The Eagles – ‘On the Border’
Most bands in the Eagles’ situation making On the Border would have probably broken up before they made another record. Their concept album about cowboys and outlaws on Desperado had left everyone underwhelmed, and it wasn’t clear that they were going to go the distance with producer Glyn Johns. While it’s easy to hear the band’s dysfunction going into their third record, it still features some of the wildest experiments the band would ever create.
Considering their penchant for writing the kind of tunes that sound like they’re coming from the middle of a saloon in Texas, ‘Already Gone’ was exactly what people needed to hear. Getting back to their roots as a rock outfit, Glenn Frey’s kiss-off towards a lady friend is the kind of song that anyone can relate to after a breakup, practically saying “Well, fuck you too” to someone that left you hanging.
This is also the introduction of Don Felder on guitar for the first time. Initially coming on as a session player, he’s playing like he’s got everything to prove on this song, eventually convincing the band to give him a permanent slot in the band. Though he also shows his talents on the song ‘Good Day in Hell’, this is probably the best documentation of a band audition going right.
Unfortunately, that also means that Bernie Leadon’s country-style licks are pushed into the background of many of the rock songs. While it’s hard to tell whether he even performed on some of the tunes, Leadon did come prepared on the Western-style tracks, teaching a clinic in banjo playing on ‘Midnight Flyer’.
In fact, Leadon might be the MVP of this album if only for the song ‘My Man’. Written in tribute to Gram Parsons, Leadon’s epitaph for his fellow Burrito Brother is one of the most gut-wrenching tunes that he would ever write, even namechecking the Parsons classic ‘Hickory Wind’.
Any Eagles fan has probably noticed that I strayed away from talking about Don Henley and Frey for the majority of this review so far. Because when it comes to the leaders of the group, their contributions are scattershot, to say the least. For every great song like ‘Already Gone’, there’s something like their cover of ‘Ol’ 55’, which completely butchers what Tom Waits intended with his original tune.
And while Henley is still a phenomenal vocalist, it’s harder to grasp what he’s trying to say on tracks like ‘You Never Cry Like a Lover’. Since the immortal ballad ‘Best Of My Love’ closes out the record, it just makes the first attempt at a mournful goodbye look worse when paired next to it.
There are definitely some rough edges, but somewhere in the album, you can hear the band aching to break free from the typical labels put on them. Though it was a leftover from Desperado, ‘James Dean’ is a fine piece of rock and roll that works fairly well, talking about the commodification of every Hollywood star that gives faint hints of where they would go on Hotel California.
Of all the songs on the record, the title track probably is the best indicator of what it has to offer. There are the germs of a great song hidden somewhere in there, but the band seem to be working with too many different ideas to make a decent point…even if it does make a few decent jabs at Richard Nixon in the process.
Compared to how they hit the ground running on their first outing, On the Border slides in as an also-ran in the band’s catalogue. There were a lot of growing pains that they needed to work through, but you need to go through them in order to come up with the classics later down the line.
