A Good Day In Hell - The Official ILM Track-By-Track EAGLES Listening Thread

styx isn't bad plus you get some vs and deyoung gives you a truly excellent douchebag. billy joel works really well also, similarities in stature and in douchebaggery w/ eagles and he's dynamic and ambitious enough to keep it interesting which i can't say about kiss that's for sure. plus catalog's really not that daunting. plus videos! yeah i'm strongly in favor of doing joel next.

veronica i like a lot of kiss also

Styx I'd do for sure. I have a head start as I've already read what's his name's memoir.

Joel also seems right. I think I like the eagles more than him! And it's a very instinctive gut dislike.

PRESSURE!

my earliest memory of billy joel is 1977 and hearing just the way you are. its a good memory! hearing it in the car for the first time in nyc. sounded good to me. so, my inital billy joel moment was a positive one. and i liked that album back then too. it had stories. i read the lyrics. i never read lyrics unless it was the beatles. a year later i was transcribing black sabbath lyrics into notebooks while listening to their songs. i got a lot of words wrong.

i bought this 45 when it came out. i didn't buy the album though. a friend of mine had the album.

http://www.8-track-shack.com/images/20101205201205-Untitled-149101202.jpg

that's 13 albums counting Fantasies and Delusions.

wait, does a britisher love a billy joel? does he sell out wembley when he plays there?

http://i.minus.com/ibm5X3MyEaa5o.gif

Seems like he'd be right up their alley.

I would definitely do a Joel listening thread --- I love a lot of his hits, most of them, but I know almost nothing of album tracks and have visceral hate for River of Dreams etc.

But I'd also be happy with Styx or Chicago

I'm down with anything that has soaring highs and soul-crushing lows, basically

KISS would be v hard on the psyche...after Lick It Up it's all just various flavors of boiled garbage

Even more than the Eagles, which is saying something, Joel struck me as the middleweight most desperate to prove he could rock.

He couldn't, didn't, and should never have tried.

plus Joel has that asshole streak; he just can't help being a dick & judging the whole of humanity almost all the time

One more quick note about Lyin Eyes: You'd think that Frey, being such the mastermind arranger and all, would be able to keep a song like that under, I dunno, five minutes? six minutes?

He was doing so good with the ol' now-we're-in, now-we're-out, but fails obviously on this one. It just keeps going and going where it could've been another "already gone".

I hope none of you are blaming Joel for starting any fires.

its true that the only thing worse than being on don henley's payroll would be if you were on billy joel's payroll. i'll bet he goes through a lot of chefs.

what if you were a waiter or waitress at a restaurant and you went to take a table's order and don henley and glenn frey and billy joel were sitting at the table. with gene simmons. and stephen stills. then what do you do?

give them your biggest smile and instruct the kitchen staff to 'special sauce' every dish they put out for that table

Ask for Stills' autograph and quit.

or: chug all night

i'll bet he goes through a lot of chefs.

I think he's actually kept a pretty consistent band throughout his career. I know he only had one drummer up through the early 90s. A decent one, too, Liberty DeVitto, who seemed better than his surroundings. Then he sued Joel for royalties or something.

lol xp

plus Joel has that asshole streak; he just can't help being a dick & judging the whole of humanity almost all the time

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, September 25, 2013 10:50 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If only the whole of humanity had stopped lighting the audience:
http://youtu.be/PqY6mXULzpw

comment off that video: is this true? can anyone verify. sounds good...

"He was protecting his fans. This was filmed when he came to the Soviet Union to do a show behind the Iron Curtain. The concert lights were being used by the authorities to pick out audience members that were having too much fun, which is why he was yelling at them."

It is true. I was there.

If I was the waiter for that table, I'd say, "Yes, Mr. Joel, writer of 'Just a Fantasy'. Is there anything else I can bring you? It'll be on the house."

I remember some radio DJs talking about it when it happened, but the explanation I heard was that the crew filming the show was lighting the audience. Joel flipped out because supposedly the lights made the audience nervous about being targeted by the police or something.

And those Yamaha electric pianos weigh a fucking TON. Joel was a really strong motherfucker.

^^ JOEL SMASH!

that's 13 albums counting Fantasies and Delusions.

between that and attila, he basically started AND ended his career with his own journey of the sorceror. how perfect is that?

wait, does a britisher love a billy joel? does he sell out wembley when he plays there?

