The only worthy Grammy winner of the 1970s, according to Glenn Frey
As a general rule, everyone is too cool for an award until they actually get one. However, in their pomp, you could perhaps argue that the Eagles genuinely rebuffed this classic trope.
Glittery success didn’t seem to be their aim in the age of glam. The band are an eternal oddity, and this facet is one of the key reasons why. They might now reside as the only act with two separate albums in the top ten best-selling records of all time list, but at the height of their fame, or rather lack thereof, they claim they could easily stroll around Hollywood without being recognised.
They cherished their anonymity, not appearing on album covers, and typically attempting to let their music do the talking. That was becoming an increasing rarity in pop culture. In the mid-1960s, before Frank Zappa formed the Mothers of Invention, he worked in advertising, and after his brief stint in the profession, he came to the conclusion that music in the modern age was 50% about image.
As the years progressed, that figure seemed to further expand, but the Eagles remained determined to shroud themselves in the shadows of their sound. This was partly due to the fact that they liked going to restaurants without having fans interrupt their starters, and partly because they wanted to maintain their “underdog status”.
You couldn’t exactly write about the sham of the American dream with any great conviction if the very next night Vogue were photographing you sipping champagne in a swanky Calvini Calvino suit. They wanted to frame their music as the voice of the niche, cool, outsiders, even if those are three words that the modern music press have never once brandished against them.
“Mass appeal is definitely suspect,” Frey said at the time, as their record sales skyrocketed. Regardless of how much he truly believed this view when he uttered it to Rolling Stone in 1975, very few folks seemed to abide by it. In fact, most people now thought it was fashionable to be the leading star of the day. Punk had not yet thrown its anti-commercial punch, and besting The Beatles was still the aim of the day.
However, Frey figured that this modern viewpoint, that flashy stardom was somehow artful, was sorely incorrect. He also saw how it was even impacting the judgement of the supposed expert awards bodies of the era.
He figured that the Grammys had become awash with star-pandering as opposed to honestly honouring the greatest artistry on display. At the time, the winners of the big four (best album, song, record, and new artist), had been: Blood, Sweat and Tears, The 5th Dimension, Joe South, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Simon and Garfunkel, The Carpenters, Carole King, Carly Simon, George Harrison and Friends, Roberta Flack, America, Stevie Wonder, Bette Midler, Olivia Newton-John, Barbra Streisand and Marvin Hamlisch.
With the expectation of the forgotten Mr Hamlisch, that’s a pretty impressive roster of names, but Frey figured only one of them was truly worthy. “Just look at our [recent] Grammy winners, Stevie Wonder excluded. Sometimes all that mass appeal means is that you simplified your equation down to the lowest common denominator.”
Coining the classic proletariat undermining phrase, he laid out the issue and his desire never to be part of it: “It’s a great temptation to think, ‘Well, f*** it, they’ll buy this. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the mass public.’” Too many artists, he felt, were prone to leaning upon the latest fad as an easy crutch to push themselves towards the cash-in of the mainstream.
Stevie Wonder, however, was his marked exception. In actual fact, the former Motown star had left his old mass hitmaking label behind to pursue something deeper. In doing so, he became a star who both Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney happily hail as a “genius”, and Frey was always happy to back them up on that.
Not only did Frey pick Wonder out an artist worth honouring from a talent standpoint, but he also thought he was a prime example of someone who didn’t “die from success poisoning” and continued to be a powerhouse of art at its purest.
Frey even went on to feature on the same album as his hero, much to his own surprise. ”I look over my shoulder – Quincy Jones. OK. I look over my shoulder – Stevie Wonder,” Frey told Rolling Stone of his memories pitching his track for forthcoming blockbuster. ”Look back over here, it’s the Pointer Sisters. I’m sitting there going, ‘I’m dead. There’s no way I’m getting a song in Beverly Hills Cop.’”
