Why does Jeff ‘The Dude’ Lebowski hate the Eagles?
Why is it that Jeff ‘The Dude’ Lebowski hates the Eagles? Is it because they represented a slide from the prelapsarian dream of the counterculture movement and embodied a new, very un-dude-like age of commercialism that Joni Mitchell dubbed spiritually “pornographic”? Well, yeah, that and a pair of ears.
“Come on, man,” a recently spiked El Duderito grumbles in The Big Lebowski, “I’ve had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man!” Many fans of the cult masterpiece nodded in agreement. However, the mainstream decidedly disagreed, figuratively throwing the naysayers out of their smooth-riding cab and blasting out a little more ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’. In fact, no less than two albums by the Eagles reside in the top ten best-selling records of all time list. They are all-conquering American heroes.
So, why exactly were they targeted by the film? After all, everything within the movie is meticulously mused over to fit its undercurrent of cultural commentary. As it happens, when the Coen brothers were making The Big Lebowski, they reached out to the musical genius T-Bone Burnett to help them curate a suitable music taste for The Dude.
It was Burnett’s suggestion that he should hate the Eagles. Why not? Burnett fucking hated them too, man. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he explained why, citing them as the death of the 1960s: “[The Eagles] sort of single-handedly destroyed that whole scene that was brewing back then.”
So, how did they kill the scene, and how was that even relevant for a film set in the 1990s? Well, as it happens, a few years prior to the release of the movie, the Eagles hit headlines as the first rock band to charge over $100 for tickets. Seeing as though ‘The Dude’ hailed from a place of hippie idealism, parcelling simplified peace and love with a price tag that lofty was an awful duality to straddle as a band.
Alongside this apparent lack of integrity, the irony of a platitude like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ – a song that strips the counterculture movement of any of its pointed intent and merely serves it up as a lukewarm laidback lark with an incense addiction – was bound to get on his nerves almost because it’s simply pleasant cab ride music. It’s in a halfway house, neither opting out and venturing towards a more personal spiritualism ala ‘The Dude’, Bob Dylan post-1966, but simply reheating a dead ideal to keep the hits rolling. Or at least this is the suggested esteemed opinion of our Dudeness.
Our fictional hero was not alone in these thoughts at the time. Burnett even used his hatred of the band to leverage song rights deals for the film. He wanted to use Townes Van Zandt’s cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Dead Flowers’ to close the movie but encountered contractual issues as their manager, Allen Klein, was asking for $150,000. But Burnett convinced him to watch the first cut of The Big Lebowski, and he later recalled: “It got to the part where the Dude says, ‘I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man!’ Klein stands up and says, ‘That’s it, you can have the song!’ That was beautiful.”
It’s depth like this that not only makes The Big Lebowski one of the greatest soundtracks of all time but also one of the greatest movies. Like ‘The Dude’ himself, the songs are the right ones for their time and place for all manner of reasons. They don’t just sit right in there, although they could easily be enjoyed in that passing sense anyway. You can dive into the soundtrack and never live to see the bottom, or you can simply float on the surface and listen to the pins fall, any which way, this soundtrack abides.
