The Eagles: California Dreamin'
Author: Tom Nolan
Publication: Phonograph Record
Date: June 1975
"I WANT TO SLEEP with you in some chocolate tonight," Glenn Frey sings in impromptu addition to the lyric of ‘Peaceful Easy Feelin’, and the crowd shrieks with delight, for this is the Hershey Park Arena the Eagles are playing in Hershey, Pennsylvania, "Chocolate Town, U.S.A." home of the world famous Hershey Chocolate Factory, whose smokestacks spew out cocoa fumes that drift down Chocolate Avenue, past the lampposts with globes the shape of chocolate drops, and settle into the cracks and corners of the town so thoroughly that not only the air outside but closed rooms and the insides of dresser drawers reek of the rich brown stuff.
The twelve thousand or so young people in the Hershey Park Arena tonight, residents of Hershey and surrounding burghs, seem revivified by the blast of fresh California air wafting at them, as it were, through the Eagles' bank of amplifiers; they suck up the aura emanating from the stage as if it were the very breath of life. This group has brought them more than music.
But of course! Any band ready to graduate to the top rank of rock has to offer its fans more than first rate tunes and licks; it must present an artistic vision of reality, a compelling way of life for its admirers to emulate and aspire to. The Eagles – who, with a month-old number one single, a year-old album still on the charts, its predecessor reentering them and the latest album shipping gold, are most certainly making their push into that heady upper region – have one of the most attractive gestalts ever with which to bedazzle crowds: a marriage of the California Dream with the Romance of the Open Road. Dressed in denim and cotton tee-shirts, they work their roles expertly; it's hard to tell where they leave off and the audience begins – with the essential exception that the Eagles are supposedly possessors of the secrets of cars, sun, movement and en mass to extract them from the music. In a logical paradox, the crowd gets most frenzied when Glenn launches the lyric advising ‘Take It Easy’; and by the time the band sings ‘Already Gone’, the kids from Hershey are dancing in the aisles, sitting on each other's shoulders, screaming approval, and moving in unison like human waves – they, too, would like to be already gone, on the road to another town, away from the dull and deadly boring and towards some bittersweet tequila sunrise.
What a great band they are tonight, heating this hockey rink to an L.A. swelter with only a Navajo-design banner draped on a screen behind the drummer to establish any ambience. Bernie, Randy, Don, Don and Glenn really crackle and roll, as if they knew for a notarized fact what they will all tell you if you show the slightest interest: that they have never been closer than right now to having it all, that this is indeed Their Year.
After the concert, after the young citizens of Pennsylvania have filed politely from the hall and the band has been limo'd sans superfluous hangers-on back to the sprawling and formidably antiseptic Hershey Motor Lodge, and after musicians and roadies have unwound over nothing more extraordinary than a tray of shrimp and the last ten televised minutes of an NHL playoff (won in overtime with a telling shot between the goalie's legs), Eagles Don Henley and Glenn Frey adjourn to the latter's room for an interview that will touch upon such concerns as their imminent consolidation of the elements of huge success, the nature of those elements, and the price they exact.
Henley and Frey, the group's principal stars, present contrasting images onstage and off. Frey, as a performer, is the lowkey leader of the band, introducing the songs, setting the pace and kicking things along, while Henley the drummer is a solid backbone, perched behind his kit and alternating lead vocals with Glenn. In person (tonight, at least) it is Don who is the aggressive talker, wired with emotion, while Glenn exercises a soothing influence: yet Henley never forgets his manners and is careful to flick his ashes into an empty beer bottle, while Glenn doesn't give a thought to letting his drop onto the rug.
The Eagles in the minds of many are the epitome of an L.A. band, and I begin by asking for their thoughts about their adopted city. Frey takes the first lead.
"My feeling," Glenn says, pulling the top off a can of Budweiser, "is that Los Angeles is the Rome of North America, during the chaos. And if there's gonna be any kinda fall of the dynasty, I'd like to see it from L.A., 'cause I think L.A. will feel it first."
"L.A. gives an' takes," Don says. "If you're strong enough, that's where you go, an' you can make it. If you don't make it, you can blame anything you want to.
