The story of Eagles

Four roads to the Troubadour

The Eagles story begins with young men from far outside California. Glenn Frey was born in Detroit on the sixth of November 1948 and grew up in nearby Royal Oak, Michigan. He studied piano from the age of five before switching to guitar, and by the mid sixties he was part of the Detroit rock scene. There he befriended Bob Seger, who pushed him to write his own songs, and at nineteen Glenn played acoustic guitar and sang backing vocals on Seger's single Ramblin' Gamblin' Man. Seger later said you can hear Glenn on the first chorus, wailing louder than everybody else. When a girlfriend moved to Los Angeles, Glenn followed, and on his very first day in town he spotted David Crosby sitting on the steps of the Country Store in Laurel Canyon.[1] [2]

In Los Angeles Glenn met a songwriter from Texas named JD Souther. Their girlfriends were sisters, both men were broke, and they started writing songs day and night. Doug Weston, who ran the Troubadour club, managed them and helped pick a name, Longbranch Pennywhistle, and in 1969 the duo released an album on Amos Records. Around the same time Glenn met Jackson Browne. For a short while all three lived in the same apartment building in Echo Park, and Glenn later said he learned a great deal about songwriting just by listening to Jackson work on songs in the apartment below. The Troubadour, with its open mic hoot nights, became the meeting place for this whole circle of hungry young writers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Don Henley came from the other direction. He was born on the twenty second of July 1947 in Gilmer, Texas, and grew up in the small town of Linden. His high school football coach suggested he was too small for the team, so he joined the school band, first on trombone and then on drums. He later left college to spend time with his dying father. With his childhood friend Richard Bowden he played in a string of local groups, and in 1969 a chance meeting with fellow Texan Kenny Rogers changed everything. The band became Shiloh, and Rogers brought them to Los Angeles in June 1970 to record an album while they lived at his home. Just before their first single came out, their bandmate Jerry Surratt was killed in a dirt bike accident.[1]

The other two founders were already veterans of the country rock scene. Randy Meisner, a farmer's son from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, was born on the eighth of March 1946. He took up guitar after seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show and switched to bass on a teacher's advice. In 1968 he became a founding member of Poco, but he quit before their first album came out, angry at being shut out of the final mixing, and his picture on the cover painting was replaced with a dog. He then joined Rick Nelson's Stone Canyon Band. Bernie Leadon, born in 1947, came from bluegrass. He had played in Hearts and Flowers and in Dillard and Clark, then made two albums with the Flying Burrito Brothers alongside Gram Parsons and his old friend Chris Hillman.[1] [2] [3]

Henley and Frey met around the Troubadour in 1970, when both were signed to Amos Records. In 1971 Linda Ronstadt and her manager John Boylan needed musicians for a summer tour, and Boylan hired Glenn because he could play rhythm guitar and sing. Glenn brought in Henley, and Meisner and Leadon also joined Ronstadt's changing group of players. Because the lineup kept shifting, the four of them only backed her together once, at a July concert at Disneyland, though all four play on her self titled album. According to Frey, on the first night of the tour he and Henley decided to start their own band, and Frey later credited Ronstadt with suggesting Leadon and arranging for him to play for her so they could approach him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Aspen, London and a flatbed Ford

The new band found its label through Jackson Browne. When David Geffen could not get Browne a record deal anywhere, Atlantic's boss Ahmet Ertegun told him to start his own company, and in 1971 Geffen and Elliot Roberts founded Asylum Records. Browne introduced Geffen to Frey, and Souther remembered telling Geffen that Glenn would make him far more money than either of them. In September 1971 the four musicians signed to Asylum. Geffen bought Frey and Henley out of their Amos contracts and sent the band to Aspen, Colorado, to learn to play together. That October, still without a name, they played their first show at a club called The Gallery as Teen King and the Emergencies. Teen King was one of Glenn's nicknames.[1] [2] [3]

