“Remarkable freewheeling times”: The California bar that started the end of the Eagles
There comes a point where even a band like the Eagles needs to come to rest.
Don Henley was certainly a perfectionist in every sense of the word when he was working on their albums, but anyone who has even come remotely close to the rock and roll industry knows that everyone knows how to party when they are on the road and more than a few are barely able to function once they get onstage. But when the California rockers flew down to Earth, one of their favourite resting spots tended to look a lot different to them by the time they started to reach the top of the mountain.
But it wasn’t like the band ever liked to flaunt their money all that often. Yes, they might have travelled in Lear jets half the time and were used to first-class experiences, but they were also more than happy to reminisce on those times when they were in the middle of the Sunset Strip without a pot to piss in. Everyone was still recovering from the 1960s, and everywhere from the Whisky-a-Go-Go to the Troubadour was where all of their fellow rock refugees congregated.
After all, The Troubadour was where a lot of them cut their teeth, and it wasn’t out of the question for those open mic nights to devolve into a bunch of rockstars drunk off their asses howling at the moon until the sun came up. But while most were there to have fun, Henley was there to listen when he saw people like Elton John perform or hearing Linda Ronstadt’s voice for the first time.
That was still technically musical homework for him, so when the band got to having their first hits, their only place to celebrate was Dan Tana’s. The watering hole was their home away from home whenever they locked themselves away in the studio, and you never knew when inspiration could strike right in the middle of one of those booths. One night there’d be a bunch of ladies trying to seduce rich men at the bar, and the next day the band would come to the studio with a song like ‘Lyin’ Eyes’.
It was a glorious time while it lasted, but after Hotel California became the biggest album at the time, their journey back to Dan Tana’s didn’t feel the same. They had seen the heights that no one else had seen, and even though it still felt like home, all the life seemed to sucked out of it once they fell back down to Earth. And when they finished up The Long Run, ‘The Sad Cafe’ was Henley’s memorial for the bar that changed their lives.
While the titular cafe was an amalgamation of both the Troubadour and Dan Tana’s, Henley couldn’t help but look back with a bit of melancholy when writing the tune, saying, “‘The Sad Cafe’ was inspired by the Troubadour and Dan Tana’s restaurant. We could feel an era passing. The crowd that hung out in the Troubadour and the bands that were performing there were changing. The train tracks that had run down the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard had been ripped out. Those remarkable freewheeling times were receding into the distance.”
No one wanted the good times to be over but when looking at the way that the band split up, the fact that this was their last recorded song for a while is actually pretty romantic. They didn’t have the finest collection of love songs on every album, but hearing them speak fondly of their time together is about the closest that they ever came to capturing the same camaraderie on their records one more time.
But moving on from places like Dan Tana’s almost became a fact of life after a while. There are probably countless other wannabe rockstars that felt the same things that Henley did when they walked into the bar every single night, but even if those were the best times of their lives throughout their 20s, there comes a point where you realise that you can never truly go back there again.
