The embarrassing concert rerun that launched the Eagles’ ‘How Long’: “That sounds like a hit”
No member of the Eagles ever had a mantle of cool bestowed upon them. They had always been viewed as the breezy band for the everyman when they were in their prime, and even when Don Henley had some credibility during the era of heartland rock, he wasn’t going to be filling up the same stages the way that Madonna or Michael Jackson were around that time. But as time would soon tell, not being the coolest band in the world can make for some great material.
Looking back at the Eagles’ career, it was clear that Glenn Frey and Henley were the true co-captains of the group. They had their moments when they could relinquish duties to Joe Walsh, but if a song didn’t get their seal of approval, it was either going to be viewed as an album track or cast to the side as some forgotten piece of their history.
That’s not how it all got started, though. Frey and Henley eventually grew into that songwriting team, but a lot of their first songs saw them taking cues from their friends. After all, they weren’t going to make an album that was based on subpar material, and even when they started making their first records, a lot of the songs felt like they were based on a committee of songwriters around them.
Jackson Browne had already given them ‘Take It Easy’, and Jack Tempchin helped them nab their first hits like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, but JD Souther was always on the fringes of their history. Despite never joining the band, Souther may as well have been the unofficial member of the band, always having the right line to tie a song together and even being featured on the back cover of Desperado alongside the members.
Souther had his own career, though, and there was one unspoken rule about their collaborations: don’t cover the other’s material. Since Souther had yet to get off the ground, Eagles always stuck to their own batches of songs when they went into the studio, but when Frey got reprimanded about his fashion sense by his daughters, he found the one song that would bring the band back from the dead.
Even though Long Road Out of Eden had been a long time coming, ‘How Long’ came from Frey listening to his daughters play footage of him performing live back in the 1970s, saying, “They were on YouTube and said, ‘Dad come here, you have to take a look at your hair. My wife said, ‘Hey, that sounds like a hit.’”
Since Souther had become content with his career, it was probably safe to say that the dust had settled, so their cutting the tune was a no-brainer. Compared to all of the modern sounds on the rest of the record, ‘How Long’ is like a small bit of connective tissue to the start of the band’s career, when they were still playing gigs at the Troubadour and trying to get noticed by any major label in sight.
While the hair might have changed considerably since the band started, Frey always came alive whenever he sang the song during the final era of the group’s career. Long Road Out of Eden may exist as a nice postscript for Eagles’ career nowadays, but ‘How Long’ was the equivalent of unearthing a piece of the 1970s and retooling it to fit the older version of the band.
