What’s the silliest lawsuit the Eagles ever filed? Who took over for Glenn Frey following his death?
Where can you really go to “take it easy?” We’ve got the answers to all of your Eagles questions.
According to legend, the earliest roots of The Eagles began with Glenn Frey getting
busted by his mom for smoking pot in 1967 with a young rock musician by the name of Bob Seger.
Frey's mom forbade her son from joining Seger's band, setting in motion a chain
of events that would lead Frey to move to California. Seger told Sirius XM,
"He was just a great guy, lotta fun, great sense of humor."
In 1970, Frey met Don Henley at the Troubadour,
a club in Los Angeles. But it took superstar singer Linda Ronstadt to actually bring the
Eagles together. Ronstadt hired Frey and Henley for her backup band. The two hit it
off and decided to form a band along with another one of Rondstadt's band members,
Randy Meisner. Ronstadt then suggested they add guitarist Bernie Leadon, and arranged a tryout.
In July, 1971, the group performed together as a
band for the first time - backing up Ronstadt at a concert in Disneyland.
They then signed a recording contract, and after appearing on Ronstadt's new album,
they recorded one of their own, releasing their first self-titled album in 1972.
The Eagles produced three more albums: "Desperado" in 1973, "On the Border" in 1974,
and "One of These Nights" in 1975. Each featured enough hits that the band's manager, Irving Azoff
of Asylum Records, decided to release the "Eagles: Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975)"
in February of 1976. The problem was, Azoff did so without consulting the band. The musicians felt
that move was just a slick way to earn extra bucks. And they weren't very happy about it.
Another reason the band objected to the greatest hits album was because they were
already busy finishing up their fifth album, "Hotel California." But as it turned out,
the Greatest Hits effort made a huge splash on the music scene.
Billboard reports the album hit number one on the chart in March and stayed there for 365 weeks. It
was the first ever certified platinum album, and in 2018 it passed Michael Jackson's "Thriller" to
become the best-selling album in American history, with over 38 million albums sold - and counting.
"Hotel California" absolutely rocked the music world in 1976. The album shot up to number one and
went platinum within a week of its release. Two songs, "New Kid in Town" and "Hotel California" ,
also went number one on the charts. And the album would eventually sell more than 10 million copies.
So where was Hotel California exactly? It took awhile to identify the ethereal
looking hotel on the cover, which turned out to be the Beverly Hills Hotel. Surprisingly,
the hotel threatened to sue the band. The suit was tossed, though, and although health issues
and band squabbles forced Randy Meisner to leave the band shortly after their album tour,
the Eagles earned their first Grammy Award for "Hotel California" in 1977.
Glen Frey once recalled being a passenger in a drug dealer's Corvette as the car careened down
the highway en route to a poker game. As the car reached 90 m.p.h., a nervous Frey uttered,
"Hey, man!" The amused driver just grinned at him, responding, "Life in the fast lane!"
The title of a hit song was born, written by Frey, Henley, and newcomer Joe Walsh,
whose practice lick became one of the most recognizable riffs in rock history.
Walsh told Paul Shaffer that Frey was inspired after hearing Walsh warm up.
"Glen comes busting in my dressing room and says 'what the hell's that?'"
"Look it’s just s a warm-up, and … He said, 'That's an Eagles song, dude!'"
It's about a coked up couple driving like mad around LA while living the wild and crazy
lifestyle that was alarmingly common by the 1970's. Eagles Online Central also credits the
song as a neologism, a cultural saying that became popular because of the song. But is that the case?
It turns out that yes, it is true.
Word Histories, a scholarly site dedicated to the origin of words and phrases,
found that the "earliest instances of the phrase" indeed occurred in the Eagles' hit song.
What does a band do when their music has made them a household word and their wildest dreams have
come true? To the Eagles, the success of "Hotel California" and "Their Greatest Hits" had to
have been overwhelming. Maybe that's why it took $800,000 and three years of recording to produce
"The Long Run." It was also their first album with Timothy B. Schmit, who had replaced Randy Meisner.
The album got rave reviews, immediately shot up to number one,
and went multi-platinum. The band was on top of the world.
But not for long.
On July 31, 1980, The Eagles were at Long Beach Arena in California to perform at a fundraiser for
Senator Alan Cranston when everything blew up. Don Felder wasn't quite sure who Cranston was.
When the senator and his wife thanked the band for doing the show,
Felder responded, quote, "You're welcome, I guess."
That sent Glenn Frey over the edge and the two had a confrontation that spilled out onto the stage,
where both spent the whole show threatening to beat each other up.
When the concert ended, so did the band. And for Joe Walsh especially, the breakup of the
Eagles was a stab in the heart. The talented musician had been with the band since 1975,
and his penchant for obliterating hotel rooms and chucking furniture
out the windows had added a bit of flavor. But when the Eagles disbanded, Walsh said,
"I was sad and didn't know what to do. I hit rock-bottom."
In the coming years Walsh's solo career would take off,
but his personal life became a crazy downward spiral that wouldn't stop for 14 years.
