Where was the Eagles’ final show with Glenn Frey?
The Eagles encapsulated rock music of the 1970s like few other bands. Their original run of hit albums and sellout tours spanned the length of the decade, and they produced one of its most enduring soundtracks in the shape of their fifth album, Hotel California, and its single of the same name.
With fatigue setting in after years on the road and the unseemly departure of vocalist and bass player Randy Meisner in 1977, the band finally imploded backstage after their final gig in 1980. Guitarists Glenn Frey and Don Felder almost came to blows before Felder smashed up a guitar and exited stage left.
Luckily for Eagles fans, that wasn’t the last we’d see of the band. A reunion involving Frey, Felder and other original members Don Henley and Bernie Leadon, as well as Hotel California guitarist Joe Walsh and Meisner’s replacement Timothy Schmidt, led to two singles and a tour in 1994. From that point on, the band performed on and off for the next two decades, including a special 1998 concert for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which featured Mesiner on bass.
The classic late-era line-up, which played together on the 1979 album The Long Run, stayed together until Henley and Frey fired Felder in 2001, and a messy court battle ensued. Once things were settled between the guitarists and his former bandmates in 2007, the years that followed were relatively serene. Frey, Henley, Walsh and Schmidt found a second wind of creativity, releasing the double album Long Road Out of Eden that same year.
That is until Frey became seriously ill with ulcerative colitis in 2015 and contracted pneumonia as a result. He died on January 18th, 2016, at the age of 67. One-half of the songwriting partnership at the heart of the Eagles was gone. Although Henley would revive the band as a live act 18 months later, they would never be the same again.
So, what was Frey’s last Eagles performance?
To promote the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, which the remaining band members authorised, the Eagles embarked on an epic two-year, 150-date world tour spanning almost 100 cities across three continents. This was to be a fitting farewell for one of the group’s two main creative forces.
The tour finally came to an end at the CenturyLink Center, a 14,000-seater arena in Bossier City, Louisiana, on July 29th, 2015. Eagles closed the show by playing ‘Desperado’, the first song Frey and Henley ever wrote together, at the end of their second encore.
That wasn’t quite the last time the line-up including Frey would play together, though. The Eagles played a secret gig two days later at CBC High School in St Louis, Missouri. According to local news outlet Fox2now, they played for a private birthday party of just 300 people, with Frey playing his double-pickup black Gibson Les Paul special guitar, which was originally given to him by Jackson Browne.
“When that tour ended, we just thought we would take a two- or three-month break,” Henley later told the Lexington Herald Leader. “Then we would probably tour some more the following year. Then the tragedy happened in October”. Frey’s condition dramatically worsened almost overnight. He was too ill to have the emergency intestinal surgery scheduled for him in November, and he hung on for two more months of agony.
“You never know what’s going to happen in this life,” Henley concluded. “It’s full of unexpected events.” At one stage, a reunion with his old songwriting partner would have seemed among the most unexpected events of all. But they made it happen and brought 22 more years of joy to Eagles fans before Frey’s tragic passing.
