A band doomed from the start. A breakup just waiting to happen.
Tragedy, incessant drug abuse, constant fighting, a 14-year hiatus – what other
tragic details about The Eagles is there to know? Keep watching to find out!
In 2018, The Eagles' Greatest Hits 1971-1975 album finally knocked the longtime, best-selling album,
Michael Jackson's Thriller, off the top of All-Time sales in the US.
That's impressive, but what's even more impressive is that it meant The Eagles hold two of the top
three spots when it comes to most albums sold: Hotel California holds the No. 2 spot. If the
band had been able to get out of its own way, who knows what other music they might have released.
Way back in 1979, Rolling Stone magazine spent a serious amount of time with the band,
and life on the road was already taking a toll on them. While The Eagles are famous for their
fighting – it turns out they never really had a chance.Don Henley, for starters, was suffering
from severe back pain, along with an ulcer he'd developed before his 30th birthday. After the
original lineup formed, it was just after their third rehearsal that Henley informed Glenn Frey:
"You and me are going to have to run things."
So, where did that leave Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner?
They were told to follow along but couldn't manage to get on the same page long enough
to stand up to Henley and Frey, which made everyone miserable from day one.
"The success of the band absolutely rested on that magic ingredient of Glenn Frey and Don Henley."
The Eagles' first album came out in 1972,
and it was Don Henley who told Rolling Stone that there were some serious tensions and
moments of magical inspiration — including some that were fueled by mescaline. Hotel California
followed in 1976, and even though they were riding high, the pressure was just too much.
Smoldering anger and resentment exploded into fireworks on July 31,
1980. The Eagles were performing at a fundraising concert for Senator Alan Cranston.
When Cranston met and thanked everyone ahead of the show, Don Felder would respond:
"You're welcome, Senator ... I guess."
At least, that’s what Glenn Frey always maintained he heard. The group took the stage,
but amid the performance were a series of threats and promises to make good on those threats.
As reported in Taste of Country, Frey explained:
"So now we're onstage, and Felder looks back at me and says, 'Only three more songs till I kick
your a–, pal.' And I'm saying, 'Great, I can't wait.' … That was when I knew I had to get out."
The entire thing climaxed with some smashed guitars and everyone in the band calling it quits.
Joe Walsh joined the already-successful group in 1975,
and even though he was already successful as a solo artist in his own right,
life hadn't always been easy. In a 2017 conversation with Rolling Stone, he looked
back over his career and one of the first things mentioned in the article was his new charity,
VetsAid. He explained why he was so dedicated to raising money for the country's military veterans
and why he always visited Walter Reed Hospital when he could. Walsh told Rolling Stone:
"My dad died when I was a year and a half old. He was in the Army Air Force,
so I've always just been sympathetic to vets. My buddies went to Vietnam
and came back a mess ... I don't see the vets getting the attention they deserve."
Fast forward a bit to when People magazine interviewed Walsh ahead of the 3rd annual
VetsAid charity concert. He talked more about the loss,
saying his father had been serving on active duty when he was killed.
Walsh is particularly involved with the children of Gold Star families — those
who have lost a family member to military action. The families have their own place
to go during one of Walsh's concerts, where they can meet others struggling with the same thing.
When Rolling Stone asked Don Henley about how long he had known just how unfair the world was,
it was an easy answer. Henley's father had quit school when he was in eighth
grade and spent his adulthood making a better life for his son.
He died just after The Eagles released their first few songs:
"Take It Easy" hit the radio, then "Witchy Woman," and soon after, Henley was in the hospital
watching his father pass away from one of a series of heart attacks. Henley told Rolling Stone:
"I figured out a long time ago, when my father got sick and died, that life wasn't
fair ... You don't know what's real until you see your father in the emergency room heaving
and gasping for breath and saying, 'Oh God! Oh God!' Everything gets real trite after that."
Henley said that his father’s death destroyed his view of what the world was really like,
and at the time of the interview, he had a single close living relative: his mother.
In 2013, The Hollywood
Reporter revealed that former Eagles guitarist Don Felder had a net worth of around $60 million.
Not too bad, right? He disagreed. He had been fired from the group in 2001, and that
departure was followed by a $50 million lawsuit for breach of contract and wrongful termination.
Don Henley and Glenn Frey responded with a lawsuit to stop Felder from publishing his memoir,
and even though it was settled out of court, things got ugly. So, what happened?
Felder versus Henley and Frey was on Rolling Stone's list of biggest music industry feuds,
and they say it all culminated when the rest
of the band refused to let Felder sing “Victim of Love,” which he had written.
Felder did the original vocals, then everyone else went behind his back to wipe all copies
and re-record the song. Things just got worse and worse, leading up to that very public,
on-stage, and on-mic meltdown in 1980. When The Eagles reunited in 1994,
things went sideways very quickly when Felder accused Henley and Frey of keeping
a higher percentage of the profits, which led to Felder being fired. They never reconciled.