The name was settled on a trip into the Mojave Desert fuelled by peyote and tequila. Accounts of the exact moment vary, but Bernie Leadon said everyone agrees on one thing, that Glenn thought of it. Glenn liked that it sounded like a street gang, and he insisted the band was simply Eagles, with no the in front. That rule never quite stuck with fans or the press. Geffen and Roberts managed the band at first. A young man in their office, Irving Azoff, made an early impression when Glenn phoned asking for a limousine for the trip to England. Azoff approved it, and when the band later wanted spending money for Christmas, he booked them a tour with Dan Fogelberg opening.[1] [2]

For their first album Frey wanted Glyn Johns, the English engineer behind records by the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin. Johns saw them at a club in Boulder in December 1971 and was not impressed. He heard a band pulling two ways, with Glenn wanting rock and roll and Bernie wanting country. Geffen talked him into a second listen in Los Angeles, and when the four of them picked up acoustic guitars and sang Meisner's ballad Take the Devil in harmony, Johns heard the sound he wanted. In February 1972 he took them to Olympic Studios in London, where they made the album in about two weeks for 125,000 dollars. Johns banned drugs and alcohol in the studio, a rule Glenn resented.[1] [2] [3]

The album opened with Take It Easy. Jackson Browne had started the song for his own debut but got stuck on the second verse, after the line about standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. Glenn kept after him to finish it and finally offered to do it himself, adding the girl in a flatbed Ford slowing down to take a look. Browne later said Glenn finished it in spectacular fashion and arranged it far better than he had. Johns had Leadon play double time banjo, an idea the band thought was crazy. Released on the first of May 1972, it reached number twelve. The album followed on the first of June, and Witchy Woman went to number nine, with Jack Tempchin's Peaceful Easy Feeling reaching twenty two.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Outlaws, and a harder edge

Back in Los Angeles, Henley and Frey decided to write together, and within the first week they had Desperado and Tequila Sunrise. Henley said that was when they became a team. Glenn wanted the second album to be taken seriously, and the idea grew into a loose concept about Old West outlaws, drawing a parallel between gunfighters and rock musicians. A book on Wild West gunfighters that Jackson Browne had been given for his birthday supplied the story of the Doolin Dalton gang. The band recorded at Island Studios in London with Glyn Johns in about four weeks, and Johns limited each song to four or five takes. When he played them the finished album, they carried him out of the control room on their shoulders.[1]

The record company was far less excited. Atlantic's president Jerry Greenberg reportedly complained that they had made a cowboy album. Desperado came out on the seventeenth of April 1973 and stalled at number forty one, still the lowest chart placing of any Eagles album. Neither Tequila Sunrise nor Outlaw Man reached the top fifty, and the title song, now one of their best loved, was never even released as a single. Henley later admitted the cowboy metaphor was a bit of a pose, since they were really young men staying up all night in Los Angeles, rebelling against the music business rather than society. The album also shifted the balance of power, with Frey and Henley writing or co writing eight of its eleven songs.[1] [2]

For the third album Frey and Henley wanted to rock harder. Sessions began again in London with Johns, but after six frustrating weeks they had only two usable songs, Best of My Love and You Never Cry Like a Lover. Johns told them bluntly that the Who were a rock and roll band and they were not. The Eagles went home and hired Bill Szymczyk, a former Navy sonar operator who had produced Joe Walsh. Szymczyk wanted a tougher guitarist for a song called Good Day in Hell, and Leadon suggested his old friend from Gainesville, Florida, Don Felder, who had once jammed backstage with the band in Boston. In January 1974 Felder added slide guitar, and the next day they invited him to become the fifth Eagle.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the Border came out on the twenty second of March 1974 and reached number seventeen. Around this time Irving Azoff took over as the band's manager, the start of a partnership that was still going half a century later. The first two singles were rockers, and Glenn held back the soft Best of My Love. It took a disc jockey in Kalamazoo, Michigan, named Jim Higgs playing the album track over and over before the label tested a local run of a thousand singles. The full release followed in November, but Asylum had shortened the song without asking, and Henley demanded it be pulled from the shops. Instead, on the first of March 1975, it became their first number one.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Superstars, and Bernie's exit

