From ‘New Kid in Town’ to ‘The Sad Café’: the Eagles songs that predicted their own break up
Knowing when a band has reached the end of the line and can no longer viably continue is often hard to predict, and often, it might take hindsight to realise where the cracks started visibly showing to the public. On the other hand, inner turmoil can sometimes rear its head in the most obvious fashion, and if you’re actively barneying with your bandmates on stage or in other public-facing environments, then it’s perhaps not that hard for others to tell that the end is nigh. For Eagles, they were definitely showing signs of strain at the end of the 1970s, but was it obvious to everyone else that they were about to call it quits?
Being a member of the band at the end of the ‘70s was a tense environment to be in, and virtually all of the core members of the group were at each other’s throats. The tensions all boiled over during one fateful performance in July 1980, where guitarist Don Felder spent large amounts of the show trading insults with his opposite, songwriter Glenn Frey. From promises of a backstage ass-kicking to sarcastically making digs at one another for their perceived lack of professionalism, the night has been since dubbed as ‘Long Night at Wrong Beach’, and is generally regarded as where things all ended.
Only a year prior, the band had released The Long Run; something they ironically turned out not to be in for. While it was still a successful release in terms of sales, it had failed to capture the hearts of fans in the same way that their previous effort, Hotel California, had done. Was it a sign of exhaustion from having used up all their best ideas in one go, or was it simply a sign that none of the members could give a damn anymore?
However, it’s one thing to come to a decision to put a timely end to things before tensions boil over in catastrophic ways, but it’s another thing entirely to be actively predicting your own downfall through song lyrics well before you even come to the realisation that the band has served its time. Eagles unfortunately chose to let their animosity spill over, but they’d actually foreshadowed their demise on The Long Run, and again even before that on Hotel California.
It feels somewhat fitting that the final song on what would be their final album at the time would be one of the tracks that prophesied the end. ‘The Sad Café’ is a song inspired by the closure of some of the venues in which they had played in their early days, and takes a pensive angle whereby vocalist Don Henley ponders the changes happening around them with the closure of the eponymous haunt. “It seemed like a holy place, protected by amazing grace,” Henley remarked. “We would sing right out loud the things we could not say. We thought we could change the world with words like love and freedom. We were part of the lonely crowd inside the Sad Café.”
With this reflection on how all good things must come to an end, it’s understandable how this might have been a warning sign to fans that the band were about to call it a day. However, on ‘New Kid in Town’, which had been released three years prior, they were equally contemplative about their future. Frey, who sings lead vocals on this track, said in a 2003 interview that “we knew we were heading down a long and twisted corridor and just stayed with it,” while Henley recalled how the band were “already chronicling our own demise,” adding that they were aware of how fame and fortune were fleeting and that someone would inevitably come and take their place.
These tracks may have spelled the end for Eagles at the time, but they would return in 1994 after a 14-year hiatus, and released their final album, Long Road Out of Eden in 2007. The band didn’t quite manage to recapture their earlier glories on this record, but they were equally wistful in their lyrics, regularly focusing on the passing of time and how things were different. Clearly, a band who loved to philosophise about their own existence as a group, they inevitably knew that things wouldn’t last forever, although their legacy remains as strong as ever.
