“I know just what you mean”: The worst lyrics the Eagles ever put to tape?
Whatever you think of Eagles — and, let’s face it, reaction to their work is mixed at best — they have a handful of undeniably great songs. They are a cultural institution, and for all of their detractors, they have an army of dedicated fans who would happily kick you out of their car on the freeway if you asked to change the channel when an Eagles song came on the radio. But surely even the most ardent of Eagles fans would reach for the dial (or, in more modern parlance, the “skip song” button) when ‘James Dean’ came on?
From the first racing moments that the song starts, it sounds like it’s got nothing to tell you. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other piece of cocaine-fuelled power pop dressed up as rock, which was being peddled at the time. Even the band already feels like they’re in a hurry to get the song over and done, playing at double speed and flying through this piece of filler at a rate of knots. Even though they’re blasting through it, nothing can hide the fact that the opening guitar lick is an empty riff, a meaningless and feeling-less lick added to fill a few seconds between the song starting and the vocals kicking in.
And when the vocals do kick in, it’s immediately clear that this is a tribute without a cause, a hollow ode to a much cooler man who might be glad that he at least didn’t live to hear it. This is not the sound of a group that can embody or inspire the same sense of rebellion and individualism which Dean did, but the sound of the corporate bastardisation of American counterculture and art, which has proliferated, spread and infected the form ever since the time between his death and the bands 1972 debut.
In fact, the fall of American rebellion, art and culture can probably quite reasonably be tracked through the idolatry and celebrity of stars such as James Dean, Marlon Brando or Paul Newman in the 1950s and then subsequently of groups like the Eagles in the 1970s. Dean’s cause was freedom. Freedom to live and to exist, freedom to roam, to explore his identity and his art form and what it meant to be young and alive and to express it all, whether he was accepted for it or not. He did what he did because he had to, was driven and compelled to, and because it’s who he was. Meanwhile, the Eagles’ cause seems to have been the pursuit of the freedom to make as much money as possible and to sell as many records as they could, all whilst saying as little as possible.
With this song, not only did they say even less than usual in their lyrics, but they were hitching their wagon to an artist with far more social, artistic and cultural credibility than they did in the hopes that some might rub off on them. It doesn’t.
Instead, what they released was a piece of paint-by-numbers, uninventive, uninteresting and uninspired rock, full of cliched lyrics and over-obvious rhymes. The song goes on for three minutes and thirty-eight seconds, but it doesn’t even feel like it took the band that long to write it. To make matters worse, they had help writing the song from Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther.
When you pull out any rhyme from the song (“James Dean, I know just what you mean, you said it all so clean”), it feels like a temp-line or a dummy lyric. A placeholder while they got the music down pat and then came back to the words to polish or finish them. “We’ll talk about a low-down bad refrigerator, you were just too cool for school. Sock hop, soda pop, basketball and auto shop, the only thing that got you off was breakin’ all the rules”. If only they really had gone away, thought twice about the words and come back with a more fully formed idea. A little bit like Stewart Stern and Irving Shulman did when writing the script for Rebel Without a Cause.