One of These Nights, released on the tenth of June 1975, turned the Eagles into international stars. Many of the songs were written while Frey and Henley shared a house in Beverly Hills, and Henley jokingly called it their satanic country rock period, chasing a dark mood with a disco flavoured beat and dangerous guitars. The title track became their second number one, and Glenn called it his favourite Eagles song. Lyin' Eyes was born at their favourite bar, Dan Tana's, when the pair watched a beautiful young woman sitting with a much older, wealthy man and Glenn said she could not even hide those lying eyes. It reached number two, crossed onto the country chart, and won the band their first Grammy.[1] [2] [3]

The third single, Take It to the Limit, began as a Meisner song. Randy wrote the opening lines one lonely night at home in Los Angeles, and Frey and Henley helped him finish it. Written as a waltz for his soaring high voice, it reached number four and is the only Eagles single with Randy on lead vocals. Szymczyk remembered Randy worrying that if it became a hit he would have to hit that note every night, which is exactly what happened. In July the album reached number one, the first of four chart topping albums in a row. The band made the cover of Rolling Stone that September, and played to fifty five thousand people at Anaheim Stadium with Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bernie Leadon was growing unhappy. He wrote three songs for the album, including the banjo instrumental Journey of the Sorcerer and I Wish You Peace, written with his girlfriend Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald Reagan. Henley later dismissed that one as smarmy cocktail music. Bernie worried about the endless cycle of recording, touring and drug use, and suggested the band take a month off in Hawaii to recover. Frey and Henley refused. One night, as Glenn was talking excitedly about where the band should go next, Bernie poured a beer over his head and told him he needed to chill out. In December 1975, after months of denials, the band announced that Leadon had left.[1] [2] [3]

His replacement was Joe Walsh, a friend of the band who shared their manager and their producer. Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1947, Walsh had made his name with the James Gang and then with solo hits like Rocky Mountain Way. Henley in particular worried that he was too wild for the Eagles. Meanwhile, in February 1976, the label released Their Greatest Hits 1971 to 1975. The band had little say, and Henley hated seeing songs lifted out of their albums, but a week after release it became the first album ever certified platinum, an award the industry had only just created. It went on to become the best selling album of the twentieth century in America.[1] [2] [3]

Checking in to Hotel California

The next album's title song began with a cassette. Don Felder had rented a beach house in Malibu, and one summer day, sitting in his swimsuit with a twelve string guitar, the chords just came to him. He recorded them on a four track machine with a drum machine and a bass line, and later handed his bandmates a tape of instrumental ideas. Henley was driving through Beverly Hills at night when he first heard it and thought, this has potential. To him it sounded like a Mexican reggae or a bolero, so the working title became Mexican Reggae. Frey and Henley then wrote the words, imagining a tired traveller who pulls in to a strange hotel in the desert and finds he can never leave.[1] [2] [3]

Henley chose the Beverly Hills Hotel as the symbol, because it had become the focal point of their lives in Los Angeles. Frey wanted the song to open like an episode of The Twilight Zone, with each door leading to a new version of reality, like a character in John Fowles's novel The Magus. Frey also said the line about steely knives was a playful nod to Steely Dan, who had name checked the Eagles in one of their own songs. Henley has explained it many ways, as a journey from innocence to experience and as a look at the dark underbelly of the American dream, about excess, narcissism and the music business. It's not really about California, he said, it's about America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Recording was split between the Record Plant in Los Angeles and Criteria Studios in Miami, because Szymczyk had developed a fear of earthquakes. Black Sabbath were working next door at Criteria and were so loud that the gentle closing song, The Last Resort, had to be recorded again and again. The title song was cut three times. The first version was pitched too high for Henley, who Felder said sounded like Barry Gibb, so Felder dropped the key from E minor to B minor. The second was too fast. In Miami the band recorded complete takes and Szymczyk spliced the best moments together, with thirty three edits on the master tape. Then Felder and Walsh began the closing guitar duel.[1] [2] [3] [4]

