Black Molly Assistance: the Eagles anthem Don Henley didn’t enjoy writing
No rock artist can claim that every track is easy to write. Some songs tend to write themselves, but it can be hard work when you’re spending hours in the studio with nothing coming together. You sometimes need a bit of a push to make it through, and Don Henley would have rather hung up his boots for the night than have to work on The Eagles’ ‘On the Border’.
Out of all the Eagles, though, Henley may have been the most career-focused of anyone. He may have been guilty of indulging in more than his fair share of fun, but Henley was focused on making songs that would last rather than having to play music in the hopes that people would sing along to it when they performed live.
When the band worked on On the Border, they needed an ace in the hole. The last record had flopped, and there was still some question about whether they could ever have a classic to their name. While the entire album is far from the most cohesive listen in the group’s discography, ‘On the Border’ is one of the most adventurous tracks on the record, made in the same kind of groovy style you would hear out of a classic soul song.
That is, once the band actually finished it. Even though songs like ‘Already Gone’ and ‘Best of My Love’ were in the can, Henley thought that he could have worked a little harder on fleshing out the tune before some friends introduced him to the wonders of the drug Black Molly, commonly used by truckers as a way to stay up for long hours.
As far as Henley was concerned, that kind of drug worked like a charm for songwriters, telling Rolling Stone, “I remember it was one of the last things to be recorded, and I had come up against an unmovable deadline. So I somehow got my hands on a truck-driver pill called a Black Molly and stayed up all night completing the song. That’s how badly I wanted to go home.”
Given his story, the piece tends to have the feel of someone who wanted to have the whole thing over with. There’s definitely the germ of a good idea in the track, and the band do make a few decent shots at Richard Nixon on the record, but there’s always something about the song that places it just below the other Eagles classics.
That kind of tension might have been their way of illustrating how much tension was in the group. Since guitarist Bernie Leadon was already thinking about leaving the band, ‘On the Border’ is the sound of each of the members trying to pull themselves into separate directions and ending up meeting somewhere right in the middle.
If Henley was going for a soulful sound, though, he eventually found it when working on the album One of These Nights, with the title track becoming one of the band’s go-to songs whenever they performed live. The harder drugs like cocaine may have come into play later when working on the album The Long Run, but as far as getting a workman’s job done behind the glass, ‘On the Border’ is probably one of the better things that amphetamines gave to the world.
