Eagles on trial: wrongly maligned mega-stars or middle-of-the-road trash? Musicians debate…
The Eagles are the world’s least mysterious mystery. They are the only act with two records that rank in the ten best-selling albums of all time list, and yet there has never been a firm consensus regarding whether their name is prefixed with ‘the’ or they’re simply Eagles. They seemed to typify the 1970s, but what exactly they embodied remains unclear. Hell, even the meaning behind their biggest hit, ‘Hotel California’, is as obfuscated as they come, and the track weirdly took two months before it hit the top of the charts for a solitary week.
The record books have them logged as successful, talented, vital, “irrelevant”, and “boring”. They are a dichotomy that makes the intro to The Tale of Two Cities look cut-and-dry. So, do they reside among the greats, or are they proof that art and chart are far more miles apart than a mere ‘ch’? In order to crack this conundrum, we’ve waded into the words that their peers have said about them, hoping that this will shed the greatest insight into why they now reside as the most maligned mega-stars in music history.
The first artist to approach the bench in their defence is perhaps the finest voice you can ever have in your corner: Bob Dylan. The folk maestro opines that they have penned what ”could be one of the best songs ever” regarding the track ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’. He throws ‘New Kid in Town’ and ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ among his favourites. Indeed, these efforts pass muster as masterpieces for many of their fans too. They embody the band’s canny knack to capture a sense of seamlessness, a beauty that renders ‘easy listening’ an underhand misnomer for artful perfection, musically akin to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s quip that “easy reading is damn hard writing”.
However, the question that critics of the band would use to rebuke this claim is, beyond pleasantry, what does the music actually have to say for itself? When John Lydon roared to prominence with the Sex Pistols, using music to make a pertinent point was a pinnacle that meant it hardly mattered if they couldn’t tune their instruments. So, with Eagles being ample musicians – but far from rock Mozarts – making music about taking it easy in an era where dystopia seemed to be setting in, it’s no surprise that there has to be more to a mega-band than the melodies that Dylan apparently reveres.
“Don Henley, that’s the man,” Lydon said in an interview with Cream. “That’s the man responsible [for the dull seriousness of ‘doom-laden’ music]. There’s a man with no humour. Same with Sting, he’s gone and taken himself far too seriously, hasn’t he? ‘I am an intellectual, honest, please believe me. Look how unshaved I can be.’” And then he took aim at the Eagles in general: “They’re irrelevant. A band like that doesn’t write songs that mean anything. We’re the Charge of the Light Brigade, with decent generals, right?”
The band themselves, however, would argue that they did have something to say, and just because it wasn’t as patently apparent as snarling anarchy, does that make it any less relevant? “On just about every album we made, there was some kind of commentary on the music business, and on American culture in general,” Henley claims. Even when it comes to ‘Hotel California’, if you sit down with the track for long enough, it becomes clear that “the hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor not only for the myth-making of Southern California but for the myth-making that is the ‘American Dream’ because it is a fine line between the American Dream and the American nightmare,” as Henley explains.
Nevertheless, there are some that claim that this commentary was obfuscated and half-baked to such an extent that it typifies the middle-of-the-road criticism that they justly deserve. T-Bone Burnett subscribes to this camp, and when he was assorting the music to The Big Lebowski, he wove them into the script to be the objects of The Dude’s scorn. He told Rolling Stone that they contributed to killing the counterculture movement: “[The Eagles] sort of single-handedly destroyed that whole scene that was brewing back then.”
So, how did they kill the scene, and how was that even relevant for a film set in the 1990s? Well, as it happens, a few years prior to the release of the movie, the Eagles hit the headlines as the first rock band to charge over $100 for tickets. Seeing as though The Dude hailed from a place of hippie idealism, parcelling simplified peace and love with a price tag that lofty was an awful duality to straddle as a band. The irony of a platitude like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ – a song that strips the counterculture movement of any of its pointed intent and merely serves it up as a lukewarm laidback lark with an incense addiction – was bound to get on his nerves almost because it’s simply pleasant cab ride music.
Moreover, it was cab ride music that often happened to be “boring” and lacking in depth, if you agree with Tom Waits. His track ‘Ol’ 55′ is one of new love being reconciled on a weary morning, but this point somewhat goes missing in the Eagles’ cover version, which Waits describes as “a little antiseptic”. His critique got ever more cutting when it came to the rest of their work. “I don’t like the Eagles,” he told NME. “They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry,” he said. He then concluded his cutting lambast by stating: “Their albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable and that’s about all.”
Clearly, however, Waits is in the minority as they have far outsold him. Contrary to what artists like Lydon and Waits claim, millions of people are in the market for peaceful, easy feelings. The reason the Eagles have dominated the AM airwaves is because they create music that eases the working day. That’s a brand of music that will always have its place. As Jackson Browne once opined, “You need a guy like Glenn, who’s a ‘girl-Ford-Lord’ guy.”
Besides, even in amongst this, the band happened to pioneer a new subtle variation of music. “The Eagles were very inspirational to both Lindsey and I because we loved their singing,” Stevie Nicks said, “And we loved their ability to bridge country and rock and roll so beautifully.” Indeed, the band did bring together two camps with great skill. In the early 1970s, this bold melding of styles was also somewhat of a rarity. Common sense decreed that if you wanted to be successful, you had to be easy to pigeonhole so that radio stations, record stores, and booking agents knew where to place you, literally. However, Eagles saw the backlash that Dylan got for turning folk electric and figured they wanted a piece of it, changing music forever in the process, even if naysayers claim that they had no reverberating impact on culture.
And yet, there are also those who might argue that the meddling they pioneered amounted to the combination of commercial forces, reducing the art of two genres to the lowest common denominator of profit. They were wildly successful at that, but the jury is still hung regarding whether they eclipsed mere commercialism.
