The 1980 song Glenn Frey called Eagles at their best: “That style comes naturally”
Whenever the Eagles put on a show, Glenn Frey didn’t want to come out there and sleepwalk through the show.
He knew that everything needed to sound perfect, and even though they weren’t the most animated band in the world, it usually didn’t matter when you heard all of them singing in unison. There was something about their voices in sync that made them as thrilled as the audience, but some songs were a much better showcase of what they could do than others whenever they got up onstage.
But it’s not like they had to grow into becoming great singers by any stretch. Every member of the band had been through the wringer more than a few times before they joined the band, and if any member didn’t know how to play well, perform well, and carry a half-decent tune, there was no way they were going to make it into the band. Then again, that also means stepping on a few people’s toes in order to get the results that you want.
Don Felder may have wanted to sing a song like ‘Victim of Love’, but there was no chance that his voice was going to compete with Don Henley’s. Everyone knew they had an ace in the hole with Henley’s golden voice, and even during some of the band’s final years, Frey admitted that he often took a back seat to everything that Henley was singing whenever working on their greatest hits.
But what got them the gig in the first place was all of them being able to sing in unison together, and Frey never forgot that. ‘New Kid in Town’ had already won a Grammy for its vocal arrangement, and while they weren’t going to be layering every single line that they ever wrote the same way that Queen had done, you can definitely hear them finding themselves on those first records, especially when they all sang those block harmonies underneath Henley on ‘Desperado’.
At the same time, Frey was never a snob about only making songs that he and Henley wrote on every record. If someone had something better, it didn’t take long for them to work it into their set, and while Joe Walsh did create some fantastic moments in their sets by playing ‘Funk 49’ or ‘Rocky Mountain Way’, Frey knew that nothing brought the band together like their arrangement of ‘Seven Bridges Road’.
It was always the band’s warm-up whenever they rehearsed, and its inclusion on Eagles Live was Frey’s way of reminding everyone of the kind of songs that suited them the best, saying, “We had heard Ian Matthews, from Matthews’ Southern Comfort, and he’d recorded that song on this album. We listened to his version and then modified our arrangement from that. Sometimes we start our show with it. It’s something we do well — four voices, a cappella. I think the bottom line is, that’s a style that comes very easily and naturally to us. It’s also something that our fans really love. It’s Americana.”
And while Frey is no longer around, Henley has taken that Americana label to heart whenever he works these days. Eagles are just one facet of what the pair of them were doing, and even when Henley came out with Cass County, he was trying to find the same kind of musical spirit that Eagles had when they were making their earliest hits, even if he brought in people like Merle Haggard and Mick Jagger.
The band was never going to be the same after Frey passed away, but whenever they perform live these days, ‘Seven Bridges Road’ is like hearing them go back in time whenever they sing together. It opens many of their shows on their tours, and their harmonising is like slowly going into a musical time machine to relive all of those moments where they seemed like the biggest band in the world.
