The one album Don Henley and Glenn Frey hated making: “Excruciating”
Neither Don Henley nor Glenn Frey was going to settle for good enough every time they made an Eagles album.
When you’re shooting for perfection, having songs that are just shy of perfection was not going to cut it, and the California rockers were willing to push themselves to the brink until they felt that they had been pushed far enough in the studio. But when you hold yourself to that high a standard for so long, that makes the imperfect albums look a little bit rougher around the edges by comparison.
But when the band started, it was not like they were looking to be any other country-rock outfit. Everyone in the band needed to be an absolute pro at what they did, but being able to play a great banjo solo or sing the highest harmonies wasn’t going to matter if you didn’t have the right songs to back you up. And on those first records, they weren’t exactly making the songs that Bob Dylan would be proud of or anything.
There are some fantastic songs to be found across their early career, but aside from the singles, more than a few album cuts weren’t even worth defending in Henley’s eyes. ‘Earlybird’ had the makings of a good song, for example, but bringing in the stock birdsong at the beginning of the tune was always a sore point for him.
The same could be said about the way that Frey wrote with Henley. Both of them managed to compliment each other perfectly when they were working on tunes like ‘Desperado’ or ‘Tequila Sunrise’, but with each single going further up the charts, there was more and more pressure, and by the time they had three singles off of one album with One of These Nights, Hotel California needed to be the moment where everything paid off.
And even with newcomer Joe Walsh getting broken in, Hotel California is still a masterpiece to this day. Even with the reprise of ‘Wasted Time’, there isn’t a single wasted note on the record, and the band could have justifiably taken their seats at the top of the rock and roll world. Everything sounded great, but that only meant that things were going to be on their way back down the minute they started working on The Long Run.
With no songs done and half of the band barely wanting to be there, Henley left that album with a horrible taste in his mouth, saying, “Making that album was excruciating. We were just completely burned out. We had driven ourselves really hard for almost a decade and we were just fried.” And you can really hear it when Frey talked about the band abusing cocaine throughout the entire process.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a rock band was using drugs, but Frey felt that the cocaine became an albatross around their neck throughout most of the sessions, saying, “When we first started snorting coke, it was a writing tool. Do a couple bumps, start talking about stuff, and then launch into some idea for a song. But in the end, cocaine brought out the worst in all of us.” But even if this was the album that broke up Eagles when they eventually went out on tour, it wasn’t just the cocaine talking when they finally blew things out of proportion.
They had worked themselves down to the bone to the point where they had nothing else to give, and if they had pushed themselves any further going forward, chances are the band would have imploded somewhere further down the line. It wasn’t easy seeing the most easygoing band in the world blow up so chaotically, but The Long Run is what happens to people when they don’t take care of themselves after one too many sleepless nights.
