Did Don Henley’s tension help Eagles become a giant success?
No one gets to become a music legend by accident.
It takes a lot of hard work for anyone to even make a marginal dent in the charts, but whereas most artists can only do their best, Don Henley wanted to make sure that there was nothing stopping Eagles from becoming one of the biggest acts California had ever seen.
After all, Henley knew that he had a knack for writing great tunes, but it was only a matter of getting the rest of the world onboard half the time. He and Glenn Frey had already been taught what it takes to make a great touring outfit, but when they first made their own albums, they needed to make sure they had the best look, the best production, and the best songs for whatever they were working on.
Does that mean that everything worked out perfectly? Not really. Even Henley could admit that there were a handful of corny moments on their first albums, and he hasn’t made it a secret that he wasn’t a fan of songs like ‘I Wish You Peace’ from One of These Nights, but by the time Joe Walsh joined the group, Henley wouldn’t be stopped making the best music that he could for Hotel California.
If there was only a small room for filler back in the day, Henley made sure there was no weak spots on the album, but his friend Richard Bowden remembered Walsh getting agitated halfway through, saying, “Joe Walsh came up to me just after he’d joined the Eagles and said: ‘You’ve known him the longest. Just tell him to relax’. I told him: ‘Just let Don be tense. He’s always been that way. When he solves one problem, he just moves on to something else to worry about’.”
Having someone that tense around might not have fit the rock and roll cliche that everyone dreams about, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Henley helped create their finest melodies on the album, and given how nonchalant the band were on The Long Run one album later, it’s easy to see why taking his foot off the gas was never going to sustain them for that long.
Because if you think about it, the band worked best when they had a balance of Henley’s rigidness and Walsh’s chaotic nature. They were doing fine before Walsh came into the group, but since their material could get a bit too downtempo for the mainstream rock crowd, having the resident class clown in the group made them much more interesting when they pulled out tracks like ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ or ‘Life’s Been Good’ during the live show.
That can work the other way as well, though. Henley’s strict rules for what any Eagles album should sound like worked for their masterpiece, but since no one wanted to give up their tunes for Long Road Out of Eden, the entire record ends up feeling like the beginnings of a really good single album that they couldn’t properly condense, leaving a lot of the double album feeling a bit bloated.
A bandleader like Henley might be the last thing that people think about when looking at the best rock stars in the world, but the frontman wasn’t worried about how he came across all the time. He was chasing after the tunes that he heard in his head, and he was going to stop at nothing until they were being played on radio stations all around the world.
