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

Mike beat Glenn to Chug by nine years: http://youtu.be/rDY02aGBTfg

I like After The Thrill Is Gone; nice guitars, good bass, good tune, reasonable singing. It's not a-grade eagles, but it's high b-grade and that's rare enough to still be a treat.

"I Wish You Peace"

http://www.bernieleadononline.com/images/BLeadonOOTNSB.jpg

http://youtu.be/aVoOk68T1SI

farewell, brave cosmic banjo man...

co-written with Reagan's daughter, ladies and gentlemen

ah,Bernie, this is how you leave us? not with oddball stuff like "Bitter Creek" and "Sorcerer" but a collaboration w/ Patti Davis? Aptly described by Henley as "smarmy cocktail music"?

Agreeable smarm, nowhere near eagles reunion album smarm, but yeah. The sorcerer is not in for this one.

Syrupy to be sure, but after two minutes I thought it was a nice little coda to the album. Then it just kept going into noodlesville.

Bernie threw us some nice curves, including this one, but yeah this should have been cut at 2:06.

^ This is nice enough; would've been boring for a band who put out actual lounge classics, but The Eagles are not that band. Actually, for a sleazy seventies act, there's not much Rhodes piano on their records, good to have one holding this track together.

well. at least there's tomorrow's.

Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan's daughter, published "Till Human Voices Wake Us" as an e-book. Amazon/Patti Davis
Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, has penned a new novel, “Till Human Voices Wake Us,” a lesbian love story written in the first person.

What would be worse -- hanging around the Reagans or Frey-Henley?

Reagan anecdotes about Erroll Flynn, even if made up > anything Glenn Frey has ever said

1975:

http://www.indecisionforever.com/files/2009/09/thereagans.jpg

Michael Reagan looking like Meathead shocker.

That may be the worst Ronnie has ever looked.

wasn't Patti disowned around that time for living in sin with Leadon? (or maybe for this song)

yep

"I Wish You Peace" (or, "I Wish I Was Dan Fogelberg"): Their most Easy Listening track yet? Legend has it that Henley & Frey were ticked at Leadon for giving Davis credit. The Rhodes kind of tugs the song into the direction of lite Soul. I'll give it points for keeping the noodly bits to the solo and for having more lyrics were the pointless coda could have been.

reminds me of a deep 70s beach boys alb cut

That country bears image is going to give me nightmares.

In the wild report: "The Heat Is On" followed by "The Long Run" on jukebox auto play in a diner.

...followed by "Chantilly Lace". We should have a Big Bopper listening thread next.

on this day in which monsieur Seward will post the famous Eagles cut ever…I would like to suggest that, perhaps as a change of pace in between "the Sad cafe" and "no more walks in the Woods," he might consider posts regarding 80s-90s singles videos that will horrify most of the participants here, like Felder's "bad Girls," Schmidt's "Boys Night Out," "Sexy Girl" "the Confessor" "A Life of Illusion" "All She wants to do is Dance" etc etc…

I found this: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/glenn-frey-by-barron/

a preview of today's extended metaphor:

Q: You sing: "So I called up the captain / 'Please bring me my wine' / He said, 'We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.'" I realize I'm probably not the first to bring this to your attention, but wine isn't a spirit. Wine is fermented; spirits are distilled. Do you regret that lyric?”

Henley: Thanks for the tutorial and, no, you're not the first to bring this to my attention-—and you're not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor. Believe me, I've consumed enough alcoholic beverages in my time to know how they are made and what the proper nomenclature is. But that line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It's a sociopolitical statement."

That is simply beautiful.

You can tell he's angry because he said "nomenclature."

"Hotel California"

http://www.eaglesonlinecentral.com/images/hcinsert3big.jpg

http://youtu.be/KaQHsWFSiao

more exegesis from Henley:

This is a concept album, there’s no way to hide it, but it’s not set in the old West, the cowboy thing, you know,” Henley told the Dutch magazine ZigZag. “It’s more urban this time... It’s our bicentennial year, you know, the country is 200 years old, so we figured since we are the Eagles and the eagle is our national symbol, that we were obliged to make some kind of a little bicentennial statement using California as a microcosm of the whole United States, or the whole world, if you will, and to try to wake people up and say ‘We’ve been OK so far, for 200 years, but we’re gonna have to change if we’re gonna continue to be around.”

so, some random thoughts on a song i've probably heard 4,000 times in my life

* Henley's finest, or at least most memorable, hour as a drummer? e.g. the fill after "can't kill the beast" where he seems to spin over to timbales.

* one influence, i'm pretty sure, on Felder at least was Bowie's "Moonage Daydream." The guitar solos have some Ronson in them; the bassline is pretty similar in places

* Felder wrote it in E minor, and they recorded the instrumental tracks in that key. But when Henley went to sing it, it was too high: Felder said he sounded like Barry Gibb. Eventually they had to downshift to B minor and re-record the whole track.

* realized i can hum, pretty much note for note, the entire Felder/Walsh guitar solo--it's like the damn thing is encoded into my DNA.

