The album Eagles refused to give to their record company
Every artist who has been in the music world for a while usually has one or two horror stories about their record company.
It’s nice to get your foot in the door in the first few years of slaving it out on the road, but whenever someone puts pen to paper on that contract, there’s always going to be other ideas thrown into the mix by middlemen who wouldn’t know good music if it hit them upside the head.
Eagles may have lucked out in many regards when they started making their first records, but they knew that things had to be a little bit different once they had built up a legacy for themselves.
Then again, they didn’t start off on glowing terms, either. Their self-titled debut was a fine record that everyone was happy with, but as soon as Desperado fell on deaf ears, it was only a matter of time before people started to have questions about where they were going. Glenn Frey and Don Henley could still write hits, but after spending years as sidemen, the duo weren’t about to roll over the minute that someone told them to fit into a neat little box.
Radio may not have approved of a single as massive as ‘Hotel California’, but the fact that they refused to do an edit told you everything you needed to know about them. These were not artists to be messed with, but when they started their solo careers, they soon found out how low some people would stoop to get every last dollar they could out of their music.
Henley had already had some dust-ups with David Geffen over the years, but when he signed back onto Geffen Records in the 1980s, he was in for a rough ride when the record mogul sued him for millions of dollars when he asked to leave. While Frey was far more tight-lipped about his recording contracts, the fact that he moved towards making films and TV appearances alongside his music career really said it all.
Once the band got back together, though, they knew it was better to sell the record to Wal-Mart rather than hand it over to any record company, with Frey saying, “I am in the business of selling records and I want to be in a place where we have the opportunity to sell the most records. It’s also nice that Wal-Mart pays us a very lucrative royalty. But that’s because we are not a loss leader at Wal-Mart. If the Eagles put out a record at Warner or any other major record label, part of the reason they can’t pay up is we’ve got to pay for all of the bad acts they sign and release.”
And it’s not like no label led to a lack of quality, either. Considering this would be the final album made with the central figures of the band, Long Road Out of Eden is a great way for them to close the door on their career. A handful of songs tried to blend in with the modern sound of country music, but there were also a handful of tracks like ‘How Long’ that made everyone feel like they were back in 1975 all over again.
Granted, if they did have someone in the background listening to the record, they may have been able to tighten up the record a bit. Henley has stated numerous times that he didn’t like the fact that the record went on too long, so having someone in the studio telling them to save some tunes for B-sides or discard them altogether would have made for an album with a lot less fluff behind it.
But still, there’s no one questioning why the country rockers chose to walk away from the traditional labels. They had paid their dues a few times over, and it was about time for them to make the kind of music because they simply liked making it. It took a long time to get to that position, but they were not about to let go of their independence.
