The singer Glenn Frey fell in love with “at first sight”
An artist like Glenn Frey never stopped listening once he decided to become a rock star.
Every legendary act knows how to keep their ears open for when the next big thing is going to be around the corner, but when he first crash-landed in Los Angeles, he was seeing another legend on every single corner when he first began playing. It wasn’t out of the question to see everyone from David Crosby to Gram Parsons around Sunset Boulevard, but some artists were enough to sustain him for the rest of his life.
Before he had become infatuated with country-rock, though, he was already beginning to cut his teeth in Detroit. It’s haunting to think of the idea of Frey being reborn as an early rocker alongside acts like the MC5, but by the time he hooked up with Bob Seger, he knew that he wanted to become the kind of singer-songwriter that he saw in people like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
So when he got to Los Angeles, he had found a godsend in JD Souther. He didn’t know anyone in town yet, but in the duo band Longbranch/Pennywhistle, he had someone to bounce ideas off of before he had any idea of flying high with the Eagles. But when Souther started coming around with a new singer named Linda Ronstadt, Frey was absolutely smitten from the minute that he heard her sing.
There had been plenty of crooners before then, but Frey knew there was something special about Ronstadt, saying, “I first met Linda in 1970 at the Troubadour bar. For my part, it was love at first sight. There was just one problem: a guitar-slinging, love-rustler from Amarillo, Texas named John David Souther. He beat me to the punch, which would become a pattern throughout our careers — thank God he never met my wife.”
Even if their relationship was purely platonic, Frey figured that he could do anything to perform with Ronstadt. She was bound to become a star no matter what she was singing, and when he got the opportunity to come on tour with her playing rhythm guitar, she ended up playing musical matchmaker when she introduced him to an up-and-coming drummer from Texas named Don Henley.
Anyone like Ronstadt would get more than a little bit pissed off when Frey and Henley left to form Eagles, but judging by her behaviour, she was practically the musical mom of the group for a few years. She wanted to see them succeed, and after suggesting they get people like Bernie Leadon in the group, she had them record their first demos in her house and even covered songs like ‘Desperado’ when they began slipping off the charts.
And it’s not like the band was going to forget about their country-rock contemporary, either. In the midst of working on their own records, it wasn’t unusual to have Frey play some guitar on one of her albums or credit her for helping pioneer the country rock label when she hit on songs like ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ and ‘You’re No Good’.
Ronstadt may not have reached the same heights that the Eagles did, nor did she want to in many respects. She knew that there was no point in trying to chase after fame if she didn’t like what she was doing, and it’s that kind of determination that’s made her one of the greatest singers of her time. She never did anything by the book, and even if it meant alienating a piece of her audience, Frey always respected her inability to stop following her muse.
