The producer every member of the Eagles fell out of love with: “Better you than me”
If you grew up listening to a band like the Eagles, you wouldn’t automatically assume that they had some of the worst drama in rock and roll history.
These sounded like California cowboys that happened to be blessed with God-given voices every single time they sang, but there were a lot of moving parts that made everything seem a lot less harmonious whenever they were performing. And while Glenn Frey and Don Henley had more than his fair share of say about each other and certain members of the band, they could all be in agreement when it came to someone sabotaging their sound.
But if you want to know how someone is sabotaging you, the first rule is figuring out what you sound like in the first place. Eagles didn’t really know what they wanted to be on their first record, and even if they had a great knowledge of harmony and songs from the rich tradition of American music, it wasn’t until they started to get the attention of people like David Geffen that they felt like they had a future.
The whole point was to try and make some of the best rootsy music that they could, but it took a while for them to impress someone like Glyn Johns. He was used to producing some of the biggest names in rock and roll, and if he had been around to see what everyone from The Beatles to The Stones to The Who had been doing, he wasn’t going to be that knocked out by a bunch of guys that happened to sing harmonies.
Once he did hear the potential that they had, though, Frey was over the moon at getting to record songs like ‘Take it Easy’ with him, saying, “I was telling myself ‘I’m going to go to Beatles country. We’re going to record in the same room where Led Zeppelin made ‘Rock and Roll’. Oh my God, I can’t wait.’” But that relationship was bound to turn sour a little too quickly for everyone’s taste.
Their debut album introduced them to the world perfectly, but Desperado had been a massive flop for them when it came out, leading to Frey starting to get a little bit leery of what Johns was doing. He already had a problem with Johns not letting them get high in the studio, but Henley felt that there needed to be some more wiggle room, saying, “We wanted a producer that put a microphone on each and every drum so we would have more control over the mix.”
But Johns wasn’t about to put up with a bunch of rules from some kids from California. He had his signature sound on a lot of his greatest albums, and as far as he could tell, Henley needed to hit the drum harder if he wanted to get a bigger sound out of them. So while the band got started on On the Border, they had already begun taking some cues from what they heard from records by Bill Szymczyk.
Joe Walsh had the best sound that they had ever heard before he joined the band, and if Johns couldn’t do the same thing, then Szymczyk was going to be the one for them. And while Frey was a little bit disappointed seeing that the band’s relationship with the production legend didn’t work out, Szymczyk remembered that there wasn’t really much love lost between the band and the producer when he called him up.
Given that Johns’s response to Szymczyk was “better you than me, mate,” it was pretty clear that he and the band had done everything they could do together. Eagles were clearly on their own path at this point, and Johns wasn’t going to sleep over the idea that he missed out on recording them their way.
