Why Don Henley was astonished by the Eagles’ first number one in 1974: “Good and bad”
It’s quite remarkable to think that, given how successful Eagles would go on to become in the latter part of their initial run, they struggled significantly to make any kind of impact when they first began releasing music.
It’s hard to find a school of thought that will outwardly deny that Hotel California was one of the most significant albums of the 1970s, even if some may consider it less innovative than some of the other music being made at the same time. The band’s brand of soft rock fused with country elements may not have exactly been novel, nor was it new to them, but the cultural impact that it ended up having was far beyond what was achieved by contemporaneous releases.
However, what it did do was capture how America felt at the time of its release, and this is what aided it on its quest to become one of the best-selling albums of all time. Hotel California was an overwhelming and undeniable commercial success, and one that serves as a magnifying glass into American culture of the period, even to this day.
If, somehow, you were only just stumbling upon the band in the present day and heard Hotel California, you’d think that the band were blessed with some sort of innate knack for being able to craft masterful pop rock that the masses could easily connect with, but their rise to this position wasn’t that simple.
Prior to its release, they’d only really had one successful album, 1975’s One of These Nights, and the three studio albums that they’d released before that, which, while looked upon favourably in retrospect as early signs of their talent beginning to blossom and take shape, were largely ignored by the public, leaving the band frustrated at not being able to create a positive trajectory.
The thing that drove the band forward was arguably a determination to prove everyone who had dismissed them wrong and a forthright sense of self-confidence in their abilities – collectively, they knew that they had to work hard to be able to reach where they needed to be, and it was the transition between two albums in particular that effectively prompted drummer and vocalist Don Henley to take a different approach.
Their second album, Desperado, as previously stated, was far from being a hit for the band, and the lack of traction it received through sales had a dramatic effect on how the band chose to approach things. According to Henley, when it was time for them to focus on developing songs for their third album, there was no conscious effort to simplify things, but it naturally began to work out that way.
“I honestly don’t recall exactly what we were thinking,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016, “but we did decide, at some point, that we wanted to go for a little harder edge. So, there were a few more uptempo songs on that album, more electric guitar. ‘Already Gone’ and ‘James Dean’ got some airplay.”
However, the song that seemingly caught the attention of audiences was not the one that he’d expected, and ended up driving them even further towards stardom than before, despite it being so dramatically different from anything they’d released before. “Interestingly enough, it was the mellow ballad, ‘Best of My Love’, that became a hit,” he added. “Our first number one hit. That was both good and bad.”
Things still weren’t perfect, but ‘Best of My Love’ took them a lot closer to where they felt they needed and deserved to be in terms of commercial success. The album it was taken from, On the Border, had not quite reached the heights that they may have hoped for, either, but they had a hit under their belt, and that was more than nothing. Why Henley considered this to be both a good and bad thing is hard to understand, but regardless of his feelings about the song, it ultimately influenced the Eagles enough to dictate where their career was heading.
