the Eagles

the Eagles, American band that cultivated country rock as the reigning style and sensibility of white youth in the United States during the 1970s. The original members were Don Henley (b. July 22, 1947, Gilmer, Texas, U.S.), Glenn Frey (b. November 6, 1948, Detroit, Michigan—d. January 18, 2016, New York, New York), Bernie Leadon (b. July 19, 1947, Minneapolis, Minnesota), and Randy Meisner (b. March 8, 1946, Scottsbluff, Nebraska—d. July 26, 2023, Los Angeles, California). Later members included Don Felder (b. September 21, 1947, Topanga, California), Joe Walsh (b. November 20, 1947, Wichita, Kansas), and Timothy B. Schmit (b. October 30, 1947, Sacramento, California).

Los Angeles-based professional pop musicians, the Eagles recorded with Linda Ronstadt before the 1972 release of their eponymous debut album. Clearly, from the band’s earliest laid-back grooves on hits like “Take It Easy” to the title song of their 1973 Desperado album—the “Ave Maria” of 1970s rock—to the later studio intricacies of One of These Nights (1975), Henley’s band felt a mission to portray emotional ups and downs in personal ways. However, the Eagles were content to do so within the boundaries of certain musical forms and music industry conventions, pushing and expanding them gently or aggressively at different junctures along the way. This willingness to play by the rules may have been as responsible for the success of their resolutely formal, exceptionally dramatic songs as was the Eagles’ hankering for the fiddles and dusty ambiences of the country rock movement they polished for popular consumption.

Before the Eagles recorded, country rock was a local alternative in late 1960s Los Angeles. After they recorded, it became the soundtrack for the lives of millions of 1970s rock kids who, keen on the present yet suspicious of glam rock and disco, donned suede jackets and faded jeans to flirt with the California dream restyled as traditional Americana.

The band’s Hotel California (1976) was, in this respect, their masterpiece. With the craft of songwriting as central to their approach as it is to that of any country singer, the Eagles’ music had begun as well-detailed melodies delivered by Henley and Frey with some nasality. The arrangements, with percussion far more forward than anything Nashville producers would have brooked, started out in a starkly rock mode with rustic accents. By the time they began work on Hotel California, they were joined by ex-James Gang guitarist Walsh, who combined technical expertise with native rambunctiousness. His contribution, mixed with an increasingly assured blend of country directness and Hollywood studio calculation, made for an unmatched country rock–pop fusion that started with One of These Nights and reached its apex with The Long Run (1979). Hotel California, coming at the midpoint of the band’s later period, captured the style at its most relaxed and forceful. Afterward, as punk and new wave repeated country rock’s journey from underground to mainstream, the Eagles’ music subsided.

Beginning in the 1980s, Henley enjoyed a solo career as an increasingly subtle singer-songwriter. As the Eagles had done in the 1970s, he engaged stylistically with his times, staring down electropop on 1984’s moving “Boys of Summer” smash. The Eagles’ music, although never exactly replicated, became the envy of mainstream Nashville artists who longed for some sort of mainstream edge. In 1993 Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles, a tribute album performed by country artists like Vince Gill and Travis Tritt, became a blockbuster in that field. The group’s nostalgia-tinged yet still musically vibrant reunion tour and album in 1994 featured four new songs and proved even more successful. In 1998 the Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The band reunited again for Long Road Out of Eden (2007), a double album that represented the Eagles’ first collection of completely new material in almost three decades. It was a hit with both critics and fans, and the album also signaled the group’s departure from the traditional industry model of production and distribution. Released on the band’s own Eagles Recording Company label, the North American version of the album was available only through the Eagles’ official Web site and at Wal-Mart stores. In 2009 “I Dreamed There Was No War,” a track from Long Road Out of Eden, won the Grammy Award for best pop instrumental performance. The band released the two-part documentary History of the Eagles in 2013.

The Eagles were named Kennedy Center honorees in 2015 but deferred the honour until the following year because of Frey’s illness; he died in 2016. They reconvened for two concerts in 2017, with Deacon Frey standing in for his father and the addition of Gill. In 2018 the Eagles resumed touring.