The 1974 Eagles song none of them could understand: “Incoherent”
The Eagles were never a band that anyone needed to think all that hard about when listening to their albums.
There are certainly songs worth digging into when you get to their more classic material, but a lot of the best songs that Glenn Frey and Don Henley ever wrote were about making slice-of-life stories that sounded like they could have taken place in the middle of small-town America. It was never meant to be all that deep in their early days, but when they get a little bit ambitious, there were moments where even they could admit that they lost the plot a touch.
But on that first album, you would have thought that they were going to be another country-rock act with a couple of good tunes. The Byrds had already broken down the door for country music in California, but even if bands like Crosby, Stills, and Nash had cornered the market on harmony singing, there was no one who could turn off ‘Take it Easy’ or ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ whenever they came on the radio.
The band knew that they had momentum, but Desperado was a case of them trying to grow up a little too fast. An entire concept album about lonesome cowboys trying to live their lives as outlaws was never going to work with people who wanted a few singles, and when the entire album took a nosedive off the charts, Frey and Henley knew that they needed something bigger on the next record.
So was On the Border the moment when everything turned around? No. Not at all, actually. The songs are still there, and it was at least a reminder that the band could still write their fair share of hits like ‘Already Gone’ and ‘Best of My Love’, but if anything, the whole thing is a soft reboot of what they had done before. That said, Henley did know that he was coming into his own as a songwriter a little bit more.
He and Frey were making the kinds of tunes that were one notch above their usual standard, but that didn’t mean that every one of them needed to make the most sense. It’s easy to hear the sadness in Bernie Leadon’s song ‘My Man’ or their love of bluegrass on ‘Midnight Flyer’, but when you hear a song like the title track, they were still clearly trying to work out the bugs of what they wanted to do.
The thought of the band doing an R&B-style track did sound a bit strange at the time, but even Henley confessed that none of the band members had the slightest clue of what they were supposed to be doing around this time, saying, “The song ‘On the Border’ had something to do with politics, more specifically with the Watergate scandal. But it was a pretty clumsy, incoherent attempt. It was supposed to be an R&B-type song, but we missed the mark.”
“We were still learning the ropes in terms of songwriting. Our producer didn’t really know what to do with it, either.”
Don Henley
R&B had been no stranger to protest songs, but this isn’t exactly worthy of being ‘War’ by Edwin Starr or anything. The entire band did sound like they were having a good time trying to make the whole thing, but since the backing vocals were recorded when half of them were drunk off their asses, it’s not like they were taking the whole thing all that seriously whenever they added the finer touches, either.
They would eventually hit their stride when making beautiful R&B-style songs like ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’, but this was like them workshopping different sounds and seeing what worked. And despite Henley’s fantastic vocal on the song, ‘On the Border’ is the kind of tune that feels like it needed a little bit more time to settle before it wound up on an album.
