What did Glenn Frey call “the best sounding” Eagles album?
No one in the Eagles was ever going to get away with making a merely passable take in the studio.
Don Henley and Glenn Frey knew that they needed to make the best records they could to get people to pay attention, and while nothing could be perfect, there was always room for them to work on their records until they were as pristine as possible. And while Henley did have a firm attention to detail, Frey knew the moments where they truly knocked it out of the park in the studio.
If you look at the band dynamic, though, Henley and Frey could have easily come off as more demanding if you had the wrong idea. Even though he was the one who ended up replacing Don Felder on ‘Victim of Love’, it was never out of spite. He was the team captain in many respects, and that meant him trying to find the best way for a song to be delivered, even if it meant that he would have to step on a few toes while doing it.
But it’s not like they were trying to make anyone’s life a living hell or anything. They simply knew what they were up against, and after working on records like Desperado, they were going to use everything in their power to make sure that they kept the momentum going as much as possible. They wanted to go down in history the same way The Beatles and The Stones did, but that also meant cutting some fat along the way as well.
And as much as Glyn Johns was a godsend for them in the early days, he was never meant to be with them for too long. The echo that he was using on the vocals was becoming way too overpowering for the rest of the group, and after not having a lot of control over the mix, they figured that they would rework On the Border into something that they could be proud of without their musical older brother.
Despite Johns’s insistence that the country-rock icons never were ‘true’ rock and roll, Felder corrected that problem the minute he walked in the door. Sure, the album still had softer tunes like ‘Best of My Love’ on it, but when listening to Felder’s playing on ‘Already Gone’, it was clear that Bernie Leadon was being given a run for his money whenever he decided to take a solo on one of their tunes.
And when Frey came up for air, he thought that they had made a landmark record, saying at the time, “On the Border was the best-sounding record we ever made. But that’s also experience. We’re starting to learn how to become recording artists, which is a little different from learning how to be a member of a band or how to become a singer/songwriter. There are definitely things we’ve learned slowly over a couple of years of making records.”
And if that was a nice sign of things to come, everything was about to hit a ceiling when Joe Walsh replaced Leadon. It’s not that the country element was toned down by any stretch, but when listening to the amount of detail they put into a record like Hotel California, it felt like they took every lesson they learned from working on On the Border and amplified them even further on the title track and ‘Life in the Fast Lane’.
But beyond being a great transitional album, On the Border serves as a great benchmark of what the Eagles wanted to be. They had their country side with every tune they played, but they knew that there was a lot more for them to explore once they had a little bit more grit in their delivery.