― scott seward, Thursday, 26 September 2013 02:37 (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, he's much more popular than kiss or styx or three dog night, here - uptown girl in partic was a massive hit. think him and elton have even played wembley on the same bill together for one gigantic feast of dismal lachrymose guff

The Piano Man has this, I think. Chicago next if there's anyone left.

"Take It To The Limit"

http://www.randymeisneronline.com/images/eaglesRS75-03.jpg

http://youtu.be/YwASii2f5c8

when i was a kid i thought they were saying take it to the lemon

take it
to the lemon
one more tiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIme

that's all i have to say about this song

Something about the call and response parts e.g. "Nobody seems to care" gets under my skin. Good dog Randy.

monumental. this is the only country-derived tune they done that I adore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItlY6oIfRVg

herein, randy is a little hoarse on a few notes, but damn if he doesn't knock the realllly high ones out the park: I can see how he would be apprehensive about singing this live, in which case I would think you adjust what you sing to what is achievable. Of course, Don and Glenn probly said "NO! SING IT EXACTLY THE WAY IT IS ON THE CUT!" and this kinda tempo is what Henley can handle…second waltz on the record…

This is the only Eagles song I think is truly wonderful, one of those songs that's so good the band themselves doesn't even realize how far beyond the rest of their work it is (like Rush's "Spirit of Radio"). Even Henley's drumming rises to the occasion.

But the Eagles' version isn't the definitive one. This is:
http://youtu.be/1r0QteIu_uA

Oh shit! was I not supposed to embed? fuck! my bad!

Ha, I almost didn't embed my link because I wanted to make sure that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD LISTEN TO THIS COVER OF "TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT" RIGHT NOW.

I've listened to it like 20 times in the last two days.

yeah, this is as close as the Eagles came to soul. As veronica (i think) said a while ago, it starts as a fairly obvious rewrite of "If You Don't Know Me By Now," and Randy's the only one (perhaps literally) who could've sung it: Henley would've made it unbearable. I think it works in part because the one thing the band could do is convey how youthful ambition can putrefy: it's the end of the Eagles as the would-be Byrds, the guys who once loved Gene Clark.

there's a YouTube guitar lesson video where the guy turns the lyric into chord change directions, which become weirdly compelling: "dreams of D minor to F... so F me to the C-way, F it to the G...F it to the G." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiSfkmx9HI8 (starts around 2;25)

agh, sorry for the embed

there is a nice version on the folk album by castleberry and dupree. ubiquitous dollar folk album on the east coast. sweet honey in the rock connection, i think. anyway, their version is great. probably my fave eagles song when all is said and done. its just a really good song. don't know if there are any good country covers of it but there should be.

also, this could totally be a Chicago song. mid-70's Chicago.

''Hey Frey, where's all the high notes you bullied Randy into hitting every night???''

to me, this ain't much to do with gamble and huff: their big harold melvin and the blue notes moment is coming up on HC. this is like a waltz-time, big bucks Nashville production with strings' n shit to me. With the exception of this, I don't much dig their country-derived material.

but yeah, after helming some truly dreadful cuts, Randy done this, his bid for immortality. This record deserves every spin on the radio its had since 1975. Don and Glenn (who introduces it live, groan-inducingly, as "this is my wife's favorite song, about using my black card," hardy-har-har) clearly made it as great as it is, and good for them.

oh shit they STILL do that patter?? When I had to review their '03 show, Frey introduced it with: "This song is for all the guys whose gals push their credit card limits nyuk nyuk"

God they are so gross.

From Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul: the 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. "Take It To The Limit" is tied at #830 with Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Lodi" and Irma Thomas' "Wish Someone Would Care":

Annals of Self-Pity.

A Crucial theme in pop music generally, latter-day rock and R&B performers have raised feeling sorry for your poor self to the status of an (exceptionally minor) art form. If whining pleases your palate and millions of James Taylor fans suggest that it can, you've arrived at the right review.

