The Eagles song Glenn Frey wrote out of pure spite: “Let’s get even”
If the rise of the music biopic shows anything, it shows that we’re desperate for our heroes’ personalities to match their art. Freddie Mercury’s music was decadent, ostentatious and thrilling, so we want the man himself to match. Bob Dylan’s was mysterious, challenging and beguiling, and so was he. What of the Eagles though? There is a huge mismatch between the band as artists and the band as people, and if I’m honest, that’s a whole lot more interesting than what we see in Bohemian Rhapsody and A Complete Unknown.
Looked at broadly, the Eagles make soulful folk-rock as warm and welcoming as the LA breezes they formed under. Few songs feel as much like a hug as the likes of ‘Desperado’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’. Even when things get darker, there’s still an element of joy and sensuality to the likes of ‘Hotel California’ and ‘One Of These Nights’. If you were to characterise the band as people based on their music, you’d probably think they were a bunch of jovial, wise hippies with nothing but love for their fellow man.
The truth is, you could not be more wrong. The men who formed Eagles had all the edge their music lacked and then some. For one thing, where their music carried itself with all the peace and love grace of their hippie cohorts, the band were as cutthroat as you could get. A bunch of dedicated careerists who viewed their job as exactly that, a job. They saw making music together as a chore to get through and on an interpersonal level, were never more united than when they were playing softball together.
Which leads to the other side of them as people. They had a searing bitter streak and a thirst to stick it to their perceived enemies that, being arguably the biggest band in the world, wouldn’t quench. I mean, this was a band that got so sick of Rolling Stone magazine not treating them with respect that they challenged the magazine’s staff to a softball game to humiliate them publicly. Again, this was the biggest band in the world.
This bitter streak wouldn’t wash out with time, either. When they were making their 1994 reunion record Hell Freezes Over, Glenn Frey and frequent collaborator Jack Tempchin wrote the song ‘Girl From Yesterday’ for the record. When appearing as a guest on the Songfacts podcast in 2022, Tempchin talked through the song’s inspiration, saying that Frey had written it as a kiss-off to his first wife Janie, who he’d divorced in 1988.
On the podcast, Tempchin said Frey “went through a divorce, and then he later got happily married. I was going through some bumpy times, so he was like, ‘Let’s get even with the old girlfriend in a way by writing a song called ‘Girl From Yesterday.” Very telling that a woman Frey was married to for five years gets referred to as “the old girlfriend” there. Even more telling that they still feel the need to “get even with her”, whatever that means.
He continues by saying, “So we were writing it, and we really liked it, but we got to the last verse, and we’re going, ‘What’s going to happen? Is he going to get back together with her or not?’ Well, it’s up to us, we’re creating it, so it turned out that no, she’s just always going to be the girl from yesterday.” I don’t know if they meant to sound as thin-skinned, aggressive and petty as they do there, but if they didn’t, it’s a truly telling slip-up. A genuine mask-off moment in a career full of them.