According to Far Out, Don Henley often said the band had a "writing tool" helping them work.
That was cocaine, and their habit was way worse than anyone might imagine.
When Rolling Stone did a retrospective on Hotel California,
The Eagles shared the fact that their sessions were often interrupted by Black Sabbath,
who was recording in the studio next to them. At one point, Sabbath headed into
the studio after The Eagles had used it, and Geezer Butler, the bassist for Sabbath, said:
"Before we could start recording, we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board."
Several of The Eagles have expressed their regret at going so far down the rabbit hole of narcotics.
"Life in the Fast Lane" is famously about the kind of lifestyle they were living, and Henley
later said that while they were recording, he couldn't even listen. Henley told Rolling Stone:
"I was getting high a lot at the time, and the song made me ill.
We were trying to paint a picture that cocaine wasn't that great. It turns on you."
The song was, in fact, inspired by a specific incident where Glenn Frey and his dealer were
flying down the road in a Corvette, going somewhere around 90 mph. Unfortunately,
it wasn't just a song, it was a reminder of just what it was they were doing to themselves.
Some songs are great for background music, while others tell a story that plays out in the mind
of anyone who hears it. Hotel California is definitely one of those songs, and how cool
would it have been to see a movie based on the song? It almost happened, and it was going to be
done by the same producer who was behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Taxi Driver.
"You talkin' to me?"
Julia Phillips was a powerhouse in Hollywood.
She wrote in her 1991 memoir that when Hotel California came out,
she wanted to sign The Eagles on to create a movie that would blend the band's musical
talent with its "writing talent at the very beginning." There are two sides to what happened.
According to Phillips, she served up a plate of cocaine during their first meeting,
and absolutely everyone dug in like it was part of their job.
Then, she said they were all going to think about it.
Don Henley, on the other hand, claimed they were worried the songs would be ruined
and had all declined the offer of cocaine because it was a business meeting after all
and they had only recently met Phillips. What really derailed talks of a Hotel California movie?
At this point, it's impossible to say.
Randy Meisner quit over The Eagles' relentless pushing to get him to do the thing that kicked
his anxiety into high gear: singing "Take It to the Limit." According to The History
of the Eagles documentary, it became such a big deal at all of their live shows that he
started to have serious issues with anxiety. Miesner would later tell Rolling Stone:
"I was always kind of shy. They wanted me to stand in the middle of the stage
to sing 'Take It to the Limit,' but I liked to be out of the spotlight."
Things came to a head at a show in Knoxville, Tennessee. Meisner was suffering from the flu
and a flare-up of his ulcer, and after going through not only the concert but several encores,
he says it was Glenn Frey who told him to get back out on stage for the song he dreaded. Frey didn't
take no for an answer, and Meisner took a swing at him. That turned into a fight that concert
security needed to break up, but the damage had all ready been done. Meisner later said:
"Those last days on the road were the worst. Nobody was talking to me … I
was made an outcast of the band I'd helped start."
According to The Telegraph, Glenn Fry once described The Eagles like this:
"[We] got crazy, got drunk, got high, had girls, played music, and made money."
In 2015, Don Henley also looked back on that period, telling the outlet:
"We were doing way too many drugs … We should have taken a year off,
or hired a band psychiatrist. Or both."
Joe Walsh's 2017 retrospective in Rolling Stone was just as full of regrets.
While he said that the best part of their success was not having to worry about the basics anymore,
23 years of sobriety had made him realize a lot. Walsh told Rolling Stone:
"It took me away from working at my craft."
"I was very fond, shall we say, of cocaine and vodka."
Far from the one-time party animal he was, Walsh became a devout practitioner of meditation and
believed that yes, there is a God — because, he mused, how else would he have survived? When
Rolling Stone asked him about his regrets, he said that while his life’s mantra of staying in the
moment kept most of the sadness away, he does wish he could get four or five years of his life back.
Glenn Frey was just 67 years old when he died in 2016, and the official cause was
complications from pneumonia, colitis, and rheumatoid arthritis. Not everyone agreed.
Longtime Eagles manager Irving Azoff spoke with The Wrap a month after Frey's untimely death
and said that the pneumonia and the colitis had been caused by
the prescriptions Frey had been given to manage his arthritis.
Azoff declined to say anything further on the advice of his attorney,
so it didn't come as a complete surprise when, in 2018,
NBC News reported that Frey's wife, Cindy, had filed a wrongful death suit against the hospital.
It claimed doctors and the hospital hadn't treated his illnesses and that Frey had been made quote,
"permanently injured and disabled until the time of his death."
None of that would, of course, bring him back or mend broken fences. Don Henley later
released a statement that indicated that he, at least, was letting bygones be bygones, saying:
"[Glenn Frey] was like a brother to me; we were family, and like most families,
there was some dysfunction. But, the bond we forged 45 years ago was never broken..."
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please call the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Administration's 24/7 National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.