Poco: the most underrated 1960s band Glenn Frey had his “eyes on”
Forming in 1971, there was a wealth of great music for the Eagles to take inspiration from. However, with the counterculture era burning out, there was also every reason that guitar music might fade away. But the Eagles hung in there, honing what had come before into a polished new sound. In the end, they became one of the most commercially successful groups in history, now residing with two separate records in the top ten best-selling albums list of all time.
They might be dubbed country-rock pioneers, but as Don Henley explained, that’s a little reductive. “At the end of the day, we’re an American band,” the singing drummer said. “We’re a musical mutt with influences from every genre of American popular music”. More so than a mere blend of country and rock, they grabbed the whole diverse palette of what came before and simply crafted it, whittling it down to something unique with great skill and a sense of musical care.
However, they were not without their inspiration on this front. According to Glenn Frey, one song in their repertoire belies the band that led the way for this new emergent blend of sounds and supreme skill. Speaking about the stand-out track ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, Frey admitted, “It reminded me so much of Poco”.
He claims it evolved in a different manner from the first recordings, but nevertheless, he wasn’t surprised that the group had hit upon something close to what their peers were pedalling. “Back then, Poco was the band that impressed me most,” he told Cameron Crowe. “Their vocals were pristine and perfect. They were the band I wanted to model us after.”
For Frey, the group, who are now superseded in Google searches by a Chinese smartphone and a Tapas restaurant, were the premiere musicians of the age, eclipsing even the counterculture maestros that came before Poco’s formation in 1968. “We loved all the singing bands — The Byrds and The Beach Boys — but to be honest, right then I had my eye on Poco,” he said.
They had a beautifully tesselated stereo sound. They were able to find nuance in the odd fluctuating half-note and nab motifs from genres that didn’t quite belong on paper. They seemed to Frey like a bold new advancement, a marker to match. “I wanted to go beyond them, too,” he adds.
And in a move that stinks of the novel move, ‘if you can’t beat that, get them to join you’, Eagles would nab Randy Meisner and Timothy B Schmit over the years and welcome them into their own ranks. As Frey concludes, “Ironically, we’d have two bass players over the years, both from Poco. ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ had a happy, country-rock quality but a bittersweet irony about it that I thought was really great. I still love that song. Love singing it.”
It typifies a southern Californian sound that began with Poco. But sadly, it never seemed to end with them. With 24 members over the years, Poco were a group always beset by too much disarray to ever really launch their mercurial sound towards the mainstream—doing enough to bend the trained ears of musicians and mould a new future for the 1970s by virtue of influence, but drifting, like their wistful sound, towards cult obscurity by and large.
