The album Don Henley said didn’t need to be made so fast: “We were not happy campers”
Don Henley was always looking at the big picture with Eagles.
Sure, they could have spent the rest of their days playing the most laid-back music known to man, but he knew that there were far more places for them to go if they wanted to be looked at as legends. But when someone has reached the absolute apex of their career, where the hell are they supposed to go when the bottom drops out from under them?
That was always going to be a hard question to answer, but none of the band were concerned about that when making Hotel California. They had spent years building up the momentum that they had with singles like ‘Already Gone’ and ‘One of These Nights’, and if the conceptual piece didn’t work with Desperado, they knew that they could pull it off if they had the idea of placing it in the middle of Los Angeles. This story was something out of the Twilight Zone, but Henley didn’t realise how pertinent it would be for the group.
The band weren’t going to settle for anything less than perfect, and when it put up all-star numbers and became one of the biggest albums of the decade, the tour practically felt like a victory lap for them. They might have had to let go of Randy Meisner midway through, but it didn’t matter so long as they kept the momentum going. And now that they were ready to do it all again, they ventured back into the studio to create another masterpiece. There was just one problem: no one had any songs.
Compared to all of the hard work that came with Hotel California, The Long Run was the first time any of their albums felt forced. Many of the songs were up to their usual standard, but aside from the fantastic singles and even a few deep cuts like ‘The Sad Cafe’, tunes like ‘The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks’ and ‘The Disco Strangler’ feel like their excuse to either blow off steam in the studio or desperately try to make a halfway decent track for the record.
But when looking back on the band’s legacy, Henley felt that the band didn’t need to really put out that record so quickly. The number-one problem that every band seems to have in its early days centres around them keeping up with everyone else, but given the fact that classic rock was about to become a new radio format, Eagles were never in danger of being forgotten at all.
So when looking back on the record, Henley felt that all of that nervous energy was all for nothing, saying, “[We were] exhausted, burned-out mentally, physically, spiritually. Homesick. We were not happy campers. But the Beast needed feeding. Momentum had to be maintained, or so we were fooled into thinking. In retrospect, we need not have been concerned.”
Even if you take the record at face value, there are some great songs to be found amongst everything. Timothy Schmitt does a fantastic job singing ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’, and ‘Heartache Tonight’ was Glenn Frey’s excuse to let loose a little bit with his vocals the same way they used to do when they had only a few tunes under their belt. But chances are that Henley remembers all the hours that went into the record whenever he hears them on the radio.
Despite having to suffer for their art in some respects, The Long Run would have still been a worthy way for the group to bow out had they known they were about to break up. After all, ‘The Sad Cafe’ felt like the perfect eulogy to the scene that birthed them, so that was practically them putting a bow on those days that everyone longed to go back to but realised that they never could.