When Felder and Walsh started improvising, Henley stopped them and said it had to be played just like the demo. Felder had made that demo a year earlier and could not remember it, so his housekeeper in Malibu played the cassette down the telephone to Miami. Walsh brought the riff that became Life in the Fast Lane, a title Glenn picked up from a drug dealer doing ninety on the freeway. Hotel California was released on the eighth of December 1976. New Kid in Town and the title song both reached number one, and the album spent eight weeks at the top. At the 1978 Grammys the title song won Record of the Year, though the album lost Album of the Year to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The eleven month tour that followed wore everyone down, and Henley later said the band probably peaked with Hotel California and then began growing apart. Randy Meisner was exhausted, suffering from stomach ulcers, and his marriage was failing. He was shy and hated standing centre stage for Take It to the Limit, especially as the high notes got harder. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in June 1977, he had the flu and would not come out to sing it for an encore. Glenn confronted him, and the argument turned into a physical fight backstage. Randy said later that nobody would talk to him and he felt like an outcast in the band he had helped start. He played his last show on the third of September 1977.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Long Run, and a long night

The replacement was obvious. Timothy B. Schmit, born in Oakland in 1947 and raised in Sacramento, had auditioned for Poco in 1968 and lost out to Meisner, then replaced him there when Randy quit. Now he replaced him again. For a band thought of as the ultimate California group, Schmit was the only member actually born in California. He brought an unfinished song that Frey and Henley helped complete, I Can't Tell You Why. Glenn told him he could sing like Smokey Robinson and steered it toward rhythm and blues, and at the listening party Henley turned to him and said, there's your first hit. The new lineup's first release, a 1978 cover of Charles Brown's Please Come Home for Christmas, reached number eighteen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Making The Long Run was agony. The band started in 1978 with few songs, planning a double album, but the ideas never came, and the record took eighteen months in five different studios. Henley later said they were completely burned out and doing far too many drugs under tremendous pressure. When Bob Seger asked Glenn whether the album was done, Glenn answered that the album was done with them. Seger helped out. One night at Glenn's house the two were jamming a shuffle when Seger suddenly sang the chorus of Heartache Tonight. Glenn phoned Joe Walsh at one in the morning, Walsh came over and added a bridge, and JD Souther and Henley helped finish the words.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Long Run was released on the twenty fourth of September 1979 and spent nine weeks at number one. Heartache Tonight became their fifth and final number one single that November and won a Grammy, and both the title track and I Can't Tell You Why reached number eight. Critics were cooler, many calling it a letdown after Hotel California. Henley said the title song was partly a reply to writers who called the band old news in the age of disco and punk, a song about lasting the distance written while the group was imploding. Glenn admitted that during this album he and Henley learned that lyrics are not an endless resource, because they had said so much on Hotel California.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The end came on the thirty first of July 1980 at the Long Beach Arena, at a benefit concert for California Senator Alan Cranston. Felder objected to playing a political fundraiser. Backstage he muttered a sarcastic I guess after being thanked, and Frey was furious. Onstage the two men spent the whole set threatening each other between songs. Felder remembered Glenn telling him during Best of My Love that he would beat him up once they got offstage, and Glenn remembered Felder counting down how many songs were left. Afterwards Felder smashed an acoustic guitar against a concrete pillar. A few days later Szymczyk told him there was no band at this time. It became known as the Long Night at Wrong Beach.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Eagles still owed their label a live album. Eagles Live was finished with Frey in Los Angeles and the others in Miami, and Szymczyk joked they were fixing three part harmonies by Federal Express. The liner notes thanked five lawyers and simply said thank you and goodnight. That November, Henley's life took a dark turn. Paramedics were called to his Los Angeles home, where a sixteen year old girl had apparently overdosed, and police found cocaine, marijuana and Quaaludes. The girl was charged with prostitution and a fifteen year old friend was also arrested. Henley pleaded no contest to contributing to the delinquency of a minor and was fined two thousand five hundred dollars and put on two years probation.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fourteen years apart

