“None of us wanted to”: Glenn Frey on the Eagles album they would never make again
Every artist is behind the 8-ball the minute they try to shoot for perfection. As much as people like the idea of finetuning every vocal harmony and getting every guitar part to sound pristine, there are only so many places that they can go once they put themselves in that kind of box. And while Glenn Frey and Don Henley weren’t going to settle for anything less when Eagles formed, there’s no real rulebook that tells everyone where to go once they are firing on all cylinders in the studio.
Granted, that didn’t mean that it didn’t take hard work for the country rockers to get to the top of the food chain. Both Frey and Henley had turned in time in Linda Ronstadt’s band, so they already had chops from playing every single night, but they were a bit wet behind the ears on their debut album. ‘Take It Easy’ was a fantastic piece of pop-rock, but tracks like Bernie Leadon’s ‘Earlybird’ showed that they needed a bit more work.
And listening to Desperado, it’s clear that they wanted to sprint before they could walk in many respects. The idea of an album all about gunslingers sounds perfect if it had been released now, but every part of the record feels a bit disjointed, putting pieces of sheer brilliance like the title track next to songs that are more form over function like Randy Meisner’s ‘Certain Kind of Fool’ or their cover of the song ‘Outlaw Man’.
They were definitely building to something, though, and once Hotel California arrived, they finally had the writing chops to back them up. Every song on the record painted a picture of both the beauty and danger of Hollywood, and winding everything down with ‘The Last Resort’ feels like closing the final chapter of a brilliant novel. So, naturally, that meant that the studio wanted another one of them as fast as possible.
“Towards the end, we just wanted to get the record finished and released.”
Glenn Frey
Since the band had been on the road and didn’t have a single song done, The Long Run is the epitome of an album that was overthought. The band needed to make sure that anything that did measured up to their early years, but listening to masterpieces like ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ next to ‘The Disco Strangler’ or ‘The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks’ was never going to have the same impact as tunes like ‘Life in the Fast Lane’.
And outside of breaking the band up, Frey said that The Long Run was the kind of album that the band would never make again, saying, “Towards the end, we just wanted to get the record finished and released. It is a very polished album, as well it should be after all that, and has some excellent moments, but none of us wanted to go through that again so we figured it was the right time to call it a day.”
That being said, the polish did capture some great moments that people often neglect as well. For as flawed a record as it is, tunes like ‘King of Hollywood’ are good extensions of the ideas they had on their last album, and while nothing could eclipse ‘The Last Resort’, ‘The Sad Cafe’ was the tragic aftermath of them realising that the magic they had started with back in the day was officially snuffed out.
Frey at least survived long enough to bow out with Long Road Out of Eden, but even that sounded a bit too overcluttered for a massive double album release. It’s easy to dunk on The Long Run for being boring or not nearly as good as their previous albums, but the biggest crime it commits is ruining the creative spark that came from the original lineup.