"Right. All the excuses are there: dope, women. Or the business! 'Oh, the business is so hard, of course I'm not makin' it.' L.A.'s got every kinda reason an' crutch."
"The only thing you can blame if you don't make it is yourself. Granted, there's a lotta people who were very good who didn't make it; they just didn't have the right temperament. I was determined to make it. The music thing, when all is said and done, it is a business. It's a weird combination of art and dollars. The opportunities are there, but if you're not smart you're gonna get ripped off. It's as simple as that. Rock and roll is a business. Rock and roll music is marketed like deodorant or detergent.
"Of course it has to be marketed or the masses would never get to hear it, but sometimes it's hard to keep the art and the business separate. Sometimes it's hard to remember we are primarily musicians and songwriters.
"And to make it, you either go to New York or to L.A., depending upon where you were brought up, where your head is at an' what kinda image you wanna project. For me, L.A. is definitely the center of what's happening now, the focus of excitement. There's that romance that's always been there, like Horace Greeley said: 'Go West, young man, go West.' L.A. rock is different from New York rock. New York rock is...decadent...chaotic...surreal..."
"How about if we say 'slicker'?"
"Whatever. There's a definite polarity."
"The most critical songwriting," Glenn offers, "is going on in the living rooms of Southern California."
"Rod Stewart's moving to L.A. Elton John's moved to L.A."
"The Band moved to L.A. Neil's moved back from San Francisco."
"It's very romantic," Don says. "It gets a hold on ya. You love it, an' you hate it. It's a whore, but it's a fertile mother. L.A. is more American to me. L.A., to me, is what America is all about."
"You know," Glenn says, "it's got New York mixed in it too."
"There's a line in this song on our new album, 'Hollywood Waltz': 'She looks another year older from too many lovers who used her and ran/But some nights she looks like an angel, she's always willin' to hold you again' – and it's true. The nights after it rains, Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world. The sun goes down, you're up on Mulholland, all of a sudden you see this incredible light show – It's just a turnon. Other days, it's smog an' dirt city."
"I'm not sayin' it's wholesome," Don makes clear. "It's not Mecca. It's not the Rockies; it's no John Denver trip."
"Hey, the Rockies ain't exactly what John Denver tells you they are, either: love an' soybeans an' all that. It's a little bit harder out there...But kids...Kids on the East coast...They call out to us, 'Tell us about the desert! Tell us about the desert! These kids...See our strongest area outside of Los Angeles is the East. Gettin' back to the idea that what people want is to escape reality...I mean, I know, 'cause I'm from the East, from Detroit. An' I saw Surfer Magazine, I got the Beach Boys albums. I took acid an' listened to the first Buffalo Springfield record an' got chillbumps an' had to lay on the floor an' stuff. You know, an' I got into this whole 'California consciousness.' I saw the articles in Post Magazine and in Life, about people takin' marijuana an' LSD an' goin' to Golden Gate Park an' all that stuff, an' the Grateful Dead an' Surrealistic Pillow. An' I mean I was a victim of the media the same way everyone else was. An' I just went out there!"
Glenn was raised in the Motor City; his father had moved there from Pennsylvania, to work in the auto industry after the war. Pay was good in the '50s, and the Freys did well. "Dad took good care of himself. 3000 bucks in the bank all the time. We bought school clothes every fall, an' some stuff for the summer too. We did okay. I got fed all right. But there was no high flyin' about it; it was all Little League baseball and drive-ins. Cheap thrills. It was all cheap thrills in the suburbs of Detroit." Like Don Henley, Glenn had to find inspiration in simple pleasures and in his own dreams. In a city with over a million people, he whiled away his time the same wistful ways Don did in a tiny Texas town. Watching trucks roar by on their way to someplace better. Listening to Wolfman Jack from Mexico, three o'clock in the morning; staying awake another three hours until the Wolfman had gone through his playlist and would put ‘Go Now’ on again. Dreaming about rock and roll.
