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

listening to this song for the first time voluntarily -- that's what's going on here, right? -- i think i am unable to separate the association of the eagles' singing/lyrics with boozy (usually old) sleazebags. i like the music ok, and the guitar solo was enjoyable, but i want don henley to stop singing every time he starts.

i feel like eagles played every song just a little slower than anyone else would play the same song. so slow and deliberate. no wonder bluegrass people get such a thrill speeding that shit up.

Bernie Leadon was a bluegrass person!

I'm kinda surprised nobody's ever sampled the little guitar part between 0:22 and 0:29.

"Bernie Leadon was a bluegrass person!"

yah not in the eagles he wasn't. okay crazy banjo in take it easy makes me a liar but in general...

they did country/downhome but it was often way slow country/downhome. though that's why this thread is good cuz there are probably hootenanny tracks i have missed. even their rockers are often very slow rockers. it was the suitcase full of valium...

It's really hard to play fast with one of those suitcases cuffed to your wrist.

I really dig Witchay Woman...I kinda wish they did more material with *that* kinda sound

and let's make sure we're putting ELO's Evil Woman our Halloween playlist

I'm still loling and agreeing with Carl about that 'rocking you in the night til your skin turns red'. I had a childhood fascination with that line too! It sounded very witchcraftian when I was a little kid, that she could turn your skin red but the rocking you was still not clear to me.

Now I'm grown up it's just like ew gross and also ow wtf

idgi

I assume it's just about sex now. She'll fuck you until you're... red? Maybe he means badly chafed.

Yes, rubbed raw. OWWWW

that's all I can think of

who would want that, I mean

Or at the very least giving you a yeast infection.

...

imagine writing about bad chafing, c'mon guys

...whereas VGs original interpretatino was on some I Dream of Jeanie, blink three times and *POOF* the Eagles have vermillion-tinted epidermis.

This will not end well for anyone involved.

And didn't we decide this was a song about Zelda Fitzgerald? Does The Great Gatsby have whole passages about bad chafing?

tbf Tender Is The Night sounds like it might

OKAY I AM MOVING ON FROM THIS I FEEL BAD FOR BRINGING IT UP AGAIN

One thing I found when I relistened to this is that something about the riff (after the wigwam drum jam opening) is that it reminds me a little bit of Sherbet's 'Howzat'

something about the bassline maybe? but same kinda groove

...but it's entirely possible that these sound nothing alike to anyone but me and I just wanted an excuse to listen to Sherbet again lol

Also whoever said that the Eagles and Steve Miller Band occupy the same space in his thoughts is OTM. I just had to take a second to remember which band released Time Keeps on Slippin'.

― Lawyer... SUAVE... (carl agatha), Wednesday, August 21, 2013 10:07 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wanna fly like The Eagles....

The main difference is that the Eagles weren't non-playing motherfuckers with only one or two sorry-ass albums.

I'm still loling and agreeing with Carl about that 'rocking you in the night til your skin turns red'. I had a childhood fascination with that line too!

This reminds me of MY childhood obsession with Donna Summer's request to "Do it tonight/You know the moment is right/Turn my brown body white" in "Dim All The Lights"

tarfumes we are gonna have to step outside. i love steve miller. he was putting out spooky 7 minute epics complete with orchestra in 1972:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJALQcCHuF0

"Love's Riddle" on that album...ahhhhh what a beautiful song.

i actually don't even own any steve miller albums after that one. still, that's seven steve miller albums i have at home that i really like a lot. i like spacey steve a ton.

I actually don't mind Miller too much. That spacey track is nice. But he hates the Who ("totally unmusical"), and Miles Davis hates him:

“I remember one time - it might have been a couple times - at the Fillmore East in 1970, I was opening for this sorry-ass cat named Steve Miller. Steve Miller didn't have shit going for him, so I'm pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first and when we got there we smoked the motherfucking place, and everybody dug it.”

i remember hearing "witchy woman" on their greatest hits when i was a kid and thinking to myself "this doesn't sound like them at all," and hating it. it sounded too self-consciously "rock" to me, i think. i never warmed up to it, and then pretty much forgot it existed until i saw the eagles documentary. listening to it now, it sounds like it comes from later in their career. it would have fit really well on hotel california.

Going to high school in a rural redneck town ruined Steve Miller forever. Steve Miller's greatest hits blaring out of pick ups, everywhere you turned someone clapping the claps from take the money and run, custom Firebird decals declaring their drivers to be gangsters of love, never ending Steve Miller Band nonstop for eternity.

Going to high school in a rural redneck town ruined Steve Miller forever. Steve Miller's greatest hits blaring out of pick ups, everywhere you turned someone clapping the claps from take the money and run, custom Firebird decals declaring their drivers to be gangsters of love, never ending Steve Miller Band nonstop for eternity.

this phenomenon was not at all restricted to rural redneck towns.

"and Miles Davis hates him"

you realize that this is a REALLY long list.

yeah, steve miller ubiquity kind of a nationwide thing. but i kinda feel the same way about his smash hits as i feel about eagles smash hits. just a part of the air for as long as i can remember. it would be like hating trees or butterflies at this point for me.

The Who being described as "unmusical" is a new one for me. Thats a bad call

you know, trees that will try to sleep with your children and butterflies that will steal your drugs, but still...

I don't have the exact quote handy, but Miller said of the Who's performance at Monterey (retrospectively, in 1987), "They came into the middle of this peace-and-love thing and did their tear-it-up bad-boy act. Totally unmusical. I thought that then, and I think that now."

And yeah, Miles pretty much hated everyone, but there was something delightfully hilarious about how he singled Miller out. He seemed to like other acts he opened for; he had nice things to say about the Dead, the Band, Laura Nyro, and CSNY (and while he never shared the bill with them, he loved the Who).

i dunno, miles said lots of mean stuff about lots of musicians. tons of mean stuff.

Oh, I agree. I think his comments about Dolphy and Cecil were supremely fucked, and he was goaded into talking shit about the new music by anti-new-thing critics in a divide-and-conquer kind of way.

Did Miles have any opinion about the Eagles?

big fan iirc

He appreciated the fact that their third album was a track-by-track response to On the Corner.

this phenomenon was not at all restricted to rural redneck towns.

― fact checking cuz, Wednesday, August 21, 2013 5:54 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I totally believe you. For whatever reason, SMB was most popular among the most rural farmer kids so I always associate them with that demographic.

Good to know (and not really a surprise): "Witchy Woman", along with all other Leadon and Meisner compositions, was left out of the Hell Freezes Over project so those guys wouldn't earn any money directly off the reunion.

heartwarming

bless their cotton socks, those loveable scamps

sooooo, i guess there isn't much to say about witchy other than its witchy and slow and it reminds us of seinfeld. and our childhood. and i like the guitars. its so simple really. that song. but what a formula for earworm immortality they had. plus, i think any band that has people singing the guitar parts to their songs is destined for a cash reward. i just made that up. but i think its true. that intro is so singable.

just a part of the air for as long as i can remember.

So, to a lesser extent is SMB

I guess I'm too old to care about the fight now. They're everywhere, though fading, and I can't see fighting about it any more than I can about arbitrating the Dorsey/Miller beef

i think i would like witchy woman more if it was don's only turn as lead vocalist in their catalog.

hmmm. i was gonna say this was one of my fav eagles songs but it's kinda sucking right now. :/

the intro writes a check the song can't cash

The title writes a check the song can't catch.