What was the first album Eagles producer Bill Szymczyk worked on?
1974 was the year the Eagles graduated from being a small-time band appreciated in country rock circles to the status of rock and roll superstardom. They scored their first number one single, ‘The Best of My Love’, which was drawn from their first top-20 album, On the Border. These chart successes set them up for their first world tour the following year.
And it’s no coincidence that this change in the band’s trajectory occurred just as they teamed up with producer Bill Szymczyk, the man responsible for introducing legendary blues guitarist BB King to a wider audience. After sharing production duties for On the Border with former Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin engineer Glyn Johns, who’d produced the band’s previous two albums, Szymczyk took full control of the reins to deliver their first global smash One of These Nights.
Then came his finest hour, the record which would come to define not only the Eagles but an entire generation of mainstream rock music. Hotel California broke with the group’s country rock roots but seemed to encapsulate their story in its lyrical tales of decadent excess and the false promises proffered by the City of Light. Members of the Eagles had travelled from far and wide to make it in California, and their fifth album conveys the spiritual limitations of that experience, as well as the lack of fulfilment that ‘making it’ entails in practice.
Hotel California was also the first Eagles album to feature guitarist Joe Walsh, the man responsible for introducing the band to Szymczyk. The producer discovered Walsh while producing albums for his previous ensemble the James Gang, and went on to record his three solo records between 1972 and 1974. It was while promoting his solo third album So What that Walsh got to know the Eagles, as they shared the same manager and began touring together.
Don Henley and Glenn Frey happened to ask Walsh if he knew any good producers, and he immediately recommended Szymczyk, setting up a meeting between his producer and the band. “We had a meeting at Chuck’s Steak House, next to the Record Plant in LA,” Szymczyk recounted to Rock Review. “And three days later, we were making On The Border.”
But how did the producer start out?
Szymczyk’s career in the music industry started well before he met Walsh and the Eagles, though. He started out in New York as a demo recorder for hitmakers like Goffin and King, as well as soul impresario Quincy Jones. It was only after moving to ABC Records as a sound engineer that he moved to the West Coast, where he worked with The Electric Flag, a soul-tinged blues rock outfit led by the guitarist from Bob Dylan’s backing band in 1965, Mike Bloomfield.
The Electric Flag’s bassist Harvey Brooks gave Szymczyk his first shot at production when he recorded an instructional bass guitar album called How to Play Electric Bass in 1967. This was quite a coup for the 24-year-old ABC staffer, as Brooks had also played with Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited, and was about to join the Doors and Cass Elliot in the studio for their upcoming albums. This production credit boosted Szymczyk’s stature at his label and helped put him in the shop window for the likes of King and psychedelic rock ensemble Ford Theatre.
And so, the Eagles were getting a producer who knew every which way around rock music when they recruited Szymczyk in 1974. He’d been in the industry for a decade when he met them, during which team he’d seen girl-group pop give way to Beatlemania and Motown, and psychedelia give both folk and rock and roll much-needed makeovers. He was perfectly primed to produce a band who, at their commercial peak, blended all of these elements seamlessly into some of the smoothest rock music ever recorded.