Irma Thomas's plaint may perhaps be the most justifiable. She was, after all, ripped off not just once but twice, and by two of the best: Otis Redding took her "Ruler of My Heart" and converted it into "Pain In My Heart," an experience that must have been leavened very little by the fact that he distinctly improved upon the original. Then the Rolling Stones took "Time Is On My Side," changed nothing much at all (oh, yeah, the guitar lick -- big deal) and cashed bigger checks than Irma would ever see in her life. Of course, the Stones can take no blame or credit for the angst that motivates "Wish Someone Would Care," since they didn't lift "Time" until a few months after "Wish" hit the Top 20, but Irma could undoubtedly see it coming. Sitting lonely in her living room, muttering to herself about injustice, "wondering how I made it and how it's gonna last," grimacing as she recalls every phony smile she's had to deliver as part of her job (any job -- she could be dishing out donuts), Irma seems most disturbed that nobody really appreciates her pain. A familiar feeling, and not only to pop stars.

It's hard to do much with an emotional cliche, but H.B. Barnum doesn't just let it lay there, he tats the story up with gushing strings and a female chorus and portentous bells at the close, so that the full weight of Irma's Sad Sack enervation becomes unmistakable. In this regard, the record lives up to its intentions perfectly, and if you have a taste for this kind of self-immolation (and what critic doesn't?), it's actually almost radiant.

The Eagles were to seventies rock stars what Uncle Scrooge was to comic book characters, the richest, most renowned, and nevertheless the most dissatisfied and greediest. Aspiring to be a Great and Artistic Rock Band, they continually foundered on the fact that God -- or the Muses or the Asylum A&R department or whoever the fuck guides these things -- intended them to be a better-than-passable vocal group, sort of the Hollies with mesquite. As a result they became studio perfectionists. Someone once told me that they used to suck lemons to make sure that their pitch stayed steady, a practice which I've never known anyone else to follow but which sure fits with the emotional tenor of their continual pleas to be taken more seriously.

Actually, the Eagles were often decent Top 40 fare (although if you ever dare tell anyone I admitted it, I'll deny it) and "Take It To the Limit" is a good example of how their music worked. Its harmonies are country but the orchestration is right out the Elton John handbook, layered on with a trowel and then sluicing on a little more, just to make sure you get the picture.

Which is meant to be the Big Picture, the story of a generation's inability to get to grips with its own restless desires, with the cramped horizons of today (ca. 1975) in contrast to the raw, wide-open promises of yesteryear (ca. 1969). I think. It's actually pretty hard to tell, because if the Eagles' arrangements were out of the Elton John handbook, not a bad place to rummage around, as these things go, their lyrics were unfortunately picked up at a Bernie Taupin rummage sale. To be charitable, one would have to call the best of them fuzzily thought out and in the end, after repeated Top 40 immersion, "Take It to the Limit" came to be my favorite mainly because it's the most ludicrous. This song, which wants to desperately to be taken as the heartfelt saga of a wasted generation, winds up summarizing itself in four lines:

You can spend all your time makin' money
You can spend all your love makin' time
If it all falls to pieces tomorrow
Will you still be mine?

I mean, huh? That grab ya? Huh? Huh? How should I know what it means; that was their job and they blew it. But if you've gotta fuck up, do it right and you'll get credit from me. Oh my yes.

Meantime, John Fogerty (as always) has a story to tell. It's a tragic tale, set to a chugging rockabilly beat (surprise, surprise -- nice guitar break before the last verse, though) about a guy who's been out playing a circuit of California dives trying to become a star and after a year -- a whole year! -- is ready to quit in disgust. Just because somebody game him a Next Big Thing write up and it didn't pan out with a record deal.

What makes "Lodi" even more ridiculous is that John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater played that lousy circuit for more like a decade and never gave up, never quit. John Fogerty got drafted and still came back to being a musician. Maybe he thought that this was his story, but it sure wasn't:

If I only had a dollar, for every song I've sung
Every time I've had to play, while people sat there drunk
You know I'd catch the next train, back to where I live
Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again

Sure sounds like the Eagles', though.

Frey bullying Randy to sing this night after night, "come on, hit the high notes for the faaans, man," is really something else. Randy must've had an ocean's worth of patience, because at some point I'd have thrown Frey out a window.

xp: I recalled that Marsh entry when I heard this again. "lyrics picked up a Bernie Taupin rummage sale" is a great dig.

Maybe less an ocean's worth of patience and more "Man, Frey's being a real assho- WOW that's a big check."

Way late but sorry Alfred you're interpreting the entire Petty body of work of one line is total bullshit