“It didn’t seem right for me”: The song that Glenn Frey could never sing right
For every member of the Eagles, singing seemed to mean absolutely everything. Even if they didn’t have the same guitar chops that virtuosos like Jimmy Page did, their ability to harmonise like Crosby, Stills, and Nash and have some of the greatest choruses of their generation is what helped them cross the threshold into the mainstream in a way that CSN couldn’t even touch. They did have their limits, though, and Glenn Frey thought that he could never get this tune quite right when he went into the studio.
Then again, Frey knew he had a much more limited range than Don Henley. Both of them had started the group back in the early 1970s, but whereas Frey had an everyman quality to his voice, Henley had a voice that seemed to be coated in goal, which might explain why he seemed to take over vocal duties more and more on future Eagles projects.
By the time the pressure and animosity became too much, Frey was more than happy to move on to other things. Even though No Fun Aloud was far from the most popular album by any former Eagle, he seemed more than content to do what he pleased rather than cater to whatever businessman wanted to hear about whether or not the Eagles would get back together.
Although the group did reunite for the Hell Freezes Over tour and kept up their time on the road for as long as they could, Frey never lost the desire to go solo. Even after making their long-awaited comeback, Long Road Out of Eden, Frey wanted to dip his toes into other genres, which meant going into the realm of easy listening on the album After Hours.
For someone of Frey’s stature, though, this didn’t seem like the worst idea. In fact, since Rod Stewart and Paul McCartney had made vocal jazz albums, hearing Frey take things in a different direction by doing renditions of songs like ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’ by The Beach Boys is far more inspired than dipping into Tin Pan Alley style ballads for every track.
Putting a voice through its paces like that can be daunting, though, and Frey admitted defeat when trying to sing the song ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’, saying, “There were so many songs I wanted to sing that I didn’t get to do. Most of the time we were right on the money, but there were a couple that I couldn’t quite nail. We tried ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’—the beautiful Tony Joe White song that Brook Benton recorded—but it didn’t seem right for me. It’s all about picking songs that fit your voice.”
It’s not like the song seems like a showstopping performance or anything, though. Frey still had the capacity to sing with the same gusto he did on tracks like ‘Heartache Tonight’, but his rough and tumble Detroit punk voice was never to clean up that much to stand alongside what Benton had already done with it.
But who knows? Maybe if the Eagles had decided to make one more album before Frey’s passing, ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ could have been a great vehicle for Henley’s voice as the rest of the band slowly crooned behind him.