For fourteen years there was no Eagles, and Henley became the biggest solo success. In 1981 he sang on Leather and Lace, a hit duet with his girlfriend Stevie Nicks. His first album gave him Dirty Laundry, a number three hit inspired by the press coverage of his arrest. Building the Perfect Beast in 1984 brought The Boys of Summer, which won a Grammy and the MTV award for Video of the Year, and The End of the Innocence, written with Bruce Hornsby, won him another Grammy in 1990. That year he founded the Walden Woods Project to protect the woods around Henry David Thoreau's famous pond from development. Then a long legal fight with Geffen Records over his contract stalled his solo career.[1] [2]

Glenn Frey went solo too, writing most of his hits with Jack Tempchin, the author of Peaceful Easy Feeling. His 1982 album No Fun Aloud gave him The One You Love, and his biggest successes came through film and television. The Heat Is On from Beverly Hills Cop and You Belong to the City from Miami Vice both reached number two, and he even acted in the Miami Vice episode named after his song Smuggler's Blues. He was first choice to sing Shakedown for Beverly Hills Cop Two, but disliked the lyrics and then caught laryngitis. When Bob Seger took it to number one instead, Glenn rang to congratulate him, joking that at least they had kept the money in Michigan.[1] [2] [3]

The others scattered. Joe Walsh made solo records, ran a joke campaign for president in 1980 promising free gas for everyone, and sank deep into alcohol and cocaine. Stevie Nicks, who dated him in the mid eighties, later said he left because he feared their drug use would kill one of them. Walsh dates his recovery to 1993. Felder did session work, wrote songs for the Heavy Metal film soundtrack, and scored a cartoon series called Galaxy High. Schmit sang the soaring high vocals at the end of Toto's Africa, toured with Jimmy Buffett, whose fans he nicknamed Parrotheads, and joined Walsh in Ringo Starr's All Starr Band. Meisner had a solo hit with Hearts on Fire, and Leadon returned to bluegrass and gospel.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Whenever someone asked when the Eagles would get back together, the answer was, when hell freezes over. In 1982 Frey even ruled out what he called a Lost Youth and Greed tour, and when a reunion was attempted in 1990, Glenn was the only holdout. What changed things was a tribute album. Common Thread, a 1993 collection of Eagles songs by country stars, sold millions and proved the demand was still there. Travis Tritt asked the Long Run lineup to appear in his video for Take It Easy, and in December 1993 Henley, Frey, Felder, Walsh and Schmit gathered in a Los Angeles bar for the shoot. When they picked up their instruments, the old magic came back.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hell freezes over

Two months after the video shoot, Frey and Henley met their management over lunch and agreed to reunite. In April 1994 the Eagles played together for the first time in fourteen years, filming an MTV special at Warner Bros Studios in Burbank. Glenn opened by telling the crowd that for the record, they never broke up, they just took a fourteen year vacation. Felder reworked Hotel California as an acoustic piece with a flamenco style introduction. The album, Hell Freezes Over, paired that concert with four new studio songs, including Get Over It and the Schmit sung Love Will Keep Us Alive. Released on the eighth of November 1994, it went to number one and has sold more than nine million copies in America.[1] [2] [3]

The tour began on the twenty seventh of May 1994 and became one of the most successful in music history, famous for its record setting ticket prices. It was interrupted that September when Frey suffered a serious recurrence of diverticulitis, then resumed in 1995 and ran into 1996. Before it could begin, the band had to sue its old label, Elektra, to stop a rival greatest hits album. Money was also reshaping the group. According to Felder's later lawsuit, earnings had always been split five ways, but for the reunion Henley and Frey insisted on bigger shares. Their lawyer argued they had earned them by founding the band and writing most of the songs. Henley once said rock bands work best as a benevolent dictatorship.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1998 the Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the first year they were nominated. At the ceremony in New York, all seven men who had ever been Eagles, Frey, Henley, Leadon, Meisner, Felder, Walsh and Schmit, played together for the only time, performing Take It Easy and Hotel California. In December 1999 the industry honoured Their Greatest Hits as the best selling album of the century. The band saw out the millennium with shows in Las Vegas and a New Year's Eve concert at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, with Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne also on the bill. Meisner asked to sit in that night and was turned down. Those shows were Felder's last with the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the sixth of February 2001 Don Felder was fired. He sued Henley, Frey and the band's company for wrongful termination and breach of fiduciary duty, reportedly seeking fifty million dollars, and claimed he had been pressured into deals that gave them far bigger shares, including triple his share of a new box set. Their lawyer replied that Henley and Frey felt, creatively and in terms of chemistry, that Felder should no longer be in the band, and that they had every legal right to remove him. They countersued, accusing him of shopping a tell all book. The case was settled out of court in 2007 for an undisclosed sum, and Felder's memoir, Heaven and Hell, came out that November in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The long road, and losing Glenn

