The Eagles song Don Henley called “the beginning of my career”
Every songwriter usually has that one song where everything changes for them. Even if they have written plenty of anthems in their time, these are the tracks that they knew would alter where their lives would be going. While Don Henley would put together a slew of unforgettable pieces with Glenn Frey, he credits one particular Eagles song for putting him on the track with songwriting.
Before the band started, Henley was interested in playing music for whoever would hear him. When performing in his first outfits in Linden, Texas, Henley would happily play any music that struck his fancy, getting his first paying gigs for instrumental Dixieland jazz music.
While Henley had a good time playing jazz, his DNA was altered when he saw The Beatles for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. Showing him the ways of being a proper rock star, Henley was convinced to form a rock band with a bunch of his friends in the area, forming under the name Shiloh.
After getting scouted by country music legend Kenny Rogers, the group moved West to California, playing music more in line with the country-rock sound of Gram Parsons and The Byrds. As Henley began cutting his teeth on the circuit, good fortune continued coming his way when he got to perform with Linda Ronstadt, being introduced to rhythm guitarist Glenn Frey.
While they fit nicely in the Los Angeles club scene, Henley thought that he and Frey would work better as part of their own outfit instead. Putting together the Eagles with Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon in tow, the band would spend their time on Asylum Records honing their craft, spending time in Aspen, Colorado, trying to refine their songs.
Eventually working with Glyn Johns, much of the album contained tracks that the group had been performing for years and donated works from their friends like the staple ‘Nightingale’ and Jack Tempchin’s ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’. When Henley started jamming with Leadon on a caustic rock and roll lick, he knew they were onto something.
Spending the rest of the day playing the song repeatedly, the track would turn into ‘Witchy Woman’, taking the same bluesy lyric about a mystical woman who did Henley wrong. When talking about the track later, Henley would credit it for drastically changing him from a musician into a songwriter.
Discussing the track in The Very Best of the Eagles, Henley recalled, “I had a very high fever and became semi-delirious at times — and that’s when I wrote most of the lyrics. Every time the fever subsided, I would continue to read a new book I’d gotten on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, and I think that figured into the mix somehow — along with amorphous images of girls I had met at the Whisky and the Troubadour. An important song for me because it marked the beginning of my professional songwriting career.”
Even though Leadon would be Henley’s first collaborator, it wasn’t until his work with Frey began that everything started falling into place, putting together masterpieces like ‘Desperado’ and ‘Hotel California’ in the years to come. While the Eagles spent years making sure everything sounded perfect, this was the first sign that things were moving in the right direction.