"We just had to stop. Except I kept going. I didn't want to admit that it was over."
When the Eagles broke up, Don Henley vehemently declared that the band would reunite,
quote, "when hell freezes over." He and the other band members barely spoke to each other,
with each going on to have their own successful solo careers.
That changed in 1993 when a group of country artists including Travis Tritt
banded together for a tribute album called "Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles." The album,
which was meant to raise money for Henley's Walden Woods Project,
received lukewarm reviews, but it had an unexpected consequence for the entire music world.
In 1994, Tritt quietly asked the Eagles musicians to appear in his video for
"Take It Easy." The guys agreed, gathering in the studio together for the first time
since the breakup. The resulting video was pretty awesome, set in a back-country bar
with the band playing alongside Tritt. They were laughing. They were smiling. They were back.
Later that year, the Eagles officially reunited, taping an MTV special and going
on tour for the first time since 1980. At the band's first live performance, Frey quipped,
"For the record, we never broke up; we just took a 14-year vacation."
In happy defiance of Don Henley's parting words when the Eagles broke up, the band's
next album was aptly titled "Hell Freezes Over." It was a live album, recorded when the band went
on tour in May of 1994. But how much would their adoring fans be willing to pay to see them again,
they wondered. Irving Azoff knew; he rightfully figured the Eagles fans were a little older,
a little wiser, and yes, a little richer. Surely they would pay $100 a ticket?
It turned out they would. The Eagles became the first band in concert history to charge $100
for a ticket to their show. That's nearly $200 in today's money, and it shocked the
media. But that didn't stop fans from spending their money, and the tickets sold. In the end,
the "Hell Freezes Over" tour would be remembered as one of the most successful of the decade.
In 1998, the Eagles achieved the biggest honor of all when singer Jimmy Buffet inducted the
band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And not just the band's current lineup - the entire band.
Meisner, for instance, had been completely frozen out of the band after leaving,
with requests to sit in with the group just being ignored.
But at the Hall of Fame induction, for the first and only time ever,
all seven members of the Eagles, past and present, took the stage for an epic performance.
Meisner, along with Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, Don Felder, Joe Walsh,
and Timothy B. Schmit came together that night to perform "Hotel California." As one might guess,
it went off without a hitch as the musicians played as if they had been one band all along.
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Glenn Frey rightfully pointed out that after
27 years together, quote, "We got along fine. We just disagreed a lot!"
That was certainly true as late as 2001, when Don Felder was fired, quote,
"for asking too many questions." But it was more than that; according to The style Inspiration,
there was a power struggle behind the scenes. Felder sued, alleging
wrongful termination and breach of contract, asking for a cool $50 million in damages.
The suit went on for six years and was settled in 2007, but exactly what went down is a mystery,
as part of the settlement forbade the band from discussing the case thereafter.
There were other suits, too, with the band frequently suing people for some pretty
silly reasons. In 1998, for instance, the Eagles took umbrage with the American Eagle Foundation,
a non-profit that works to, quote, "guard and protect the Bald Eagle and all birds of prey."
The band claimed the foundation infringed on the band's name and image. That suit was dropped when
Don Henley and Irving Azoff failed to appear because they were in Europe. Then in 2018,
another suit against the "Hotel California" resort in Baja,
California was dropped when it was pointed out that the name had been in place since 1950.
January 18, 2016 was a sad day for Eagles fans when the news broke that Glenn Frey
had died from a bevy of health problems. It was even sadder, of course, for his wife,
Cindy. She ultimately filed suit against Mount Sinai Hospital in 2018,
claiming that Frey's doctors had failed to correctly diagnose or treat his health issues.
The Eagles, meanwhile, were devastated by Frey's death. The Chicago Tribune recounted how Frey
had just finished a tour with the band and was spending some family time in Hawaii when he got
sick. Back in California, he contracted pneumonia, which contributed to his death. Henley said,
"I don't see how we could go out and play without the guy who started the band."
In February, the band played a tribute to Frey at the Grammy Awards. In attendance was Frey's
son Deacon. Ultimately, Deacon ended up joining the Eagles in his father's stead,
and remains with the band today.
Eagles fans who are traveling on Interstate 40 through Arizona owe it to themselves to
stop at Winslow, the place where Glenn Frey famously sang of meeting a girl in the hit
song "Take It Easy," co-written by Jackson Browne. In 1998, the city built "Standin'
on the Corner Park," a spot dedicated to the song with commemorative bricks,
murals and two statues, including the 2016 addition of one depicting Frey.
There is also an annual music festival with plenty of festivities, live performances,
and other events. And there's a store, also called Standin' on the Corner, which offers Eagles
memorabilia as well as lots of kitschy goodies commemorating Winslow. The Washington Post notes
that both the park and the shop have brought Winslow a long ways from the days when Highway
40 bypassed the town in 1979. Today, thousands of visitors now stop by, if only to just stand there,
on the corner, and reminisce about one of the biggest and most popular bands of all time.
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