The mind behind the Eagles’ 1975 best-selling album: “Everything lined up for us”
It’s easy to roll your eyes at the name ‘greatest hits album’, don’t worry, I do too. It never really feels like a real record, rather a compilation of songs thrown together to simply satisfy the craving you may have for the band in question.
There’s no narrative arc or ebbing and flowing of say, a Hotel California by the Eagles. The way in which the band laced their commentary on the so-called ‘American Dream’, the pitfalls of fame, and the state of industry hedonism through its dark allegory of the seductive yet manipulative hotel made for one of the albums of the decade in the 1970s.
But it wasn’t entirely bogged down in the concept either. There was plenty to satiate fans and the label in the way of singles – the title track and ‘Life In The Fast Lane’ being the most notable. Released in 1976, it finally gave the band that defined them as a band because until that point, they hadn’t and had to accept the fact that their biggest-selling record was in fact a greatest hits compilation.
Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) was a 10-track set which simply compiled the very best songs of that early chapter of their career, after the band formed in 1971 in Los Angeles, with Glenn Frey and Don Henley joining up with multi-instrumentalist Bernie Leadon, late of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and bass guitarist Randy Meisner from Ricky Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.
It was a time when they wholly embraced Southern California country rock and blended it with acoustic folk-rock. And so, that sunny musical disposition, compiled into one record, got them their first certified Platinum album, and it subsequently spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 chart.
The band themselves weren’t exactly enthused by the project, and nor should they have been; the idea of a greatest hits album seems to suck the very art out of music entirely. But their label, Asylum, persisted and released it despite the lack of permission from the band.
It’s not unsurprising, then, that Bernie Leadon, who left the band in ‘75 and let the album signify his time in the Eagles, looks back on the record with fondness and even commends the label for pushing on and getting it made.
He said, “You have to have a great manager, great record producers, great agents, business manager, on and on. There’s a whole list of amazing people we worked with. Glyn Johns did a great job and, later, Bill Syzmczyk, in producing the records. We had J.D. Souther, Jackson Browne, Jack Tempchin all contributed songs throughout the first four years. Everything lined up for us.”
The record remains their biggest selling of all time, and Leadon likely rested with a wry smile on his face, knowing that he was a part of their very best work. But that’s only commercially speaking, and no matter what records the greatest hits record broke, it simply has nothing on the artistic achievement of the album they wrote after his exit.
