The song that proved Eagles weren’t just a “country rock band”, according to Don Henley
With their music inspired by folk-rock icons The Byrds, the Eagles have long been pigeonholed as a country-rock band. Even after all these years, this title still grates with founding member Don Henley.
Speaking with Cameron Crowe in 2003, ahead of the release of (yet another) greatest hits compilation, Eagles: Very Best Of, Henley refuted the idea that their sound could be defined with just the words ‘country’ and ‘rock’. “Even now the Eagles are thought of as a country-rock band,” he said. “The music industry and the media saddled us with that label at the very beginning, and, no matter how diverse our musical palate, it has been impossible to shake that stereotype. At the end of the day, we’re an American band. We’re a musical mutt with influences from every genre of American popular music. It’s all in there, and it’s fairly obvious.”
To argue against the title, he pointed to the song ‘Midnight Flyer’, adding: “I was happy to do something in that vein because I was a big bluegrass fan. The Dillards, in particular, had an enormous impact on me. Along with Doug Dillard and Herb Pedersen, Bernie Leadon was one of the top banjo players in the country, so I was proud to do a bluegrass tune—thought it lent a certain amount of authenticity and credibility to our band. It showed versatility.”
Perhaps pointing to a song that leans so heavily into one of the more famous country sub-genres to explain the point isn’t the most emphatic way of clarifying the genre distinctions, but the song is certainly at least more country than rock, even despite its rocky undertones.
Originally released on the 1973 album On the Border, ‘Midnight Flyer’ sees all of the Eagles bring their voices together to harmonise on the train-whistle melody on top of a drum beat played by Henley that rolls along like the titular train running down the track, an expert cascade of bluegrass banjo from Bernie Leadon and slide guitar from Glenn Frey.
Though some of the band wanted to move into a more aggressive, hard-rock direction for this album, Henley was happy to hop a train into the heart of the country. Perhaps it was this push and pull between the band and the direction they wanted to travel in that made them so often meet in the middle and bring those elements of country and rock together after all.
According to Henley, it wasn’t the only song on the compilation album that showed their range, either. He described ‘Wasted Time’, originally from their 1976 album Hotel California, as “a Philly-soul torch song.”
He added: “I loved all the records coming out of Philadelphia at that time. I sent for some sheet music so I could learn some of those songs, and I started creating my own musical ideas with that Philly influence. Don was our Teddy Pendergrass. He could stand out there all alone and just wail. We did a big Philly-type production with strings — definitely not country rock. You’re not going to find that track on a Crosby, Stills and Nash record or Beach Boys record”.
Perhaps if they’d released more songs like this instead, they’d have wasted less time fighting the country-rock moniker, but then again, perhaps they’d have just been labelled as a blue-eyed soul band instead. Maybe the Eagles just didn’t want to have their wings clipped at all.
