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

nice to hear don in such pain. now you know how we all feel....

this rips off Bowie's "Fame" a fair bit ("Fame" played by guys on quaaludes). Though it sounds like it was some studio goof they cut in one take and threw on a B-side, with this lot you know they probably spent a month on it.

Oh no I thought you were all joking about funky new year.

wait till we get to "Groovin' Groundhog Day"

Meanwhile, Timothy B. Schmit is watching the band he left after nearly a decade, Poco, finally break big with "Crazy Love" and "Heart of the Night", just after he jumped ship to the Eagles. Wonder if Tim listened to "Funky New Year" whilst holding back his gag reflex, thinking 'hmm, maybe shoulda stuck it out with Poco a bit longer and not have to put up with Henley and Frey'....

Well that's when Satan appears and shows him the royalty checks from Greatest Hits Vol. 2.

Hey, I made you all a little something.

You want it before we get started on their final album of the 70s or after we wrap it up and head to Hell or Eden or wherever.

i could really really do without henley's "uunh! aah!" in the first chorus. i'm going to be having nightmares about that for a while.

When he says that even his hair hurts, I do take him at his word.

He has a hairache.

That joke Elvis used to tell in the 70s - "I need a drink of water - my mouth feels like Bob Dylan slept in it last night" - would've been funnier with Don Henley as the punchline.

It is singularly unpleasant to imagine sleeping with Don Henley in my mouth.

i guess it's not as bad as i feared?

still it feels like one of those things where you're practicing and someone has some dumb riff that's not really in your wheelhouse but everyone likes it and it's kinda fun to jam around with and for about an hour you talk yourselves into it like "i dunno it's not our usual thing but this is kinda cool we should play it at the next show" and then by the end of practice you realize it's kinda dumb and forget about it

Yeah I quite like it, but then I have a massive tolerance for this kind of thing. Also this thread delivering something loose and fun after the past week is like finding manna in the desert. Reminds me more of Physical Graffiti than any actual funk, to tell the truth.

I kinda wish it had another singer though, Henley sounds far too uptight to get properly funky. Also while the drums aren't bad, nobody's going to be sampling them while other funk records still exist.

Demonstrably stupid (then and now), a misguided attempt at something well out of their range.

Wow, E-Funk. I can see why this didn't become a seasonal radio staple like the flip. Walsh should have sung it. This does point towards the fun throwaways on TLR, and as noted above, it's refreshing in a way after some of our prior entries.

It's amazing how bad Frey-Henley were at throwaways. Maybe because the serious songs sound like discards?

ok
two things i guess i kinda dig about this song
1) the grunting -- it's better than the singing
2) the slow grisly funk pace

seriously every single time i hear don henley singing i get the same gross familiar feeling
i will never listen to this song again if i can help it

Content 77 Eagles

http://i.imgur.com/abbF5wg.png

I'm stunned that I don't hate this. But being the Eags, it's all relative. I probably wouldn't hate eating a whole box of Saltines after rolling a piece of dogshit around in my mouth like it was a piece of hard candy, either.

LOL

Oh man, if nothing else this thread is inspiring genius levels of metaphor for things that are terrible. TAKE NOTE OF THE METAPHORS, DON. OR GLEN. WHICHEVER ONE OF YOU BUTTHOLES WAS GOING ON ABOUT METAPHORS.

it's no funk#49 (james gang or killdozer)

some great comments on the youtube version of the james gang track

the drum break on funk#49 (o.g. version) is insane

Eagle in the wild: Henley's "Not Enough Love in the World" playing in the supermarket, broken up at intervals by increasingly cranky calls for someone to come up to the front end to bag

(Felder sheepishly shuffles out to the registers to bag)

CUT TO

EXTERIOR. PARKING LOT. GLENN FREY eggs Felder's car, laughing hysterically.

"The Long Run"

https://www.morrisonhotelgallery.com/images/medium/eagles_boat.jpg

http://youtu.be/NTe82e03xVI

joe walsh 4ever

FINALLY

Their best single; for once the smugness is funny. I love the Felder organ, the mocking Walsh slide.

plus, you'll notice it doesn't drag like someone pulling a dead horse. it only took them 80% of their career to figure out the whole tempo thing.

this would have had like 2 more minutes of outro if it had been on one of the earlier records

I know: I was shocked this clocked in under four minutes. It's so punchy and full of attitude, and even though it's the product of a group of guys who hated eachother's guts by this point, it sounds like a strong ensemble recording: maybe the underlying tension finally woke up them up in the studio. Henley sings it like "yeah, I *am* an asshole," and it's a better vocal for it.

