The 1972 song Glenn Frey wanted to play forever: “Still love singing it”
When you’ve amassed as many hits as the Eagles have, there are many times when even the greatest songs tend to fade into the background whenever you play.
Even though Don Henley has played ‘Hotel California’ more times than he can count at this point, there are a lot of great moments that keep him coming back, even when he’s relying on muscle memory throughout the entire show. But even after years of playing the hits, Glenn Frey felt that some songs were far above anything that he had ever come up with later.
Then again, Frey and Henley were two completely different ends of the musical spectrum in many regards. They both knew how to put together a quality tune and certainly relied on having some great chemistry with each other, but compared to Henley’s more reserved persona and need for everything to be as perfect as it possibly could, Frey was the one out there to have a good time every single time he made a record. He didn’t mind having a few rough moments on record, but that wasn’t what made their albums so great.
Every tune needed to have that perfect vocal harmony the same way that most Queen records did, and it’s not like Frey wasn’t trying to go the distance as well. If the song called for a specific sound, he was going to move the Earth if it meant having everything sound correct, whether that was him trying his best to make the right vowel sound or trying to strum his guitar in just the right way to play off the drums.
But on that first record, it wasn’t about making a pristine album by any means. The band were happy enough to have a record that was produced by Glyn Johns, and even if they were still rough around the edges, the fact that they had tunes like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ already in their repertoire was enough for them to start with. It wasn’t that complicated, but it captured their vibe better than anything else.
That feeling of taking to the open road with the wind in your hair was practically the soundtrack of California at that point, and Frey figured that was everything that he ever needed when putting together one of his classics, saying in 2003, “Compared to the original recording, it’s evolved through live performances to where it’s a bit of a different animal now. ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ had a happy, country-rock quality but a bittersweet irony about it that I thought was really great. I still love that song. Love singing it.”
At the same time, that doesn’t mean that every single song on the record was going to follow suit, either. Frey had helped write the soundtrack for what country rock was going to be on this song and ‘Take it Easy’, but when you look at how the rest of the album panned out, a lot of it feels like a hodgepodge of what the LA scene was like, especially when they started throwing in other people’s tunes like a cover of Jackson Browne’s ‘Nightingale’.
It was still a fantastic record for 1972, but Frey and Henley didn’t want to be known as the flavour of the day. They had a lot more to offer, and even if the rest of the world didn’t necessarily take to Desperado when it was first released, it was enough for them to hone their craft as songwriters, especially when making the title track and coming away with a tune that wouldn’t have felt out of place as a traditional American hymn.
But the beauty of a song like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ is how malleable it has been over the years. Frey was able to sing it like a kid who had the wind at his sails or a much older man looking to enjoy his twilight years, but when the band plays it today without their leader, it’s simply a reminder of the kind of magic that Frey had when he was singing it during their prime.