Glenn saw the Beatles twice at Detroit's Olympia Hall. He had this fantasy about someday selling out that hall himself. He started to play the guitar, and began to hang around Bob Seger's recording sessions. "Seeger was cool. I was never in his band, but he liked me, and he let me come to some sessions, when he was recordin' four-track. He let me play maracas, an' on one song he let me play acoustic guitar."
After moving to L.A., Glenn formed Longbranch Pennywhistle with J.D. Souther. By the time the Eagles were assembled, Glenn was pretty confident of the simple image he wanted to project.
"Somebody told us a long time ago," he remembers," 'Live your trip.' It's a lot easier for us, bein' the same people onstage as we are off. It's easier to draw the line an' know where you're at. There comes a moment when all of a sudden you're receiving simultaneous love from fifteen thousand people, it's pourin' into your body in a gigantic orgasm, an' you're drenched in sweat – allright, then you can draw the line an' say, 'that's me.' An' I think it's just that all of us chose to remain the same people onstage as we were off. So we didn't bring any kinda schizophrenia into it. It's not like puttin' makeup on, an' goin' in front of an audience! Like a young actress would, who sees herself on television an' digs how good she looks all madeup an' highlighted, an' wants to look like that all the time! That breeds a schizophrenia that I don't think any of us wanted to deal with.
"Of course, doin' it as yourselves, it takes a lot longer. At first I didn't think anybody would be interested in seein' a group dressed in tee-shirts an' jeans, just like them. It takes a while for all the water to accumulate in the bucket. You can't fill it all in one day; you have to wait for it, drop by drop."
When success was accumulating in measurable quantities, it brought with it a peculiarly East Coast style of hostility. Critics there who prided themselves on being politically aware claimed to find the Eagles' supposed noninvolvement anathema, and they continue to chide the band for being an extension of California frivolity. This particularly rankles Don, who is still seething over a recent incident.
"Some guy, he says, his anger rising, "reviewed us for the New York Times the other night in New York, an' he sorta cut us down for our songs not bein' political. He said how pleasant we were an' everything, an' I really resent the fact that somebody cuts us for not bein' political an' for not doin' political songs or not takin' a stand or any of that crap: I really resent that a whole bunch. He should listen to our song ‘On the Border’."
"I don't see that there's anything relative to chaos," Glenn offers, "except sanity. you know? And I think we're in the age of chaos right now. This isn't 1968 anymore, 'Three for McGovern' and all that."
"It's our job to get people off," Don continues, "not to get them crazy an' militant."
"There's nothin' provocative about an orgasm; an' that's the best I've ever felt. Better than yellin' at anybody."
"People are concerned with their own individual lives, an' gettin' their own personal trips together, an' that's what we write about.
"You know you can't help anyone until you help yourself. That's another thing that galled me about that New York Times f – r – he labeled our songs 'escapist rock.' Now to me our songs are more realist rock, confrontist rock, than anybody's! To me all that glitter stuff is escapist rock, that is fantasyland. What we're doin' is all stuff that happened to us. We don't make any of it up! It happens to us in real life – a relationship with a girl, a spiritual thing – whatever.
"I hate those stupid labels! I hate when people call us a country-rock band because they are so full of it. We can do anything! We can do rock and roll, we can do country music – anything. When they call us 'a country-rock band with high-flying harmonies and soaring vocals' – "
All this is especially galling at a moment when the band is consolidating its generally favorable critical response with a popular acceptance that seems ready to expand to enormous proportions. Things change when you begin to breathe the rarefied air of headliners; the stern attention of writers only adds to the pressure.
"Know what happens?" Glenn asks. "You make a great record, right, an' you go through all the moves – you snort the coke, you drink the beer – an' it's all very in an' vogue, an' all of us did that...But then when you become a headliner, all of a sudden there's something expected of you, something other than the moves. It starts to...it gets serious."
"'Best of My Love' did it," Don reflects. "Bein' number one...We'd been close. 'Take It Easy' was number seven. 'Witchy Woman' was five. When Desperado came out no one took it seriously; now it's regarded as a masterpiece, it's back on the charts again, it's gold."
"'Refreshingly selfindulgent,' they call it now," Glenn muses.
"I was readin' an article the other day about another group, never mind who. It said that four of their albums are platinum.
