Five musicians who hate the Eagles: “Irrelevant”
“Come on, man,” a recently spiked El Duderito grumbles in The Big Lebowski, “I’ve had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man!”
Many fans of the cult masterpiece nodded in agreement. However, the masses decidedly disagreed, figuratively throwing the naysayers out of their smooth-riding cab. In fact, no less than two albums by the Eagles reside in the top ten best-selling records of all time, evidencing just how many fans the band have enamoured since their debut single, ‘Take It Easy’, was released in May 1972, offering a new mantra to the decade.
Is commercial success an arbiter of quality and worth? Absolutely not. However, that doesn’t explain away the fact that their popularity isn’t fixed to a passing fad or some masterful marketing ploy – contrary to many column inches, people simply love the Eagles, and it’s a phenomenon the world over.
If you do any amount of travelling in Asia, then you’ll soon conclude that ‘Hotel California’ might actually be one of the most successful engines of American cultural hegemony that the world has ever seen. It’s the musical version of McDonald’s, convincing the socialist-leaning region that capitalism mustn’t be all bad if it’s throwing up sweet, air-guitar-inducing rock ‘n’ roll like this (the irony that the track actually makes the opposite point is lost somewhere in translation).
In nine fractious years, from 1971 to 1980, the band, in their pomp, took over AM broadcasting, and they have remained there ever since. In that time, they have drawn their fair share of plaudits; Bob Dylan described ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’ as “one of the best songs ever”, and Neil Young proclaimed that “The Eagles are the one band that’s carried on the spirit of Buffalo Springfield”. However, there are others who consider them tediously middle of the road, doggedly androcentric, and a dated derivation of the very era that they killed.
All these cutting opinions are voiced below. While it seems inevitable that if you’re a rock band who finds yourselves in wild commercial favour, then you’re going to have your detractors, the curated vitriol against the Eagles below highlights one of society’s extraordinary oddities: music is one of the few realms where something essentially considered acceptable and pleasant can cause such unprompted uproar. Love them or loathe them, this is why the Eagles prove so darn interesting, as the fella once said.
Five musicians who hate Eagles:
Tom Waits
Tom Waits’ relationship with the Eagles is a strange one.
When the band covered his beauteous Closing Time album opener ‘Ol’ 55’, they helped to launch his career, but he was about as thankful for this as the fake tan industry is to Donald Trump’s endorsement. Regarding the cover itself, he told WAMU: “The song is about five years old, it’s one of the first songs I wrote, so I felt like it was kind of flattering that somebody wanted to do your song, but at the same time I thought their version was a little antiseptic.”
While the flattery and royalties might have sweetened him at this stage of his career, he was even more cutting about their cover the following year in 1976, once the song had dipped out of the charts and his own career was in a much more established state.
“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.” Well, with over 200 million records sold, they’ve certainly gone through a lot of dusting.
T-Bone Burnett
When the Coen brothers were making The Big Lebowski, they reached out to the musical genius T-Bone Burnett to help them curate a suitable music taste for The Dude. It was Burnett’s suggestion that he should hate the Eagles. Why not? Burnett fucking hated them too, man. He even went as far as to tell 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 to 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.
Burnett even used his hatred of the band to leverage song rights deals for the film. He wanted to use Townes Van Zandt’s cover of The Rolling Stones ‘Dead Flowers’ to close the film, but encountered contractual issues as their manager, Allen Klein, was asking for $150,000.
But Burnett convinced him to watch the first cut of the film, and he recalls: “It got to the part where the Dude says, ‘I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man!’ Klein stands up and says, ‘That’s it, you can have the song!’ That was beautiful.”
John Lydon
The Sex Pistols’ butter-loving frontman John Lydon has shared his opinions and so many bands that he’ll soon have to move onto gastric, elastic and broad, just to have something new to say. However, his fault-picking with the Eagles is long-running enough to imply that his hatred is more than just a passing comment for effect.
“Don Henley, that’s the man,” Lydon said in an interview with Cream in 1992. “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, in 2007, 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?” He preferred his American artists to be more along the lines of the manic Captain Beefheart kind.
Stephen Malkmus
It is a mark of the peculiar space that the Eagles hold that their melodic ways prompted Stephen Malkmus’ Pavement to channel them in an “indie rock” fashion with the track ‘Crooked Rain, despite hating them. When Salon asked him if tackling their music gave him a new appreciation of the band, he said: “I still hate them. There’s too much – it’s not even the music. It’s kind of like ‘Graceland’ for me, that album too. There’s levels of evil in it to me,” he conceded.
Adding: “We know what they are but I don’t want to go in print saying too much. Not the Eagles. I already knew – my parents had the Eagles’ greatest hits. I’m a child of the greatest hits. Eagles’ greatest hits, Elton John’s greatest hits, Carpenters – there’s maybe two albums they had that weren’t greatest hits, like Tapestry or something by Carole King and Rumours or something – so that’s basically a greatest hits.”
And Malkmus contested this ‘perfected’ musical fashion, claiming it was cynically commercial, and reducing the Eagles to “rich hippies talking about money”.
Eagles
Perhaps the greatest paradigm for the love/hate of the Eagles comes from the band themselves. They wrote ‘Hotel California’ to poke at the American dream becoming beset by drugs and excesses, and yet they readily admit that they fall foul of that themselves. Likewise, they sing of peace and harmony but existed in a state of perpetually bitter feuding. And in the end, although they may now have reunited, for a time, they pretty much hated the Eagles more than anyone, with Don Henley joking that he wouldn’t rejoin until hell freezes over.
That bitter distaste came to the fore in the 2013 documentary The History of The Eagles. During the feature, frontman Glenn Frey points out: “Don Felder, for all of his talents as a guitar player, was not a singer”.
Drummer Don Henley agreed, maintaining that he “simply did not come up to band standards.” Meanwhile, Felder’s complaint was that the band had turned political. Mud was being hurled in all directions. Things were getting restless and the music was falling by the wayside.
And then it all came to an ugly head one night in California. “We’re onstage, and Felder looks back at me and says, ‘Only three more songs till I kick your ass, pal.’ And I’m saying, ‘Great. I can’t wait,’” Frey recalled. “We’re out there singing ‘Best of My Love,’ but inside both of us are thinking, ‘As soon as this is over, I’m gonna kill him.’ That was when I knew I had to get out.”
They had, by their own admission, lost the proverbial plot, and when you start hating your own band, it is time to call it a day.
