The tour that Glenn Frey was scared to play: “What if nobody showed up”
Throughout the Eagles’ career, Glenn Frey was the one musician who looked like he couldn’t cower to anything thrown his way. Even though he was the one singing the more laid-back songs on most of their greatest hits, the Detroit spirit he had growing up usually came through whenever he was backstage or even in front of the stage when he almost got into a fistfight with Don Felder. Despite being one of the most bulletproof members of the band, Frey admitted to being scared to perform when it came time for them to go back out on tour in the mid-1990s.
The group had been doing solo projects since the early 1980s, but the option for them to reunite was always going to be open. As far back as 1983, people had been motioning for the California rockers to reunite for one-off shows, with Frey later using a press release with a picture of him flipping the bird to anyone who wanted them to perform at the US Festival.
It’s not like he was exactly hurting in his solo career, either. His work on songs like ‘The Heat is On’ and ‘You Belong to the City’ had planted his foot firmly in the door as a solo act, and his former co-writer Don Henley seemed to be having a fine time going the adult contemporary route on albums like The End of the Innocence.
Once Henley put together an Eagles tribute album for his charity organisation, The Walden Woods Project, Frey started to get interested in returning to the fold. After a few conversations with management, the group reunited for the live show Hell Freezes Over, featuring a handful of new songs.
It’s a miracle that Henley and Frey even bothered to write any new material together, but ‘Get Over It’ was proof that they at least knew how to put a decent hit together. Anyone can get a decent show out of a good episode of TV, but when manager Irving Azoff talked about taking things on the road, Frey was a little reluctant.
To him, this was going back into the life of a rock star, and the idea of leaving his family behind wasn’t an easy decision, telling History of the Eagles, “That was the biggest test. What if we got together and nobody showed up? I told my family, ‘I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Hang in there with me.’”
Spreading their wings once again, many of the performances made it sound like the band hadn’t lost an ounce of their shine in those few years. There were definitely some songs like ‘Heartache Tonight’ that required a bit more strength to get down, but whenever Henley started singing ‘Hotel California’, you’d have to rub your eyes and wonder if it wasn’t the younger version of themselves.
Granted, the tour wasn’t all fun and games, with Felder eventually getting fired from the band halfway through the reunion because of his frustration over how the royalties were getting split. That classic version of the Eagles’ family may have ended in a mess, but for those shows, Frey went from being timid to being in his element every time those first chords of ‘Take It Easy’ began.
