What instrument does Bernie Leadon play on the Eagles song ‘Journey of the Sorcerer’?
Throughout the first five years of Eagles’ existence as a band, Bernie Leadon was largely a lead guitarist without much input into the band’s songwriting. He would contribute to one or two songs per album on average, but his songcraft was never considered comparable to that of Don Henley, Glenn Frey or even Randy Meisner.
Instead, Leadon’s strengths lay in his instrumental fills, for which he drew on his experience as a key player in the country rock outfit The Flying Burrito Brothers. Leadon was a master of string-bending country licks, as we hear on the Desperado lead single ‘Tequila Sunrise’. But he could also shred a mean rock and roll solo, with the 1974 ode to 1950s nostalgia ‘James Dean’ showcasing some of his finest work in this regard.
By the time the band came to record their fourth studio album, however, Leadon had more up his sleeve than just a customary songwriting credit and the odd star turn on electric guitar. He wrote or co-wrote three out of the nine songs that ended up on One of These Nights, and these included a song that would prove to be one of the most controversial in Eagles history.
Henley and Frey were roundly against the extended prog-country instrumental ‘Journey of the Sorcerer’ even being included on the album. They felt Leadon was going beyond his remit, and the ensuing conflict over the song contributed to the growing resentment the guitarist harboured towards the other members of the group. He duly quit the band not long after the album’s release, even though his bandmates had relented and let him include his song in the tracklist.
But what instrument does the song feature?
Backed by a string section resembling something Ennio Morricone scored for a spaghetti western, Leadon leads the band through six minutes and 37 seconds of jarring anachronisms on ‘Journey of the Sorcerer’. He uses a pedal steel guitar to create sound effects of desert birds, but another instrument takes centre stage, playing what sounds like the accompaniment for a pseudo-medieval square dance.
This is the instrument which Leadon initially used to write the song – his trusty Huber VRB-75 banjo. The one he’d been playing since the release of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ self-titled third album in 1971. It makes for an utterly bizarre sound clash with the rest of the Eagles’ instrumentation, let alone the orchestral crescendos which come to the fore in the second half of the song.
Perhaps Leadon was trying to prove that the prog rock dominating the album charts of his day has a place for the humble banjo. But if that really was his intention, it backfired spectacularly. The track is best left to one side when assessing One of These Nights, which otherwise includes some of the most accessible soft rock the Eagles ever put out. None of which features a banjo.
