Which Eagles song inspired the title for an episode of ‘The Simpsons’?
For two years in the mid-1970s, the Eagles could reasonably lay claim to being the biggest band in the world. Their albums were flooding the charts around the world, most of their singles were claiming the top spot in the US, and they were selling out stadiums everywhere they went. More importantly, they were gaining the ear of John Swartzwelder, a young copywriter for a Chicago advertising firm who’d go on to become the most prolific writer in the history of The Simpsons.
Swartzwelder was on the legendary TV show’s writing crew from its inception in 1988, after being plucked straight from Saturday Night Live’s pool of writing talent by The Simpsons developer Sam Simon. By the time he left the show in 2004, his name was enshrined in the annals of screenwriting history, responsible for 59 complete episodes of arguably television’s finest half-hour. His credits included such gems as ‘Homer the Great’, ‘Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie’, ‘You Only Move Twice’ and ‘Homer’s Enemy’.
The first episode he wrote was season one’s ‘Bart the General’, which was first broadcast on February 4th, 1990. His second was broadcast just six weeks later and owed its title and much of its plot to a song by one of Swartzwelder’s favourite bands. The episode focuses on marital problems between Homer and Marge Simpson after the latter appears to be falling for another man.
She meets him on the lane of a bowling alley while learning how to use the ball Homer got himself for her birthday. As she struggles to get the hang of bowling, a suitably sophisticated French man called Jacques takes her hand and guides her through the action. The two bond over bowling lessons before Jacques invites Marge to his house.
Just when Homer fears he’s losing his wife, and she’s “rushin’ down that freeway” towards marital infidelity, her car comes to a fork in the road. One way leads to Jacques and the other leads to her husband. In the end, she turns down the road to Homer, and the two make up as the episode draws to a close.
But what’s the episode called?
Jacques might not be “brutally” handsome, but he plays the part well enough for the 1976 Eagles hit ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ to work as the basis for the episode’s title. Swartzwelder tweaked the title slightly to read ‘Life on the Fast Lane’, making it clearer that it was a bowling-themed pun on the word “lane”.
The Eagles’ song is about a sex-obsessed couple whose eagerness for “action”, whether in the bedroom or at drug-fuelled parties is what sustains their relationship, until they go off the rails completely. It serves as an apt metaphor for the supposedly dangerous passion which tempts Marge to the edge of a fling with Jacques in Swartzwelder’s Simpsons episode.
Unusually for the Eagles, guitarist Joe Walsh was the primary songwriter behind the 1977 single taken from Hotel California, which reached number 11 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It wasn’t one of the greatest things the band ever recorded, but its legacy was secured 13 years later. By an animated TV show, of all things. Probably not what Walsh was imagining for it when he came up with the track.
