The 1976 Eagles lyric that ruined their relationship: “I could hardly listen”
For a band that was all about harmony, there’s an awful lot of fighting in the Eagles’ history.
There isn’t a single band that seemed to be as petty and vindictive about their behind-the-scenes drama half the time they played, and even if Glenn Frey and Don Henley steered the ship throughout their career, there were more than a few times where they could be absolutely cutthroat to their bandmates. But even if Frey and Henley started to guide them through every one of their hits, there are more than a few times where they could end up turning on each other as well.
They weren’t always the best of friends when working on some of their records, and while they could always make the best music that anyone had ever heard, you could definitely feel the tension on a handful of those later albums. ‘I Wish You Peace’ was the first time they started to realise that Bernie Leadon really needed to leave, but it wasn’t like all their prayers were about to get answered the minute that they began working on Hotel California.
Granted, it doesn’t really feel like much should be on someone’s bucket list after making an album that good. Everything that a band dreams of when making a classic is on here, from the guitar solos to the deeper messages in the album cuts, but when combing through this story about the true nature of Hollywood, Henley remembered that ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ was the one tune that never sat right with him when working on the record.
As far as Frey was concerned, this was the kind of song that came from the streets that they had been driving down every single night, saying, “I was in the car with a drug dealer on the way to a poker game, and the next thing I know we’re going 80 miles an hour. I go, ‘Hey man, what are you doing?’. And he just looks at me and goes, ‘[This is] life in the fast lane’ and I thought immediately, ‘Now there’s a song title’.”
But when you look at the way that Eagles were living around that time, Henley couldn’t really stomach going through those lines every single time they played live, recalling, “[It] turned more into a celebration of exactly what we were trying to warn them about. Everybody’s got cocaine now, no matter how shitty it is.”
“I could hardly listen to that song when we were recording it because I was getting high a lot of the time, and the song made me ill.”
Don Henley
And while the band were still riding high, they wou;dn/t realise how much Henley’s illness may have been a precursor of things to come. Because when you’ve been at that great height for so long, there’s only one place left to go, and the whole band could tell that they were heading towards the end of their time together by the time they were working on making the album The Long Run.
Cocaine had become one of their favourite pastimes when they started thinking of ideas for songs, but even Frey claimed that “cocaine brought out the worst in all of us” when it came time to tour. And even though the tension could be cut with a knife the minute that they stepped onstage when performing a benefit concert in 1980, a lot of the damage had already been done after years of being far too high all the time.
Henley was always the more sensible one in the group, but when looking at ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, there were more than a few question marks around that song than anything else in their discography. Because rarely do you get a song that is both a major hit for a band and also a commentary on why they are moving way too fast.
