The Eagles album the entire band couldn’t stand
The Eagles might have been one of the biggest acts of the 1970s, but after they had run the gauntlet of fame, they acrimoniously split in 1980.
The members – who were now going it alone – quickly realised that things had changed, and they were no longer the masters of their destiny. Now that the fellowship had splintered, it was harder to find success. The group had been a productive hotbed despite the constant feuding.
This came to the fore only a couple of years after the band imploded. The change from being in one of the most commercially viable bands to almost unknown quantities as solo artists was particularly stark for the group’s primary songwriters, Glen Frey and Don Henley, who were striving hard to show they could do it without their old buddies.
However, as they were now forging their own paths, Frey, Henley and the rest of the former Eagles would come up against the music industry’s machinations. They were not ready for this fight, and it would unforeseeably stifle their hopes as singular creative entities. The break-up was turning out to be a brutal divorce.
Enter Asylum Records. From their side of the coin, when the Eagles called it a day, the label saw one of the most captivating species in their menagerie lay what appeared to be its final golden egg in 1979’s The Long Run, the follow-up to the band’s masterpiece from three year’s prior, Hotel California. However, they had a trump card. As the pull of the Eagles brand was immense, they had other parts of the carcass to sell off, even if they didn’t have more shiny eggs rolling down the chute.
Famously, 1976’s Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) was the first album to be certified as platinum by the RIAA. It then became the bestselling album of all time in the US, shipping over 38 million units. Nothing more than a summary of the group’s first chapter, this shrewd release offered Asylum their post-Eagles meal ticket after they realised the demand was still there when November 1980’s Eagles Live went platinum after just two months.
So, in November 1982, Asylum released Greatest Hits Volume 2, a cash grab in every sense, featuring eight tracks from the band’s two most recent albums, and closed by ‘Seven Bridges Road’ from Eagles Live and ‘After the Thrill is Gone’ from 1975’s One of These Nights. This could not have been worse timing for Frey and Henley, who released their respective debut solo efforts, No Fun Aloud and I Can’t Stand Still, in May and August of that year.
What followed only reinforced how little control the former members now had over their own narrative. While they were attempting to establish themselves as individual artists, the sudden arrival of another Eagles compilation pulled attention straight back to the past. Instead of being judged on their new material, they found themselves competing with the very catalogue they had created together.
It created an awkward and frustrating contrast. On one hand, their solo careers were beginning to take shape with respectable success, but on the other, the enduring power of the Eagles name dwarfed everything else. The situation underlined a difficult truth: stepping out from a band of that magnitude meant not only starting again, but doing so while your former identity continued to dominate the conversation.
Both LPs were successful, with Frey’s going gold and Henley’s peaking in third place on the Billboard Hot 100. But, as both musicians were used to such searing heights with the Eagles, they were only moderately happy with how their debuts fared. This tenuous satisfaction would soon morph into pure outrage when Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 2, a release no one in the band was aware of, arrived with the festive period just around the corner.
It was a masterstroke on the part of Asylum, with the nondescript cover art playing into the Californian group’s famously anonymous public image. As the group had preferred to be physically out of the limelight, and most fans couldn’t put a face to their names due to the pre-internet age anonymity they enjoyed, Frey, Henley and the rest of their former outfit’s struggle against the album became even harder. Their singular brands paled in comparison to that of the Eagles. The boys behind ‘Hotel California’ could happily hide behind their music; as solo artists, they didn’t yet have the cache to afford them this liberty. Resultantly, they hated the release.
“The trouble was that, after years of keeping our names out of the newspapers and our faces off Eagles album covers in favour of the artist Boyd Elder’s incredible decorative cattle skulls, no one really knew who Don Henley and Glenn Frey were — or any of us, for that matter,” Eagles guitarist Don Felder explained in 2007’s memoir Heaven and Hell. “For years, we’d been able to walk around L.A., into restaurants, clubs and theatres, and melt anonymously into the crowd. It is one of the great bonuses of being an Eagle. No one knows what we looked like.”
Suddenly, they needed to be seen. Yet a surprise foisted upon them by their former label was profiting off of their old mystique. This created a damaging narrative for the group. They had to go public to advertise their new solo ventures, but in doing so, they looked like the break-up had been a commercial move. Asylum’s release implied that they were at their best when putting America to the sword in soft rock music was their only motive, and now those days were but a greatest hits relic. Understandably, the band repelled the record and it sent in motion a deepening resentment over what had gone before. The Eagles were now well and truly over.
Listen to Greatest Hits Volume 2 below.
