The Eagles album Glenn Frey didn’t want to release: “We were resistant to it”
Being a recording artist doesn’t really mean calling your own shots. Even with all the money you could want and the biggest touring numbers imaginable, there will always be that one record label boss staring artists down, wondering when the lightning will strike on the next big record. The Eagles were already on a mission to bring their brand of sunshine rock to the masses, but Glenn Frey was never happy that they had to compromise by releasing a greatest hits album.
That’s because the Eagles seemed to be on this ascending path since the early 1970s. The hippie dream had come and gone, and the emergence of country rock started to have a drastic effect on what California was going to sound like in a post-Woodstock world. Frey may have moved there from Detroit, but he became indebted to the country scene from the minute he joined Linda Ronstadt’s backing group.
Once he started hitting it off with drummer Don Henley, Frey finally had a vision of how he could become a rock star. Whereas he had the lyrical prowess to keep things rolling, Henley was the ideas man who always kept things close to the chest whenever it came to business.
Now with Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, the beginning of the Eagles saw them try out everything under the sun, from country tunes to scorching rock and roll songs to throwing in the odd song for the hell of it, like a cover of Tom Waits’s ‘Ol’ 55’. While the reception of Desperado left fans pretty ice cold, On the Border and One of These Nights seemed to be building blocks for the next phase of their career.
Right before they started up with Joe Walsh in tow, their label demanded a greatest hits package. While this would be the album that would go on to become one of the best-selling of all time, Frey remembered that he wasn’t as in love with the idea of throwing together a bunch of singles rather than an album statement.
According to the frontman, the band had some fun designing the cover to spite their higher-ups, telling PBS, “I remember they wanted to put out a greatest hits album, and I think we were probably resistant to it. They told me, ‘They have the right to do this. If they want to put it out, they can put it out.’ So with that in mind, we put an eagle skull on the front of the Greatest Hits album, which was sort of bad karma. And, of course, it’s sitting there in a field of glistening white powder of something.”
Then again, one could hardly ask for a better promotion for the next album than having a greatest hits record deliver all-star numbers like this. Once everyone was settled in, though, Frey and Henley were ready to make a big enough album to match it, eventually turning in Hotel California with some of the greatest songs of their career, like the title track and ‘New Kid In Town’.
Even when the band had long since broken up, Frey had to deal with the same problem again once they decided to release a second greatest hits album from the two albums that they released after the first one. Everyone had been kneedeep in their solo careers at this point, but it’s hard to build a foundation for yourself as a solo act when you’re trying to outrun your own legacy half the time.
