The 1972 song Don Henley will never forget: “Always remember”
When you’ve had as many hits as Don Henley, it’s hard to remember every single piece of your history.
Eagles were making the kinds of records that no one could have resisted in the early 1970s, and even when they sprawled out and made tunes like ‘Hotel California’ in their later years, there’s a good chance that everyone knew what they had on their hands when they played through the final version of the song in all of its six-minute glory in the studio. But while Henley can’t remember the ins and outs of every single deep cut, there were bound to be a few tunes that stuck out in his memory from the moment that he heard them.
Then again, nothing that Henley approved of on the record was going to be less than excellent if he could help it. There were more than a few times where he was outvoted and some pedestrian tunes like ‘I Wish You Peace’ found their way onto the track listing, but from Hotel California onward, nothing was going to turn on the record unless it was absolutely fantastic. Which probably explains why the band only bothered to release one more record after that.
They were absolutely fried from making one record after another, but that didn’t mean that Henley wasn’t proud of the work they’d done. The Long Run still had some great tunes on it despite being painful to make, and even though there were a few filler songs on each record, there’s a certain magic that Henley felt every time he thinks back to the days of him and Glenn Frey working up tunes like ‘Tequila Sunrise’ and ‘Desperado’.
That kind of magic isn’t something anyone should take for granted, but it was a real dilemma for them to get back together to write some new tunes for Hell Freezes Over. ‘Get Over It’ was the first sign that they could write songs together again, but if it weren’t for Henley’s charity album Common Thread, the band wouldn’t have got back together in the first place if they hadn’t appeared in the video for Travis Tritt’s version of ‘Take it Easy’.
Tritt wasn’t on the same level as Eagles by any stretch, but having all of them back together and jamming on the first song that introduced them to the world was enough to get the wheels spinning in their heads again. Henley never wanted the band to break up in the first place, and whenever he heard those chiming guitars coming in at the top of the tune, he was always transported back to the studio in 1972 when he heard it coming out of the speakers for the first time.
It was a miracle for the band to get a record deal in those days, and after paying their dues in Linda Ronstadt’s band, Henley’s core memory of being in Eagles was listening to ‘Take it Easy’ take shape, saying, “I don’t recall the first time I heard it in its basic form, but I will always remember the first time I heard those shimmering guitar chords in the intro pulsing through the big playback speakers at Olympic Studios in Barnes, a suburban district in the London borough of Richmond upon Thames, where the first Eagles album was recorded. The song’s primary appeal, I think, is that it evokes a sense of motion, both musically and lyrically.”
And that sense of abandon is half the reason why so many people love the tune today. Even though the track feels like the epitome of dad music to the young generations, those shimmering guitars were the reason why every single kid in the 1970s wanted to roll the windows down and ride in the sun with the wind in their hair.
Getting to the top of the rock and roll world wasn’t easy by any stretch, but Henley figured that listening back to their signature tune made all of those hard years worth it. Anyone could have become tired of their signature hit, but no one should ever forget the legacy that existed between the grooves of a record like this.
