The 1975 album Don Henley called Eagles’ first great work: “The best we had done”
It was going to be impossible for Don Henley to rest until he felt that the Eagles were going to make the best record that they could.
There was never any chance that they were going to become one of the biggest bands in the world the minute that they hit the road, but after they had a few breakout singles under their belt, there was bound to be some question as to how long they could keep the momentum going. And while Henley knew that they were in danger of falling back more than a few times, all it took was one album for him to realise that everything was going to be okay.
But being in one of the biggest bands in the world wasn’t lost on Henley by any stretch. Anyone else would want to revel in the fact that they had made some of the best tunes that anyone had ever thought of, but Henley didn’t like the idea of staying stagnant for too long. If they made an album that wasn’t that great, it was up to them to give his bandmates a kick in the ass and tell everyone that they needed to get back in the studio. He was the one who worried about everything, but it’s not like he didn’t have good instincts.
Getting the band together for Desperado resulted in one of the most lopsided records of their entire career, and even if Henley thought the idea was crap, it wasn’t like they didn’t still have potential. The album itself was a bomb, but as long as they could get a hit on the next record, that was all that mattered. And when ‘Best of My Love’ started tearing up the charts, the fact that it was one of the few Glyn Johns-produced songs on the record didn’t bode well for them.
The band needed a knockout punch on the next record, and One of These Nights was the first time that they started to develop their own unique identity. The band was always meant to be a hybrid of all these different sounds whenever they made a record, but across nine tracks, every song on the record seemed to have more grit behind it. They were entering a new realm, and while they weren’t quite ready for Hotel California yet, Henley felt that the album was the first time where he could sit back and realise that they had delivered something great.
A lot of their previous albums did have a fair degree of filler, but Henley knew that there was a different feeling in the air when they walked out of the studio for this record, saying, “We were pretty prolific. There’s a certain uneven quality to the first three albums — some of the songs aren’t exactly gems — but that’s normal, I think. Then One of These Nights, that was the best we had done up to that point.”
The afterglow of that album may have been cut down when their label ended up releasing their greatest-hits record only a few months later, but that was only a good thing. The fact that they already had enough records out to make a best-of record was already a good sign, but since that would end up becoming one of the biggest-selling albums of the century, it was the perfect way of setting up what they were going to do next when they made Hotel California.
And Henley wasn’t the only one heaping praise on One of These Nights, either. The pressure of making one of the biggest records of their career wasn’t yet on them, and when talking about his all-time favourite Eagles songs, Glenn Frey normally went to tunes like the title track before he even touched on ‘Take it Easy’ or ‘Hotel California’. The rest of the record was still spotty, but that didn’t seem to matter.
After spending so much time trying to claw their way back onto the charts, One of These Nights was the album that proved the Eagles belonged in the conversation of the greatest band of the decade. And by the time that they released their magnum opus only a year later, everyone got to hear them at the absolute peak of their powers.