I was in my 20s, at least, before I figured out he was saying, "Did you do it for spite" instead of "Did you do it for Spike," like some dude named Spike.

& was this the Eagles throwing down the gauntlet to their critics? "We're gonna outlast 'em all, man, just watch." As it's 35 years later, they're still touring arenas, and we've spent months talking about these clowns, perhaps they were right.

even Frey's backup vocals work.

Love the un-ostentatious, no-nonsense drum intro: dat-thud-thud-WHACK-WHACK. Works perfectly. Also, the nice little syncopations in the rhythm guitar. These guys really were good at the little arrangement details, even if it often added up to a lot of nothing.

god, even their guitars sound like assholes in this song

These are the Eagles I can listen to without flinching too much. Good beat, Timothy knows his chops obviously, love the organ.

When I worked for the sportstalk radio station, our commercial spot blocks had to be timed to the second, otherwise you'd come back to the the network on the last four-digits of one of spots. Tough to do since ads run 29 seconds or 31 seconds, and if you laid enough of them down that were short, you'd be out five or six seconds. So I sometimes used the intro to this song as a spot fill. just a bump-bum-bumm-bump-BUMP out of nowhere.

Song doesn't stop on a dime or anything, but I do like that one part around 2:45 where they take it back to the outro on a heel. Maybe there was a splice in there or something, but I bet it was fun to play live.

We're finally into the Eagles era that I remember living through. I'll probably get into that when we play the Frey song, but suffice to say, our school's mascot was THE EAGLES and the teens in that small town hung out at a place called THE EAGLE'S NEST.

GLENN: We’d had the idea for about six or seven years. The title of the song was apropos, and it seemed to be a good title for the album — let’s see who’ll last. I think it was a lot about longevity, and it was also about me just lovin’ Tyrone Davis’ record “Turning Point.” We had done some slicker production like the Philly sound, but “Long Run” was more like a tribute to Memphis with the slide guitars playing the parts of the horns.

DON: It was a long and difficult album. Everything was catching up to us. Too much pressure, too much worry, too much traveling, too many controlled substances, too much paranoia and infighting. I missed having a normal life. Glenn and I were starting to grow distant. Everything was pulling apart — and we were writing about longevity. [thoughtful pause] Yeah, well, even if we weren’t living it, we were always able to idealize it in a song about the way we’d like to be — the way we’d like to be perceived. That song may have been a message to our critics. It may have been a message from Glenn to me or me to Glenn. It could be taken all kinds of different ways. Could be a message to a girl — a long-departed lover. But, again, it was built on that foundation of Glenn’s rhythm guitar playing [sings part]. Always that foundation. So, here we are some 25 years later — 32 years total — still going strong. The Long Run, indeed.

so, col, you're right

lol @ yt screengrabs

http://i.imgur.com/KR6dqu8.png

http://youtu.be/UuWpqmTR2uw

http://i.imgur.com/laks1.gif

the last #1 album of the Seventies, right? which seems appropriate (I remember my dad got this and "Tusk" around the same time and was disappointed w/ both of them)

OOOH FA FA FA FIND OUT

Knocked In Through the Out Door out of the No.1 spot. Two of the biggest bands of the 70s and their swan songs fighting to be the last of the decade.

I wonder sometimes if Joe misses his buddy.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfstm1_eagles-the-long-run_music

Meanwhile Tusk never hit #1.

I can't argue with any of the insightful, positive comments any of you have made, but boy I just do not like this song. It grates on me in what I now recognize is a very Eagles kind of way. This makes it even worse: Knocked In Through the Out Door out of the No.1 spot. I mean, I wouldn't go to the mat for In Through the Out Door in an argument about best Led Zeppelin albums but it's a damn sight better than The Long Run (and, spoiler alert, I have a lot of good things to say about tomorrow's song).

i like four songs on inthroughtheoutdoor more than any eagles song.

Fuuuck, just thought of what an Eagles Mexican Reggae version of Fool in the Rain would sound like.

Just to be sure, I played "In the Evening" a few minutes. Yep, it's better.