This totally slays, I can't and won't front.

Obviously the guitars sound fantastic, right from the start. I love how the licks in the choruses get progressively more manic - is this what Walsh brings? There's been nothing so unhinged hitherto as the lick at 3:07. The bass is terrific too; as well the cod-reggae lines Randy lays down a pretty melody in the intro, and wisely resists the temptation to show off when the dual guitars chime in.

Two things. Is this generally reckoned a Stairway rip-off? Because it clearly is, but I've never actually seen it said as such. And when Henley's voice fades out at 3:28 it's alarmingly abrupt. Is that normal, or something to do with me listening on spotify? It sounds almost like he's gated, which there's no reason for at all.

LOL at the Eagles trying to wake anybody up

It sounds almost like he's gated, which there's no reason for at all.

I noticed it on the YouTube clip too. Don probably exhaled weird or something, necessitating a cut-off. His vocal doesn't sound gated anywhere else on the track.

It's kind of amazing how the harmonizing guitar figures during the verses never bump into or crowd the vocal, or predictably "answer" it. And I like how the guitars start to sound like a synth towards the end of the solos.

A Good Day in Hell

http://blackjacketsymphony.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/ht-1.jpg

• would love to hear E minor version. Also, there's a full 7-minute version released in Japan that doesn't fade out. Been scouring the web looking for that one.

• Give 'em credit for a lot of things with this song. Off the bat, Frey or whoever arranged this should get an attaboy for starting the lyrics right after the boom/boom that ends the intro. Any jam band - or metal band even - would've got milked the first few bars of that verse section too.

• I'm on record all over the place for digging that part of the solo where the two guitars lock into each other at around 5:20. Lot of professional restraint, as Tarfumes mentions, on not going crazy with the fills and responses. Same goes for Randy who goes as far as possible with the rhythm of this song without going overboard. In other words, he takes it to the limit.

Don Felder teaches you how to play Hotel California. Namechecks Barry Gibb again.

you can stab them with your steely knives
but you can never leave

Posted this on the other Eagles thread, but I think it bears repeating.

In the 80s, Joe Walsh was a frequent guest on a Chicago radio show. The hosts were always trying to get him to dish Eagles dirt, so Walsh talked about Henley and the "Hotel California" solos.

Walsh and Felder were in the control room listening to the playback of the solos when Henley walks in and says, "What the hell is this shit? Do those solos over!" and storms out. Walsh and Felder smirk at each other. An hour later, Henley comes back, high as a kite, and demands to hear the new solos. Walsh and Felder play the tape and Henley says, "See, that's MUCH better. Thanks for doing those again!"

They hadn't re-recorded a note. Henley was hearing the exact same solos he'd heard earlier.

Same goes for Randy who goes as far as possible with the rhythm of this song without going overboard. In other words, he takes it to the limit.

― pplains, Monday, September 30, 2013 9:59 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Meisner kills it on this song. It's the first time I really admired (much less noticed) an Eagles bassline.

i never thought anything would be able to make me see this song in a newfound light, but listening to the rest of the eagles' oeuvre turned out to be the thing that could

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1053/in-the-song-hotel-california-what-does-colitas-mean

good info!

i never thought anything would be able to make me see this song in a newfound light, but listening to the rest of the eagles' oeuvre turned out to be the thing that could

― call all destroyer, Monday, September 30, 2013 2:32 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This thread and the previous posts on the song have definitely made me listen to the song differently, mostly because all of your astute observations have given me new things to listen to and a new appreciation for why those things are good. So thanks, smart people!!!

in re: the Steely Dan connection (which Frey and Henley have gone on about over the past 3 decades). The "hotel calif" lyric is Henley and Frey trying to write a Dan lyric, so we get lots of obscure references, & words that most people mishear or think are made up (e.g. "colitas"). Yet it's not obscure enough, in a way: the lyric's a pretty straightforward narrative; the wordplay is pretty weak and forced at times, and worse of all, they still want it to *mean something,* man: hence Henley from day one is talking about how "HC" is supposed to be about America and California and "yeah, I saw Polanski's Chinatown man, it's heavy stuff"

whereas the Dan is obscurity for its own pleasures. if it's a reference in a song it's so private, confined to Fagen and Becker, that it might as well not even exist. So "Chain Lightning" is about a Nazi rally, or seeing an Elvis concert, or whatever. "Kid Charlemagne" is about Owsley Stanley, or a blaxsploitation movie Fagen saw, or a guy he knew at Bard, but the song is its own thing.

"They're livin' it up at the Hotel California..." sounds like something my grandmother would've derisively said about some event she didn't care for. "Oh, those Alabama fans must have been livin' it up after that call for Tennessee was called back," etc."

so weird that i am always ready to here this on the radio. which is the only place i hear it pretty much. i wonder how many times i've heard it over the years. a thousand times? okay maybe not that many times. feels like it though. and yet there i am singing along every time. never gets old.

I don't think I've ever heard this song in its entirety. It's such a part of the landscape that I catch it in the beginning, middle, or end, and have never played it of my own volition.