The songs that marked the Eagles’ “satanic country-rock period”
The disco backlash was a bleak time for popular music. The white, straight male rock fans that made up the most catered to demographic in popular music at the time weren’t just annoyed at the rise of disco. They were angry. If you asked them about it, they would say it’s because of the genre’s “commercialism” and how it was “infecting” artists that previously made ‘That Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll’. To be clear, that’s not why they were angry, but when a band as resolutely white as the Eagles were looking to cash in on the disco dollar, they weren’t wrong either.
The late 1970s are full of bands trying and mostly failing to get their strut on. After all, good disco music rules and The Bee-Gees had completely flipped their reputation as folk-rock relics of the 1960s into the world’s biggest pop group. Suddenly, bands of their ilk thought it was a great idea to get down with the kids and try out some four-on-the-floor. The Rolling Stones were probably the most high profile and ‘Miss You’ does, at least, still carry that classic Stones camp and cattiness, but otherwise, pickings here are slimmer than Jagger’s trousers.
Rod Stewart with ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’. Kiss with ‘I Was Made For Loving You’. Even The Kinks got in on the act with ‘(I Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman’. Yet, there’s still something particularly egregious about Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s gang of country-rock megastars, giving it a bash with the title track and lead single from their 1975 album One Of These Nights. Perhaps the fact they got their disco track out three years before everyone else saves them from the ridicule that everyone else got, but surely they didn’t need the clout?
They were the Eagles, after all. Not only one of the biggest bands on the planet, if not the biggest, but also resolutely certified members of the musical establishment. A band of milk-white, blandly handsome LA jocks who had more fun playing softball as a band than playing music as a band. The idea that they would not only traverse the queer, clubland underworld of disco, not only do it first but also (whisper it), do it pretty well at that? I suppose stranger things have happened, but not many.
In an interview with longtime friend and ex-music journalist Cameron Crowe (yes, that one), Henley and Frey talked through what inspired the song. Henley said, “It was a dark time, both politically and musically, in America. There was turmoil in Washington, and disco music was starting to take off. We thought, ‘Well, how can we write something with that flavour, with that kind of beat, and still have the dangerous guitars?’ We wanted to capture the spirit of the times.”
The jury’s out on whether they captured the spirit of the time, but maybe what puts ‘One Of These Nights’ above the other experiments is the fact that the band weren’t just going for craven copies of what was popular. At its heart, disco is a reflection of dark, profoundly frightening times and the human urge to dance through them because how the hell else are we meant to get through them? Surely that’s something we can relate to today.
There’s a reason that in that same interview, Henley doesn’t call the period they wrote the album their ‘disco period’. He called it their ‘Satanic country-rock period’, which works just as well and is, let’s be honest here, a hell of a lot cooler. It’s kind of mind-boggling that the band responsible for ‘Desperado’ two short years earlier were also the first to really get where disco was coming from, but thank God somebody did.
