Why did bassist Randy Meisner leave the Eagles?
In September 1977, the Eagles bassist Randy Meisner announced he was quitting the band due to its exhaustive touring schedule. It’s true that Meisner had been ill during the band’s year-long tour of their best-selling album Hotel California, to the point that he’d developed stomach ulcers.
But was it really bad health and fatigue that ended Meisner’s tenure as the bass player of arguably the biggest band in the world at the time? Or were there other factors at play?
Meisner was filmed during the tour saying, “All I want to see is five guys happy playing together, you know.” He paused wistfully and added, “That’s what makes the music.” While the Eagles were playing more expansive sets to bigger crowds than ever before, all wasn’t well beneath the surface.
Their bassist was voicing his frustration with the band’s set on the tour, and having to be the centre of attention for its encore. The 1975 single he’d written, ‘Take It to the Limit’, required him to strain his vocal range into its upper reaches every night.
A combination of the stresses and strains of touring and weariness with almost nine successive months on the road came to a head in June 1977, when Meisner began openly expressing how “unhappy” he was. According to his account in the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, guitarist and frontman Glenn Frey was in no mood to sympathise. “We just got fed up with that and said, ‘OK, don’t sing [‘Take It to the Limit’]. Why don’t you just quit? You say you’re unhappy. Quit.”
Drummer and vocalist Don Henley went even further, claiming that Meisner’s complaints about his vocal cords and stomach ulcers were just excuses for the real reason he wasn’t feeling up to singing ‘Take It to the Limit’. “He’d been up all night with a couple of girls and a bottle of vodka.”
So, did he quit, or was he pushed?
Either way, Meisner’s mind was made up. “I was too sick and generally fed up,” he told Eagles biographer Marc Eliot. “I decided I wasn’t going back out.”
Frey responded to his refusal with, “Fuck you, then.” The two came to blows, and Meisner found himself effectively ostracised from the rest of the group from that point on. As he told Rolling Stone in 2013, “The whole thing started to end when we started taking separate limos.”
He managed to stick out the rest of the tour before going home to his family in Nebraska on September 4th, 1977. Except for a brief reunion at the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, he never came back.
Meisner’s exit signalled the end of the Eagles’ golden period. The rest of the line-up went their separate ways less than three years later after releasing just one more studio album. “It reached a point where we were just tired of each other,” Henley explained. “At that point, songwriting was becoming very difficult.”
Perhaps he and Frey could have done with one more songwriter in the mix. But Meisner’s departure proved to be a precursor to the band running its course. Whether he was given no choice but to leave against his will by Frey and Henley or he engineered his own exit, the bassist left at the right time for him.
The other band members would have done well to follow his lead. Rather than go down in a blaze of fisticuffs long after the fun was over.
