The Eagles album Glenn Frey and Don Henley both agreed was the worst to make
The journey of Eagles wasn’t supposed to end with a whimper if you were to have asked Glenn Frey and Don Henley.
They had kept pushing themselves, trying to make the best music that they could every single time they walked into the studio, and even if their records didn’t always have the best material, they were willing to get it right until they had a masterpiece on their hands. But when you have that many hits between that many albums, there’s no sense in trying to mess with perfection after one too many trips to the studio.
But it’s not like Frey and Henley weren’t going to try and match the kind of perfection that they set on tunes like ‘Desperado’. The energy that song created had only suggested where they could go, and when they made Hotel California, they managed to prove every one of their naysayers wrong. They could make a record that stood as a piece of pure American music, and while you could hear pieces of everything from rock to country to soul in the songs, that only begged one question: what’s coming next?
That was a hard question to answer, but Frey admitted that the band were riding too high on tour to even think about it. They had made one of the best records that anyone could have hoped to make that decade, but when looking through the sessions for the album The Long Run, Frey remembered being absolutely pissed when they walked into the studio, and nothing came together like it was supposed to.
It might have been their fault since they didn’t have any songs ready, but Frey felt that it was the first time that making a record had felt like work, saying, “It had stopped being fun. Going to the studio was like going to school – I simply didn’t want to go. But most importantly, during the making of The Long Run Henley and I found out that lyrics are not a replenishable source. It is a very polished album, as well it should be after all that, and has some excellent moments, but none of us wanted to go through that again so we figured it was the right time to call it a day.”
But even if Frey didn’t have his heart in everything, Henley could have at least come to the rescue. He was the intellectual in the group and had even made some of the most gripping lyrics on the last record, but even though there were some songs like ‘The Sad Cafe’ and ‘King of Hollywood’ that stood out amongst everything else, Henley remembered everything being a lot more difficult than it needed to be.
They had spent too many months on the road to even think about recording, so getting all of them in a room together to try and hash something out was always going to be an uphill battle, saying, “There were big bucks at stake, the corporate stockholders had expectations, jobs were on the line. The group was breaking apart, imploding under the pressure of trying to deliver a worthy follow-up to Hotel California, and yet we were writing about longevity, posterity. Turns out we were right. Irony upon irony.”
And coming from years at the top of the heap, breaking apart was practically the best thing that could have happened to them at that point. No one wanted to see the dream end, but after fighting together onstage and eventually splitting apart, it was going to be a lot easier for both Frey and Henley to call their own shots when they started working on their solo material throughout the 1980s.
While the band did eventually get back together and make up for the most part in the 1990s, their resistance to getting back to the studio after so long may have had something to do with how much of a headache this record was. No one was having any fun anymore, and since they had started their entire career trying to make the best music they could, no one wanted to carry on if making music felt like a chore.
