“Son of a gun”: The Eagles song that was stolen from The Monkees
Every single Eagles song needed to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb if it had any shot of getting on a record.
Don Henley and Glenn Frey didn’t get into the business to be merely another good rock and roll act, and they wanted the chance to make people swoon every time those soaring harmonies began on some of their tracks. But even if they had a lot more country influence on those early records, some of their influences were worn a bit too close to the chest when they started making their best material.
Then again, it’s not like Henley and Frey were the first ones to decide to add some twang to rock and roll. The LA scene had already been moving in that direction ever since the hippy movement started dying out, and when people weren’t listening to what Crosby, Stills, and Nash were doing whenever they made their classics, there were newcomers like Linda Ronstadt and Gram Parsons that were born and bred to play the kind of country music that could melt people’s hearts when they heard them.
It wasn’t even exclusive to California, either, given the fact that Keith Richards had begun making his own country tunes like ‘Dead Flowers’ and ‘Wild Horses’ on some of the classic Rolling Stones records. Eagles needed to stand out a little bit more if they wanted to be noticed, but no one could have imagined that they would have gone as far as they did in such a short amount of time.
Glyn Johns already knew that their harmonies were what separated them from the rest, but Henley and Frey had a lot of training well before the band started. They had cut their teeth in Ronstadt’s backing band, and even as far as harmony singing goes, there wasn’t a single soul in California that didn’t study what bands like The Beach Boys had been doing when they first started making records. But of all the bands to be influenced by, no one was going to admit that The Monkees were their favourite band and be taken seriously.
Which is a shame considering the amount of real talent they had. They were clearly put together by a committee for their TV show, but as time went on, they did at least start stretching out and playing their own songs later in their career. But once Mike Nesmith left the fold and started trying his hand at being a country rocker, he was a little bit concerned when he picked up Eagles Live and heard that the band had taken his exact arrangement of the song ‘Seven Bridges Road’.
The song had already been a standard in the country-rock world, but Nesmith insisted that what the Eagles were doing was exactly how he had arranged it, saying, “Son of a gun if Don or somebody in the Eagles didn’t lift [our] arrangement absolutely note-for-note for vocal harmony. If they can’t think it up themselves [and] they’ve got to steal it from somebody else, better they should steal it from me, I guess.”
In all fairness, there’s no way that Nesmith could have made the song a classic in his own band the same way that Eagles did. The band still used the song as a major part of their setlist to this day when they open up their shows, and hearing those acapella harmonies cascading over top of each other never stops being a thrill for anyone who attends their shows.
It may have been a fairly clever lift, but it’s not like stealing an arrangement from The Monkees gave them less credibility or anything. If anything, this was the kind of novelty form of plagiarism that actually gave them a bit more character than being the same band that loitered onstage and played their songs without a care in the world.
