The Eagles song Don Henley called his favourite: “An epic story”
Picking a favourite song is the kind of arbitrary practice that lets you quietly know that music is the greatest art form. Unlike literature or paintings, picking a favourite song can change literally from minute to minute. And that can become even more frequent if your favourite band is a group like the Eagles.
The band not only sold millions of records, but they also packed those albums full of carefully crafted pieces of soft rock mastery. But while it is hard for fans to settle on a single track to herald as their most cherished, the job gets even harder for the members of the group.
The music of the Eagles explored wide-ranging themes, from the mythology of the West in ‘Hotel California’ to the pressures of being a rock star in ‘Desperado’ and ‘Life In The Fast Lane’. The songwriting partnership of Glenn Frey and Don Henley left no stone unturned, and the Eagles were just as comfortable singing about love as they were about social issues.
One song which touched on the latter was ‘The Last Resort’, which features imagery of the most beautiful places on Earth being destroyed by the onslaught of 20th Century industry and commerce. The track arrived on the Eagles’ 1976 album Hotel California, reissued as the B-side to ‘Life In The Fast Lane’ a year later.
Don Henley told Rolling Stone that ‘The Last Resort’ is “one of [his] favourite songs.” Explaining why exactly, Henley said, “That’s because I care more about the environment than about writing songs about drugs or love affairs or excesses of any kind.”
He continued to explain his kinship with the natural environment and how ‘The Last Resort’ responded to growing climate pressure, saying, “The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence — by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment.”
It was through music that Henley felt he was able to express his political views. “The environment is the reason I got into politics,” he said, “to try to do something about what I saw as the complete destruction of most of the resources that we have left. We have mortgaged our future for gain and greed.”
Glenn Frey once claimed that ‘The Last Resort’ is Henley’s “opus”, and though both he and Henley are credited as its co-songwriters, Frey feels that he must “give all the credit for ‘The Last Resort’ to Henley.” He said in an episode of In the Studio with Redbeard, “It was the first time that Don, on his own, took it upon himself to write an epic story.”
Frey also went on to note the environmental concerns that ‘The Last Resort’ tackles. “We were very much, at that time, concerned about the environment and doing anti-nuclear benefit [concerts],” he said. “It seemed the perfect way to wrap up all of the different topics we had explored on the Hotel California album.” According to Frey, it was the Hotel California track on which Henley found his feet as a natural lyricist.
Driving the point of the song’s message home, Frey added, “We’re constantly screwing up paradise, and that was the point of the song and that at some point there is going to be no more new frontiers. I mean, we’re putting junk into space now. There’s enough crap floating around the planet that we can’t even use, so it just seems to be our way. It’s unfortunate, but that is sort of what happens.”