"They took the easy route. Coupla years from now, they'll be goin' like this." He makes a plummeting motion with his thumb. "I figure, the faster you go up, the sooner you come down. 'Cause once you're up there, there ain't but one place to go.
"We been takin' it slow. We're well respected over the lyrics. We bust our ass to make records. We agonize over the lyric. We analyze every 'and' and 'the' and 'but.' It's like buildin' a table, an' then once it's built, deciding how much time you want to spend sanding and glazing it."
"We've had great record producers who have helped us enormously."
"Yup. Doin' our first album with Glyn Johns was a stroke of genius on everyone s part. Especially his. 'Cause he was a real strong producer, in the face of first album weirdness. He was able to say, hey, Henley, you go here, Frey, you do this, etc. etc., an even if you don't know where it's leadin', trust me, this is for the best. He really helped us make two albums."
Bill Szymczyk, "the vowelless producer," supervises their recording these days. His track record includes producing and/or engineering for Aaron Neville, B.B. King, Rick Derringer, Edgar Winter, Lorainne Ellison and the James Gang. As Glenn puts it, "He's got a heavy hand."
Their latest collaboration with him is the new album, One of These Nights (with the title track being its first single). While not a concept album in the Desperado fashion, it extends what Henley explains as the group's basic philosophy.
"The theme of all our albums," he says, "has been basically the same. An' that is: Looking for It. It. Whatever It is, just lookin' for it. Whether it be a woman, or happiness, or satisfaction or success or peace of mind or riches or any of that. Lookin' for it, and tryin' to deal with it. 'It.' Know what I mean?
"Your whole life is a journey, right? An' the journey is more important to us than the journey's end.
"The new album was written durin' the wintertime. It's dark. It's kinda occult, kind of a 'Witchy Woman' feel."
Glenn: "It's anxious. It's anticipatory. It's 'One of These Nights'. This album has a lot to do with our career. This is an album we wrote all by ourselves, 'One of These Nights' – It's like, puttin' things off...Everybody I'm sure has said, 'One of these nights I'm gonna...' Gonna drive back to that restaurant an' take that waitress in my arms, whatever."
"Find that girl, make that money, buy that house. Move to that country. Any of that stuff. Everyone's got his ultimate dream, savin' it for 'someday.' And 'someday' is up to you."
A theme runs through their music, according to Glenn, which links romantic love with the music business. It's not just the ambitious Desperado album, which equates the gunfighter of legend with today's rock'n'roll musician. There's a supplementary theme – in ‘James Dean’, ‘My Man’ (written for Gram Parsons and Duane Allman), ‘Good Day in Hell’ (written about Gram while he was still alive) – of those who make the fatal mistake of living too hard too fast.
"The meaty lines," Glenn says, "we're always sneakin' 'em across. That's when you learn to use symbolism. 'You can see the stars an' still not see the light' – they're lookin' right in my face when I sing that! I swear to God I don't know whether they're even thinkin' about what it really means!
"It takes Henley for me to finish a song. And it takes me for Henley to finish a song. And it takes all of us to do that for each other. If I was by myself, I know I wouldn't get as much done. I identify strongly with Crosby and with Nash, they were definitely catalysts, team players. I just know that if me and Henley split up, the lyrics to my songs would be weaker and the music to his would be weaker. We put it together real good, an' I ain't givin' that up for nothin’. We're gonna write forever, even if it's only once a year."
Not that Henley always writes the lyrics and Frey the melodies; it changes back and forth all the time, but those are the strong suits for each. Glenn hesitates to say who "wrote" specific songs, but he gives a few credits for initial inspiration: Frey started 'Tequila Sunrise', 'One of These Nights' and (with Jackson) 'Doolin-Dalton'; Don began 'Desperado' which uses a progression written years ago for a song that never got finished.
Bit by bit; drop by drop. As their body of work accumulates and their popularity grows, the mix becomes ever more volatile; there's a lot at stake here. Henley speaks with particular fervor as he spells out the realities of the business, the words coming out fast and with feeling.
