How the Eagles’ Glenn Frey learned to write songs
Very few of the greatest songwriters in history get to the very top just by happenstance. The Bob Dylans and Gordon Lightfoots of the world often spent hours upon hours honing their craft until they first hit upon the idea for a classic track. Glenn Frey was no different when he started Eagles, but his journey to ‘Hotel California’ had many more work hours than most.
Growing up in the factory city of Detroit, Frey was used to the sound of car shops when he found his calling in rock and roll. After playing ‘Satisfaction’ by The Rolling Stones with a high school band, Frey had the chance of a lifetime when he became friends with future superstar Bob Seger.
Long before the days of Night Moves, Seger had been cutting his teeth as a songwriter when he saw a spark in Frey, letting him guest on the track ‘Ramblin Gamblin Man’. Seger would recount how much confidence Frey had when contributing backing vocals, recounting in The History of the Eagles, “You can really hear Glenn blurt out on the first chorus. He comes out really loud with tremendous gusto. Of course, that was a big hit for us, which was really cool”.
It wasn’t long before Frey wanted to write his songs, eventually seeking advice from Seger about writing classic songs. Seger’s initial advice to Frey was to just write whatever he can, with Frey asking, “I went ‘Well what if they’re bad?’, and he said, ‘Well, they’re gonna be bad, but you just keep writing and keep writing and eventually you’ll write a good song’”.
Seeing how his future wouldn’t emerge inside the Detroit city limits, Frey ventured to California to chase his dreams, where he struck up a friendship with fellow songwriter JD Souther. After finding a place next to singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, Frey remembered every morning being an unofficial crash course in songwriting.
No matter how late Frey had stayed up the night before, he would always remember Browne’s teapot going off, saying: “I learned from Jackson’s teapot and my floor exactly how to write songs. He’d go through the first verse of ‘Doctor My Eyes’ and play it 20 times, and then there’d be silence. And 20 minutes later, he’d start again, and there was the second verse, and then he’d go to the top of the song and play the whole thing another 20 times until he was really comfortable. I thought, ‘So that’s how you write songs, elbow grease”.
Around the same time Frey was learning how to write, he played in the sideband for Linda Ronstadt, which featured Don Henley behind the drumkit. After finding some modest success, Henley and Frey quickly struck up a friendship and began writing tunes of their own which would eventually become Eagles songs.
Despite Browne indirectly teaching Frey, he admitted that Frey helped him finish the song ‘Take It Easy’ by filling in a line about a girl in a flatbed Ford slowing down to take a look at him. Browne knew that he would never have been able to come up with a line that good, capturing all of the desires of the ‘70s rocker at the time, from girls to cars and the redemption for all one’s past sins. This was just the beginning, though, and Frey was on his way to making songs that still echo through the valleys of Los Angeles.
