The song from the car speakers sounded out sharp and vibrant and lilting across my high school parking lot. So much so I found myself sprinting across the lot, shouting at the parking driver not to turn off his radio. "What song, what band?," I asked. The disc jockey provided the answer at song's end; it was Take It Easy by a new band called the Eagles. The singer, I would soon find out along with much more as the '70s and '80s unfolded, was Glenn Frey.
Fast forward to this MLK Day. I went online that afternoon to check on the latest polls in our rather alarming presidential race for a forthcoming piece, only to learn that Glenn Frey had suddenly passed away. It was quick a shock, since he was only 67 and he and the rest of the Eagles have regularly been touring the world for years, looking good and sounding great, a long run which, given the band's great popularity, I expected to continue for a long time to come.
A lot has happened in the 40-odd years since I first dashed to hear the ending of Take It Easy, which became a personal catch phrase of mine. The Eagles, who began as Linda Ronstadt's back-up band, became sudden stars on the strength of Take It Easy and two other hit singles on their hit debut album. By the end of the '70s, established as America's all-time best-selling band, a status they've continued to hold despite gibes from some mostly East Coast critics, they were icons of California, their music and even lives emblematic of the promise and peril of the California Dream.
Glenn Frey gave a gracious speech at the induction of the Eagles' old boss Linda Ronstadt into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.
Indeed, it was Frey who, after hearing guitarist Don Felder's "Mexican reggae" instrumental composition, conceived what became the unofficial anthem of California. He came up with "the fantasy of California," according to the memoir of Felder, who famously fell out with Frey, nearly having an on-state brawl at a Long Beach show I attended in 1980 which marked the end of the band for 14 years.
Hotel California, written by Frey with lyrical help from Eagles co-leader Don Henley, who sings an alluring and haunting lead, is a mystical allegory whose literal meaning many have pondered. Don't worry about it. It's a tale of promise and peril. Your experience and perception will vary. Besides, while you can check out any time, you can never leave, so you have all the time you need to figure it out for yourself.
The Eagles are the biggest, in some ways the culmination, of the fresh-sounding, gloriously harmonizing superstar musical groups which attended the rise of California as America's mega-state in the '60s and '70s.
First of course came the Beach Boys. Though only one actually surfed, the troubled Dennis Wilson, and genius songwriter Brian Wilson actually disliked the ocean, their usually merry incantations of the fun and exciting life in California coincided with the Golden State passing New York's Empire State to become the nation's largest. The frequent sniping from the East hasn't really stopped since, especially as California, which provides one-fifth of the electoral votes needed to elect a president, grew one of the world's 10 biggest economies with global leadership in technology and entertainment.
By the end of the '60s, a new California group, comprised of young stars from three groups, swept the music scene from Los Angeles. Lyrically encapsulating, in haunting and bittersweet fashion, the private longings and public concerns of post-hippie, anti-war young America, Crosby, Stills & Nash provided what Jimi Hendrix called "Western sky music." With the addition of Stephen Stills's Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young's electric guitar and sardonic songwriting, CSNY were quickly acclaimed "the American Beatles."
But the four stars were a volatile mix, the times were crazy enough, and the new supergroup imploded after two years and another smash hit album. Subsequent reunions have revived some of the magic but not the momentum.
Largely at Frey's instigation, with Henley's powerful co-leadership role emerging later in the '70s, the Eagles moved expeditiously to fill the vacuum.
With the blessings of Linda Ronstadt -- Frey gave a gracious speech thanking the great singer when she was herself inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 -- the young Eagles sallied forth to seize their destiny. With a few adjustments and missteps, it was swiftly theirs.
Theirs was "Western sky music," too, with a twist. More cognizant of the downside of the California and American Dreams than the Beach Boys. More country and blues and less folk and hippie than CSNY. But not, as it happens, all that less political or pointed in social commentary, notwithstanding some unknowing critical carping to the contrary.
Under the leadership of Henley and Frey, who ultimately ended up as the band's owners, the Eagles embraced environmental and alternative energy causes, questioned interventionism and backed some politicians, mostly notably then and now Governor Jerry Brown, who provided the coda to 2013's History of the Eagles documentary. (Brown even rooted the band on when they played their famous grudge match softball game against New York-based Rolling Stone magazine at USC in 1978, which the musicians won.)
In fact, the Eagles, joining their old boss, then Brown amour Ronstadt, provided critical benefit concert backing to the then very young governor's near-miss stab at the Democratic presidential nomination in '76.
But after an eight-year run at the top, now very rich superstars, like the Beatles and others before them, they found the pressure of topping themselves and internal frictions -- not to mention the damage from heavy partying -- to be too much. The July 31st, 1980 blow-up in Long Beach, at the end of the tour for The Long Run album, coming right after the pressure of recording their live album at a series of Santa Monica shows, was almost inevitable. Especially since Felder was peeved that the show was a benefit for then Senator Alan Cranston, whom he didn't care about.
While the Eagles were away, their songs became radio standards, enduringly popular with baby boomers and impressed on a newer generation. A 1993 tribute album called Common Threads: The Songs of the Eagles, recorded by top country stars, demonstrate how the band had greatly influenced a new generation in country music. The band's 1994 reunion album and tour, appropriately titled Hell Freezes Over, was itself inevitable.
The Eagles, with a few hiatuses between long and rather leisurely and extremely profitable world tours, haven't really gone away since, though together they have only produced the smash studio double album Long Road Out of Eden.
It turned out, not surprisingly, that being an Eagle was the best destiny for each man, solo projects and ventures into other fields notwithstanding.
Frey in particular looked to acting. He made a good debut on a Miami Vice episode based on his solo hit song Smuggler's Blues. But a few attempts at lead roles, including a CBS detective series, didn't work out.
Ironically, though he had the looks and charisma of a leading man, Frey was best suited to be a character actor. His very memorable role in the Dead Dog Records arc of the Wiseguy, a critical forerunner show for today's Golden Age of deeper ongoing story-telling in TV drama, showed what might have been. Frey plays Bobby Travis, a rather small fry hustler who serves as the at first unwitting guide to the corruption of the music business for Wiseguy's undercover FBI agent. But after that part, aside from a memorable supporting role in the 1996 classic Jerry Maguire, in which he amiably goes toe-to-toe with Tom Cruise's sports agent, Frey eschewed the character actor second career that might have been.
I didn't really know Glenn Frey, though I met him any number of times and once sang on-stage with him at a big anti-nuclear/pro-renewables concert -- along with a couple dozen other people, of course. Though he had his foibles, he seemed a good sort, smart and amusing.
After the excesses of the '70s and '80s, which resulted in significant stomach problems, he became a fitness buff, actually fronting a gym. So when the Eagles postponed last month's induction in the annual Kennedy Center Honors on account of Frey's illness, I unwarily didn't think too much of it. But now, with his sudden passing from pneumonia attendant upon complications with rheumatoid arthritis and acute ulcerative colitis, we see what can go wrong when an immune system is compromised in more than one way.
The world is a poorer place without Glenn Frey's sprightly and soulful tenor ringing out in concert. But the songs, well, the songs go on forever.
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