"The rock and roll business is like crammin' sixty years living into thirty. We live twice as fast an' twice as hard as normal people. It's like sports. You can't play professional football forever, you know; physically, you just deteriorate. You can be a doctor or a lawyer until you get senile; you can be a Supreme Court Justice until you fall over an' die, but you can only be a rock and roll star for a certain amount of time, you only got so long to get there an' get yours – so to speak, quotations, parentheses, whatever – an get out. It's no sin. I'm not ashamed. I am giving. And I expect to receive! By the time I'm 311 want to be able to sit back an' have my ranch in the country, an' my bread, an' so forth. Because I am bustin' my ASS, an' if I come outta this sane I'll be very lucky. So I don' feel guilty about...about gettin' 30,000 bucks a night. Or 35. Or any of that People think this is a...pic-nic...
"People's values can get really screwed up. I think mine do, from time to time. I forget what's really important to me. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy says, 'You can be young without money, but you can't be old without money.' An' that struck me, somehow.
"It's sad when you learn what the rock and roll business is all about. That's basically what the Desperado album deals with. With growing up, and learning what the real world is about, an' learning that there are certain...compromises and sacrifices you have to make. In other words, you have to do what everyone else wants you to do for a while. An' during that time you have to maintain your identity, remember who you are an' what you want to do. An then after you've achieved your position of power, then you can say screw you to all those people an' go do what you want to do."
"There's a danger in that, though," Glenn warns. "If you're not straight, you can become petty about it. There's a great temptation to become vindictive as soon as you get in your place of power. To feel your oats at the expense of everybody else around you. Hire a buncha people who tell you you're the greatest guy in the whole world. That's a great pitfall. It's like, in every dream-come-true there's a hidden curse. It's how you deal with that kinda stuff that determines your true stature."
"We're not selling any answers," Don goes on. "All we're doin' is reporting. 'Eyewitness Music.' We're not saying California is better than New York, that if you live in New York you're dumb. 'I'm goin' to the country and cut off my telephone an' screw you' – we're not sayin' any of that. We just figure everyone has a certain amount of universal experience, that you go through no matter where you're from or what you do.
"The bottom line is, it's the songs that count. That's what's gotten us where we are, the songs we've written. And the choice of producers, and the fact that we had a good manager. It's a combination of all those things. You can be the greatest – you can have all the talent in the world an' it won't make any difference; if you don't have a good manager, you're screwed. You can have a great manger, an' no talent, an' you're screwed. You can have a lotta talent an' a great manager an' a crummy record company, an' you're screwed. You've gotta have all those things workin' for you at once. One weak link in the chain, man, an' you can forget it.
"But me an' him," Don says, easing up a tad as he smiles at Glenn, "we're very conniving people. We're not dishonest. But we're hungry, and we're smart, and we want it. We want it real bad. We always wanted it."
Glenn the sports buff has a metaphor handy. "We're inside the five-yard line – it's first down – an' we got Czonka in the backfield. I mean we smell the goal line! We smell it on every song!"
"You gotta want it bad, man."
"That's right! The only man who can't be beat is the man who won't be beat. It's heart! It's a whole thing we joke about: the Punk Theory.
"Well we want it," he ties up the thread. "We want it bad."
"It's Don Juan," Don says. "'Follow the path with heart.' A warrior accepts his own death. When you accept the fact of your own death, nothing else matters."
"It tempers your spirit, it makes everything you do have more meaning, 'cause every performance might be your last."
Don Henley, so passionately determined to make it, has come a long way in miles and spirit from his birthplace. Linden, Texas, a town "in the middle of nowhere" whose population figure of 2000 has remained unchanged in over 20 years. His father was an auto parts dealer whose wife became a schoolteacher after his death. (Both Don and Glenn had parents involved intimately with automobiles! Is it any wonder they both have such a firm grip on the American myth of the Road? Linden is like the town where The Last Picture Show was set, and Don says, "All you can do in a place like that is dream.
"There wasn't anything to do but sit there an' watch the sun sink in the West. An' I used to watch it an' say, 'Boy, the sun's goin' down in California. Someday I'm gonna go there.'
"It's like Mick Jagger said in 'Ruby Tuesday', man: 'Lose your dreams an' you will lose your mind.'
