“Cross things off”: The Eagles song Don Henley insisted on changing
Being a musician that sticks around usually means being somewhat of a perfectionist behind the scenes. As much as a song can come together with the bare basics, it will never fall wholly finished until everyone adds their signature parts or puts the right amount of hours in the studio trying to tidy everything up. Although nothing got past Don Henley in the Eagles, he knew that the lyrics to one of their later songs would never find its way onto the record if he had anything to say about it.
Then again, Henley was always a bit of a stickler regarding lyrics. Despite having one of the best voices in the California rock scene, many of Henley’s heroes were poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson, so it was no use trying to labour over a song if it had stupid lines about going out on a Saturday night.
Even when going through the band’s lesser moments like The Long Run, Henley still held up that track record for fantastic lyrics. No matter how dumb ‘The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks’ comes off nowadays, hearing him and Glenn Frey harmonise on ‘King of Hollywood’ and talk about the corrupt side of the music industry is a lot more prophetic of what would come later when many power players began getting exposed.
However, The Long Run also featured the first contributions from Timothy B Schmit, having come off of his stint with country rock legends Poco. Even though the band were still breaking him, ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ became the first and only hit he had during their prime, becoming an R&B-infused staple of their catalogue right before their breakup.
Despite not getting too much to work with, Schmit had much more wiggle room working on Hell Freezes Over. There was no point in reuniting without some new material, but when he came to the table with the song ‘People Can Change’, Henley would never get that song on the final record.
Since ‘Get Over It’ saw him and Frey reuniting for the first time, hearing Schmit’s first attempt at a reunion song was dreadful, with the bassist recalling, “I went over to see Don and Glenn, and we had the basic idea for a song, ‘People Can Change’. I had a whole legal pad full of ideas, and you know how your second-grade teacher used to take a red pen to mark your work and cross things off? That’s what Don did! I didn’t take offence to it. He’s good at what he does.”
While most artists would walk away with a bruised ego, Schmit didn’t worry about it for a second, eventually getting his chance to shine on the ballad ‘Love Will Keep Us Alive’. And this version suits his voice much better than the preachy title of his other song implies, especially when the rest of the band comes in behind him on the chorus.
Then again, there was no real reason to argue with Henley and Frey about what should be included on an album. They had already made some of the greatest lyrics of the 1970s, so they knew when they had the makings of a hit and when something was heading nowhere pretty quickly.
