The only band Don Henley called competition for the Eagles: “That competitive spirit”
There’s always a healthy sense of competition between anyone on the hit parade. It’s nice to be able to make a dent in the charts at all, but no one’s in the business trying to get to number two, and if there’s someone keeping them off the top spot, artists will do whatever they can to blow them out of the water the next time around. Don Henley knew that kind of competition all too well, but of every other 1970s band, he thought that Fleetwood Mac was a prime target for the Eagles.
When the Eagles were first rising up, though, Fleetwood Mac was a completely different outfit from what they ultimately became. Whereas Henley was still looking to make the country-infused rock and roll that he had loved since growing up in Texas, ‘The Mac’ had gone from a blues rock masterclass to one of the greatest soft rock acts of all time with Bob Welch and Christine McVie at the helm.
Once Welch left the group, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks brought a bit more of a rootsy edge to it. It’s hard to really call Buckingham’s approach country per se, but his background in bluegrass music and playing exclusively with his fingers definitely gave him a leg up on other country-tinged players like Bernie Leadon.
While the Eagles’ second album, Desperado, fell on deaf ears upon first release, Henley did end up getting that fire in him again when he saw Fleetwood Mac climbing the charts. For someone who was known for popularising the country-rock genre, it probably had to sting seeing a group of LA transplants suddenly turning up and taking away chart positions with songs like ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Say You Love Me’.
When talking about that time, Henley remembered that out of all the groups tearing up the charts, Fleetwood Mac was one of the clearest rivals they had, telling Louder, “We saw them as the competition. Everybody was, actually. We were on good terms with everybody, but we’d take note of how other bands were doing chart-wise. We wanted to be in the game. We had a competitive spirit.”
Despite the group having some immortal songs to their name, Fleetwood Mac did win their fair share of battles, with Rumours being shot into the stratosphere thanks to the amazing hooks and the added tension of the relationship drama happening within the group. If ‘The Mac’ won the battle, though, Henley was ready to win the war.
That rivalry was never about animosity so much as motivation. Henley didn’t resent Fleetwood Mac for their success, but he understood what it represented: a band operating in similar territory that had cracked the code before the Eagles fully had. Watching Rumours dominate the charts sharpened the Eagles’ focus, reinforcing the idea that emotional depth, polish, and ambition could coexist within accessible rock music. If Fleetwood Mac could turn personal chaos into pop perfection, Henley knew the Eagles had to raise their own stakes.
In that sense, Fleetwood Mac functioned as both a warning and a benchmark. They showed what was possible when a band leaned fully into its internal tensions instead of smoothing them over. By the time the Eagles entered the studio to refine what would become Hotel California, they were no longer chasing hits alone. They were chasing permanence, determined to make a record that could sit comfortably alongside Rumours rather than live in its shadow.
Looking at the raw numbers, Hotel California handily goes to bat with Rumours as one of the best-selling albums of all time, sitting right below records like Michael Jackson’s Thriller. At the same time, the biggest success wasn’t even something that Henley was responsible for, with the group’s first greatest hits becoming the best-selling record of the 20th century by the time the 1990s were out.
It’s like the competition wasn’t friendly, either, with Henley appearing on Stevie Nicks’s solo records and even being the inspiration for a number of Nicks songs after their affair fell apart in the early 1980s. Regardless of personal matters, though, Henley was still out to be the biggest band in the world, and by the time they reached the end of the 1970s, the Eagles could have gone to bat with the Led Zeppelins of the world if they wanted to.
