The Eagles album Don Henley called their “satanic” period
Eagles were normally the last place that anyone would check for rockers up to sinister behaviour.
While the band were open about being bad boys behind the scenes, it’s not like anyone was looking to jam out to ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ and think the California rockers were a scourge on society. But somewhere between ‘Take it Easy’ and ‘New Kid In Town’, Don Henley knew that the band could touch on the more evil parts of the human psyche.
After all, Henley never wanted to be pigeonholed as a band that only wrote about one thing. They had the reputation of being a care-free band who sang about the California sunshine, but looking through all of their records, rarely do their songs stay on that simple of a note for their entire duration. There was a lot more they needed to get off their chests half the time, and when listening to Desperado, they had already begun flirting with the idea of making tunes that told cautionary tales about rock and roll.
Even if the record itself got them nowhere, it did set them on the path to go in a bold new direction. All they needed to do was regain their momentum, and while tunes like ‘Already Gone’ were a lot closer to what most people expected out of the group, the clientele in their backstage area started to get a lot more strange.
It may have been the money rolling in at the time or the band members getting as high as they could, but the name of the game on the road was who could outdo each other. They wanted to put on a great show, but there was a sense of friendly competition over who could push things over the line just enough and still be able to get on that stage and deliver a show-stopping performance every single night.
But California looked a lot scarier than it did when The Beach Boys were around a decade before. You have to remember that ‘Take it Easy’ was seen as a breath of fresh air after hearing about everything from the Watergate scandal to Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ murdering Sharon Tate, and despite Eagles being a welcome cooldown, it only takes so long before California starts to want the souls of those who leave.
And while ‘One of These Nights’ marked the band at the peak of their powers at the time, Henley felt that there was a demonic energy to what they were doing during the album cycle, saying, “We like to call it our ‘satanic country-rock period’. Because it was a dark time, both politically and musically, in America. There was turmoil in Washington and disco music was starting to take off. We thought, ‘Well, how can we write something with that flavour and still have the dangerous guitars?’ We wanted to capture the spirit of the times.”
For a tune that was supposed to tap into the zeitgeist, though, it sounded a lot better than what the other strands of disco were doing. Any other pop artist that tried to make a stab at a dance hit were being laughed out of the room, but by only taking the drum beat and a few guitar stabs, this was like the care-free version of Chic had Nile Rodgers listened to more country music back in the day.
Admittedly, the song is far from the most dangerous-sounding record when put next to Black Sabbath, but there is that slightly tortured spirit in there of the ghosts of California’s past. Eagles may have had a few more years before Hotel California gave us the real American nightmare, but some say if you listen to this tune hard enough, you can hear all the souls of those who didn’t make it out of the Hollywood system.
