Glenn Frey on the end of the Eagles: “I’ve been paying you for seven years”
After coming off the tour for Hotel California, the touring life of the Eagles began to get undeniably tense. While travelling around the world delivering great tunes to one audience after another sounds fun, the California rockers dealt with it in their ways, with one performance forcing bassist Randy Meisner out of the group. Instead of taking a break, the band soldiered on to their next album, The Long Run.
After returning to the studio, no songs were completed, with the band having to occasionally jam to get the right song to work. Although newcomer Timothy B. Schmidt had an ace in the hole with his ballad, ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’, Glenn Frey and Don Henley’s songwriting machine began to have cracks in the foundation, with songs like ‘The Disco Strangler’ not holding up as well as deep cuts like ‘Wasted Time’.
In the background, though, Don Felder was also getting restless to contribute more to the group. Ever since the recording of Hotel California, Felder had demanded to sing more on an Eagles project. Though he came close to having a hit on ‘Victim of Love’, the rest of the group didn’t allow him to sing it, forcing their manager to take him out to dinner while they cut the track with Henley singing lead.
Though the group put on their best faces in the studio, they would not survive the road intact. Despite things kicking off well on their first handful of shows, everything came to a head when the group arrived in Long Beach for a benefit gig.
While Frey was happy to be doing a benefit show for Senator Alan Cranston, he knew that Felder was not a fan of any charity shows, recalling in History of The Eagles, “Felder didn’t like benefit shows. He’d figured that was money that should be going into his pocket, so why are we doing it for [people like] Jerry Brown?”.
As the band finished rehearsal, the senator came up onstage and thanked the performers for playing the gig. As Henley recalls: “He comes up to Felder and says ‘I want to thank you’. Felder looked at the senator and said ‘You’re welcome’, and as he was turning away he said, ‘I guess’”.
Enraging Frey, the frontman returned to the band’s tuning room where Felder was practising and smashed a beer bottle against the wall. Since the show must go on, the band took to the stage with Frey still seething, playing a handful of tunes while Frey and Felder bickered.
In a recording taken from the gig that night, Frey and Felder can be heard making open threats to each other. After Felder claims that Frey doesn’t give a shit about the people he pays, Frey rebuttals, “Fuck you, I’ve been paying you for seven years, you fuckhead”.
As Frey recalls, the set ended, and Felder erupted backstage, explaining, “When we came off, he was out ahead of me. He took his cheapest guitar, busted it into a million pieces, got into his limousine and drove off. And that was it. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back”.
When Schmidt called Frey to ask what had gone down, Frey couldn’t take it anymore, telling the new bassist that the Eagles were over. Although they had written their fair share of classic tunes, the growing animosity between Frey and Felder became too much to ignore that night.