"I'm the only person who got out of that place. There's one other guy who got out, because he was a great athlete. He was the second-string quarterback for the New Orleans Saints; now he’s in the World Football League or somethin’. Just about everybody else I graduated with is still back there. They haven’t changed. Got married when they were 18, had a couple kids, an’ now they’re miserable. Gettin’ divorces an’ wonderin’ what’s wrong. An’ I don’t have a thing in common with them. My ten-year class reunion is comin’ up this year on June 21st. On June 21st all those people’ll be back there at the American Legion Hall, havin’ a dance an’ gettin’ drunk, an I’ll be in London at Wembley Stadium with Elton John, playin’ in fronta eighty thousand people."
No one could accuse the Eagles of being programmed. Their individuality constantly asserts itself in the form of internal squabbles. Don addressed the subject by saying:
"Perspective is a real hard thing to keep in this business. Somedays you just feel like, well, the hell with those guys. I don’t feel like doin’ this, I don’t feel like don’ that, an’ they’re screwin’ me over anyway.
"But that’s what makes our group good. We are different. If everybody thought the same an’ played the same an’ everything was homogenous, it would be dull and boring. The fact that we are different is the thing that makes us better. It’s a theory we’ve developed, the theory of Creative Tension."
This theory accounts for the friction that exists as an inherent part of the Eagles’ make-up, a prickliness which is never far beneath the surface. "Hell yes, we fight!" Glenn admits readily. "We fight with our manager. We fight each other. Don and Bernie nearly had a fistfight the other day. We fight about everything: playing too loud, facial expressions, drinkin’ too much, stayin’ up too late... Talking in a restaurant. Not saying anything when you shoulda spoke up. The issue is not the important thing; the important thing is that it gets vented.
"When you’re in a band, when you’re working with a producer, with managers, with a whole lot of other people, it’s all a romantic relationship. When the band don’t get off, the band fights. When a man and his old lady don’t make good love in the space of a certain time, there’s gonna be a fight. It’s gonna get released some way. It’s Creative Tension. We’ve known each other now for a long time, but... it’s still a very frightening experience when you bare your soul to somebody. There’s very few people on this planet you ever do that to, an’ we’re doin’ that to each other constantly. Bein’ in the Eagles is bein’ married to four men. The music is our love life."
There is an album lying on a table by Don’s chair. He picks it up and looks at it. It’s the debut and farewell album by Shiloh, Don’s highschool group from Linden:
"You know," Don says, gazing into the cover photograph taken on the porch of his own grandmother’s cabin, "I’ve lost a lot of friends along the way. All these guys I was in the band with... We grew up together. Grade school. Junior high. High school. Now I don’t ever see ‘em; they hardly talk to me. ‘Cause I made it, an’ they didn’t. You have no idea the trauma and guilt I went through. When I left this band, after eight years, it was like gettin’ a divorce. But I learned a long time ago, some people can come with you an’ some people you gotta leave behind.
"The Eagles never expected to make more’n two albums together, because we found out we didn’t get along. But things kept gettin’ better in spite of ourselves. No matter what we did to mess it up, no matter how much we fought or hated each other... which we really don’t, by the way... But...
"On The Border’s been on the charts for a year, it’s platinum; the new album’s gonna ship gold... it’s like a miracle to me.
"Now we’ve all grown up, an’ decided we are good. People have accepted us, an’... this is our year. I mean, last night was our last night to do two shows in a small hall. It’s gonna be big halls from now on. We just stuck it out. There’s a hump you gotta get over. That’s what separates the men from the boys."
Glenn brings us back to the present. "We’re gonna break wide open this year. We’re gonna go from ninety to ninety-nine, an’ that’s the toughest ten yards. But I just know it. Inside the five with Czonka.
"I mean we got the songs. We got the best country guitarist in Bernie Leadon, an’ the best rock and roll player in the world in Felder, an’ the best high-singin’ bass player, an’ the best sinhin’ drummer an’ I know I’m the grease an’ we are goin’. I know when we’re on, there’s nobody better. An’ that’s all I know."