The Eagles song that made Don Henley “ill” while making it: “I could hardly listen to it”
Eagles were a band built out of a seemingly unstoppable ability to deliver bona fide classics without so much as a scratched needle on the record. Their soft rock anthems glided into the airwaves with minimal fuss.
Or at least that is how it seemed to outsiders looking in. In truth, the group were plagued with infighting and a seemingly endless run of shaky moments in the studio. With such distinctive voices behind the music, it was perhaps only a matter of time before one band member disliked a particular song.
Whenever a band is mixing a song, there comes a point where it doesn’t feel like their creation anymore. Regardless of how much time and effort may have gone into making it sound perfect from top to bottom, even the biggest songs tend to be worked on for so long that they practically stop sounding like music. Although every Eagles song was poured over with time and thought, Don Henley didn’t have the best reaction when listening back to one of their classics.
During the making of the album Hotel California, there was an immense amount of pressure on everyone’s shoulders to create a legendary product. Since their last few albums saw them on a constant upward trajectory, critics and fans were looking to the next album for the group to make something amazing again.
While the band had started the germs of classic songs like the title track and ‘New Kid In Town’, the basis of ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ came around almost accidentally. Rather than sit around with their guitars thinking of ideas, the central guitar lick came out of a jam session, with Joe Walsh playing the now-famous guitar figure while warming up.
As Walsh recalled in History of the Eagles, “It was a coordination exercise. And I was just warming up, and they said, ‘What is that?’. ‘Well, it’s something I have. There you go’.” While the lick may have been about trying to get the guitarist’s fingers going, Henley and Frey could only think of the restless side of Hollywood when the lick came on.
Remembering a line that he heard from a drug dealer on the way to a poker game, Glenn Frey thought of the phrase ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, going off on a story about a destructive couple that would most likely end up a victim of their demise. Although the story was fiction, it may have been closer to reality than Henley wanted.
When talking about listening to the song after they tracked it, Henley was mortified listening to the speakers, recalling in Life in The Fast Lane, “[It] turned more into a celebration of exactly what we were trying to warn them about. Everybody’s got cocaine now, no matter how shitty it is. I could hardly listen to that song when we were recording it because I was getting high a lot of the time, and the song made me ill.”
Then again, the drug dependency had begun long before the Hotel California sessions began. When discussing the group’s escapades at the height of their fame, Frey saw the drugs as a mock competition among the band members, recalling, “It was ‘who could function’ throughout the set.”
While the chemicals had briefly worked their magic, it wasn’t until the next album that they hit a brick wall. Being dependent on cocaine, The Long Run was marred with sessions that grounded to a halt, with Frey and Henley slaving away during sessions where practically nothing got done. Even though the idea of ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ may have struck a nerve for those who like to live on the edge, Henley freely admitted that the lifestyle helped bring out the worst in every band member.
