Why did Eagles guitarist Glenn Frey first move to Los Angeles?
Unlike every other band member who passed through the Eagles at one time or another, Glenn Frey was a true heartlander, born and raised in the area around Detroit. And he was part of a thriving rock music scene in the Motor City, which had sprung up just as he was coming of age as a guitarist.
He didn’t need to leave his roots behind and venture out west to find the music, as Don Henley, Randy Meisner, Bernie Leadon and Don Felder did. The music found him. “It was the golden age,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2003. He was referring to a period of time when local bands like Tommy James and the Shondellas, Question Mark and the Mysterians, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels were at the forefront of the national garage rock scene, propelling music in the direction of punk.
And two other Detroit bands were about to burst the bubble of 1960s psychedelia entirely. The MC5 and the Stooges ripped up the rock and roll rule book, producing the rawest and wildest guitar sound yet known to humankind. And a teenage Frey was right there in the eye of the storm. He was even playing with a Motor City artist signed to Capitol Records, the future heartland rock pioneer Bob Seger, who asked him to join his band officially as the bassist.
Frey was on the cusp of making it big in Detroit as a contemporary of Iggy Pop and Wayne Kramer. And then, disaster struck. “My mother found out I was smoking pot,” he remembered. She banned him from the Hideouts, stopping him from joining Seger’s group. “That was the impetus to go to California,” Frey claimed.
But how did he get there?
Still, he needed a better reason to buy a ticket to Los Angeles than just to escape his mother. He soon found it, in the shape of his girlfriend, Joan Sliwin. She was a member of The Mama Cats, a Detroit-based girl group who’d just signed a record deal in LA.
The two were very much in love, as lyrics in Frey’s Longbranch Pennywhistle song ‘Rebecca’ seem to suggest. And so Frey decided to make up the distance between them. “I started out buying student-standby tickets – $66 from Detroit to California in ’67 – to visit my girlfriend,” he recalled.
And he was amazed by what he found there. Particularly when he drove through the neighbourhood that would become his own five years later, Laurel Canyon, and met Byrds guitarist David Crosby. “I thought California was for me.”
Frey immediately identified with the budding country rock scene in Southern California more than he ever had with the rock music of Detroit. “That scene was calling,” as he described it. “I just felt that was where I had to go.” His mind was made up. Within a year he’d move to Los Angeles County. And he’d never look back.
