The song that kickstarted Don Henley’s entire career: “It marked the beginning”
When the Eagles first got together, there was no way that Don Henley was going to settle for merely “good” songs.
He had cut his teeth working on some of the greatest country tunes that he could with Linda Ronstadt, and while he did have a lot of road miles under his belt, he wanted to make sure that he and Glenn Frey put together the kind of band that could rival anyone else in Los Angeles. No one could have predicted that they would become one of the biggest bands in the world, yet all great songwriters only get to that position by taking that first step into musical history.
Then again, it could be intimidating for virtually anyone to try their hand at writing a song. There’s always that devil on your shoulder saying that everything that you’re writing is either too cringy to put in a song or will sound dated years down the road, but that’s a part of the learning process. Frey was convinced that his songs were going to be bad before he started Eagles, and Longbranch/Pennywhistle was his way of cutting his teeth before he began working with Henley in Ronstadt’s band.
The same could be said for what Henley was doing in Shiloh. They were a decent little country rock outfit, but considering all the work that they put into their album, it felt more like a vehicle for Henley’s voice than anything else. And since he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his days as a backup singer, he figured that it was better to roll the dice with Frey in their own band than slogging it out and collecting a paycheck every single night.
But when looking at the first Eagles album, it was a lot more rough around the edges than what they would become used to. Every debut is going to have a few imperfections, but the main problem here was that Frey and Henley weren’t writing yet. They had some brilliant songs on their own, but it was a lot better for them to work on whatever Jackson Browne had given them than worry about whether or not they could whip a boring riff into decent shape for some album filler.
They already had their freewheeling side laid down with songs like ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, but ‘Witchy Woman’ was something a lot different. The band were on the witchcraft hype train years before Stevie Nicks became one of the biggest names in music, but Henley felt that the song meant a lot more to him after finally getting a groove down that was worthy of an Eagles track.
He could have just been the frontman if he wanted to, but after putting together the song with Bernie Leadon, Henley had opened a door to the rest of his songwriting career, saying, “I had a very high fever and became semi-delirious at times — and that’s when I wrote most of the lyrics. Every time the fever subsided, I would continue to read a new book I’d gotten on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, and I think that figured into the mix somehow — along with amorphous images of girls I had met at the Whisky and the Troubadour. An important song for me, because it marked the beginning of my professional songwriting career.”
And while the song isn’t as caustic as Henley’s later message songs, you could hear his classic style of writing taking shape as well. The whole track gives a sense of unease to the album, and Henley’s later tunes would follow suit when he started talking about the natural evils out there in the world, from the cowboy on the run in ‘Desperado’ to the Hollywood machine on ‘Hotel California’ to the big businesses on ‘Building the Perfect Beast’.
Not every band gets to put their best foot forward on their debut, but ‘Witchy Woman’ stands as more of a statement of what the band was going to become. They could continue to write songs about drifting away down an open freeway, but underneath all those sing-along tunes was a band that had a genuine message to give to the world.
