The Eagles song Don Henley said sounded “terrible”
From the moment that Eagles started, the band was never meant to be a complete democracy.
Glenn Frey and Don Henley may have wanted the best musicians they could find every single time they walked into the studio, but they weren’t going to give everyone equal time on the record to keep everything fair. They were in the business of making the best songs that they could, but that could get more than a little bit complicated when the label started sticking its nose in places where it didn’t belong.
Then again, Henley has never exactly been happy with every single label he was on. Midway through the band’s ascent, watching David Geffen sell Asylum Records to Warner Bros led to them getting lost in the shuffle a little bit. And once everyone went solo, the thought of Henley getting sued for millions of dollars when he wanted out of his contract didn’t exactly mean he had the highest opinion of what the sleazy side of the industry was doing.
He was more than willing to speak his mind on songs like ‘Building the Perfect Beast’ and ‘The Garden of Allah’, but he had to play the game a little bit more in the pre-Hotel California days. The band were still cutting their teeth to a certain degree, and while Desperado was a fantastic record, it’s not like everyone was ready to hear the biggest pop-rockers of their day make an entire record devoted to outlaws and suddenly start playing country music.
It wasn’t exactly far away from the music they started out with, but Henley felt that the commentary on that record mattered a lot more than people realised. Sure, they were decked out in traditional gunslinger garb when they posed for the album cover, but the lyrics were letting everyone know about the horrors of what people might be getting into when they first sign those contracts when they’re starting out.
But that wasn’t going to stop the label from having its way with the band whenever it worked on the follow-up. Since Desperado fell on deaf ears at the time, they needed a smash hit right out of the gate for On the Border, and ‘Best of My Love’ was one of the greatest contenders they could have hoped for. A heartbreaking ballad was always going to do the trick, but Henley was pissed off when he heard the song on the radio for the first time and heard a huge chunk of the song get cut.
The order of the day may have been centred on bands making three-minute songs, but Henley wasn’t going to roll over when their song got mutilated, saying, “Somebody at our record company took ‘Best of My Love’ and cut a piece of it out one night in the studio without telling us about it. We were on tour, and imagine our surprise when we heard it on the radio with a terrible clumsy edit. So we found out who did it and made a plaque. We took a 45rpm record and put it on a gold plaque with a hacksaw and snuck into the record company’s offices one night and bolted it to the wall.”
That might seem incredibly bitter on their part, but this is about more than making something accessible for radio. Every song can feel like a small miracle to get down on tape, so when someone just decides that they are going to have their way with it and chop it up without telling you, you’re going to want to do everything in your power to make sure that never happens again.
Paul McCartney had done the same thing when Phil Spector mixed ‘The Long and Winding Road’ differently, but Henley was not going to be as diplomatic when people messed with his music. He wanted to make sure that people knew he meant business, and judging by that plaque, it was clear that he meant every single word about the sliminess of the music industry on Hotel California.
