The 1800s songwriter that united Glenn Frey and Don Henley: “Blew my mind”
The kind of chemistry between Glenn Frey and Don Henley is the kind that only comes a few times every generation.
Every great rock and roll band usually has that certain tension between two people, and while John Lennon had Paul McCartney and Steven Tyler had Joe Perry, Frey and Henley were the ones who kept pushing country rock forward every time they made a new record. But even though they had first formed the idea of making a band, it took a while before they were ready to start making tunes of their own.
Linda Ronstadt had already given them the break that they had wanted when she got them in her own band, but Frey and Henley never liked the idea of being sidemen in someone else’s group. Frey had wanted to be a star in his own right, but he knew that he needed a band behind him, and having Henley was the perfect partner in crime whenever it came to writing lyrics. He was a true wordsmith, and Frey would be the one having that one brilliant turn of phrase to fill in what Henley couldn’t.
But you won’t be finding much of that on their debut record. A lot of the best tunes on their first outing are a hodgepodge of the kind of music they had been playing in the clubs when they first started. They needed time to hone their craft, and even though ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ were knockout hits when they first came out, Desperado was a classic example of a band trying to grow up way too quickly.
No album with tunes like ‘Tequila Sunrise’ and ‘Doolin-Dalton’ could have been considered outright bad, but there were a lot of people not ready for them to lean into the country angle so much. They had already been written off by one of their label heads when they were told that they didn’t want “a fucking cowboy record,” but the song ‘Desperado’ was the moment where everything started to make sense for all of them.
Frey and Henley may have had their start with ‘Tequila Sunrise’ first, but the title track is the moment where they made pure classics. This was like discovering a lost Americana song from long ago that never managed to see the light of day, and while Frey was the one making everything work behind the piano, Henley said that the reason why the two of them worked so well was their shared understanding of people like Stephen Foster.
Henley had already loved Foster’s songs back in the days when his family would sing them, but he felt that common thread between him and Frey was going to make everything roll easier, saying, “What blew my mind was that Glenn knew who Stephen Foster was. He immediately got it, understood intuitively what I was going for and proceeded to add structure, including some additional chords and lyrics, to a song fragment that had been lying dormant for years. In the following years, I would learn that Glenn had an encyclopedic knowledge of the canon of American popular music.”
Not every rock and roll star needed to know what Foster was all about, but his presence was more of a standard for the Eagles. People like Bob Dylan had been used to listening to Foster’s folk songs all the way back when he was making his first records, and when you look at how simple a lot of those tunes were, the biggest lesson that they could teach was that people didn’t need to be one of the most intelligent artists in the world to move people.
After all, the average listener is looking for the kind of song that they can sing along with, and Frey and Henley made that their bread and butter whenever they wrote tunes. Because with Foster as their guide, they knew that the number-one rule is to never keep their music out of the reach of their fans.
