“Good material is timeless”: The Eagles song Don Henley thinks will last forever
Every artist will want to write material that means more than a simple pop tune. Although having the spotlight for one season of the hit parade may seem enticing to young artists, it’s another matter when it comes to writing a tune that will far outlive anything else that has come before. While Don Henley may have many triumphant tracks with the Eagles, he believed one of their earliest compositions had withstood the test of time.
When the Eagles were first getting their feet wet, most of their material was cribbed from the kind of California rock blossoming around the same time. Even though Glenn Frey and Henley would turn themselves into a songwriting institution later down the line, their early recordings are indicative of the rootsy rock sound prevalent at the time in artists like Linda Ronstadt and the late Gram Parsons.
After Frey and Henley decided to leave Ronstadt’s backing band to form their outfit, though, the hunt was on for them to find new pieces. Although the band’s debut album would feature many outsider songwriters for tracks like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ and ‘Nightingale’, the band got in touch with their rock side when putting together the track ‘Witchy Woman’.
Birthed out of a jam session, most of the track came together with Henley, Frey and guitarist Bernie Leadon working together. Marrying together lyrics about an evil temptress, this would also be the first time the public got to hear Henley’s golden voice, sitting behind the drumkit and giving a genuinely soulful performance on the final cut.
While the debut would also be home to classics like ‘Take It Easy’, ‘Witchy Woman’ would stay prevalent into the next handful of generations as well. Even though the band were born out of the post-hippy movement in California, the caustic sound of the guitars and the militant rhythm fit right into the punk movement a few years later, especially with the emphasis on the guitar’s scratchy tone.
When asked about why the song has lasted so long, Henley considered it to be a testament to the track’s staying power, telling Sun-Sentinel, “When I played ‘Witchy Woman’, which is an Eagles song that’s 13 years old, the teenagers and the kids with the mohawks and the orange hair were going just as nuts as the people in their 30s. So I think good material is timeless.”
While Henley may later describe the song as far from his greatest work, he would continue to flesh out his material as the band made its way through the 1970s. From the country-driven concept album Desperado up until their magnum opus, Hotel California, the Eagles would make songs that toed the line between their artistic integrity and their firm look at where their country was headed, even having time to flex their rock chops again on tracks like ‘Life in the Fast Lane’.
It’s not like ‘Witchy Woman’ hasn’t had an overarching appeal, either, going on to be featured in sitcoms like Seinfeld years after the fact. There are a lot of factors that go into making a hit record, but if you have the right balance of heart and universal appeal, there’s no limit to how many people you can inspire.
Who did the Eagles write ‘Witchy Woman’ about?
Henley’s lyrics about a “restless spirit” with “raven hair and ruby lips” seemed to embody the allure of the West Coast for rock fans in the early 1970s, while the group harmonies on the chorus showed just what the Eagles were all about. There was something wild and dark about the song, contrary to the bright guitar jangles and earnest, folksy charm of ‘Take It Easy’, the band’s debut single that Glenn Frey had written with Jackson Browne.
It seems that Henley dreamed up his song’s protagonist as a feverish vision while bed-bound and burning up with a bad case of the flu. She didn’t appear out of nowhere, though. A book he was reading to pass the time, as he recovered, by English author Nancy Mitford, gave him a sense of the character he was writing about.
Mitford was principally a novelist but was also known for her biographies of some of history’s most romantic figures, including a book about Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of French king Louis XV, and another about the love life of Renaissance man Voltaire. Yet it was Mitford’s story of a more modern romantic icon that captured Henley’s imagination.
It was Mitford’s 1970 biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, the famed novelist and visual artist whose appearance in American literary circles and troubled marriage to F Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s captivated the public, that the Eagles songwriter was reading while bedridden. Mitford’s Zelda traces the tragic life of the early 20th century’s archetypal “flapper” girl and femme fatale, from her introduction to future husband Scott in 1918 to her premature death at the age of just 47 when the hospital where she was institutionalised burnt down.
In a 2016 interview about his band’s debut album, Henley remembered learning about how Fitzgerald “drifted in and out of psychiatric hospitals suffering from schizophrenia (or more likely, bipolar disorder), while her husband’s health and career spiralled downward, due to his abuse of alcohol.” The way Mitford portrayed her subject’s struggles with mental illness and its impact on her art and public persona influenced his characterisation of the titular ‘Witchy Woman’.