The four piece Eagles of Frey, Henley, Walsh and Schmit kept touring, with Steuart Smith taking over Felder's guitar parts. In 2003 they released The Very Best Of, featuring a new song about the September eleventh attacks, Hole in the World. Work on a new studio album dragged on for about six years. When Long Road Out of Eden finally arrived on the thirtieth of October 2007, it was their first album of new songs since 1979 and their first ever double album, sold in America only through Walmart and the band's website. It sold more than seven hundred thousand copies in its first week and went to number one in America and Britain. JD Souther's How Long, a song they had played live in the seventies, won them a Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album had a political edge, with several songs sharply criticising the Iraq War and the Bush administration. Henley told CNN it was probably the last Eagles album they would ever make. The tour opened at London's O2 Arena in March 2008. Then in 2013 came History of the Eagles, an authorised two part documentary directed by Alison Ellwood with Alex Gibney producing, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won an Emmy for its sound mixing. It told the story without hiding the fights. Felder took part, but complained that it glorified Henley and Frey and left a lot out, and said he was surprised by how much anger they still felt toward him, especially Glenn.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour that followed ran from July 2013 to July 2015, and it brought back Bernie Leadon to play alongside the band. Meisner was invited too, but was too ill. In March 2013 he had choked on food at home and spent time in a coma, and he later revealed that his old bandmates had paid his hospital bills. Felder was not asked. The final date, on the twenty ninth of July 2015 in Bossier City, Louisiana, became Glenn Frey's last public concert with the Eagles. Two days later the band played one more show in secret, nine songs for a major donor's birthday at a school in St. Louis, and even the three hundred guests had not known the Eagles would be playing.[1] [2] [3]

Glenn had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 2000, and the medication he took for it eventually led to colitis and pneumonia. In November 2015 the band postponed its Kennedy Center Honors because he needed major intestinal surgery. He never had the operation. He was placed in a medically induced coma at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and died there on the eighteenth of January 2016, aged sixty seven. Henley said crossing paths with Glenn in 1970 had changed his life forever, calling him a brother and admitting that, like most families, theirs had some dysfunction. In February the surviving Eagles, Leadon and Jackson Browne played Take It Easy at the Grammys, and Henley called it an appropriate farewell.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Randy Meisner's later years were troubled. He had long struggled with alcohol, and in 2015 a friend went to court seeking a conservatorship, alleging that his wife Lana Rae was keeping him drunk, claims the couple denied. Court papers described bipolar disorder and threats to harm himself and others. On the sixth of March 2016, less than two months after Glenn's death, police answered a domestic call at the couple's home in Studio City. About ninety minutes later Lana Meisner was killed when a rifle she was lifting from a case in a closet accidentally fired. Police and the coroner ruled it an accident, and said Randy cooperated fully. Days later he asked a court to appoint friends to help care for him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Deacon, Vince and the long goodbye

Henley changed his mind about ending the band. He said he had been in shock when he called it finished, and that messages from fans around the world had asked for the songs to go on. His answer came from the old guild system, where a craft passes from father to son. In July 2017 the Eagles headlined the Classic West and Classic East festivals, organised by Irving Azoff, with Glenn's son Deacon singing his father's songs alongside the country star Vince Gill. Gill said he was grateful, but that in his heart of hearts he wished he was not doing it, because that would mean Glenn was still around. In January 2018 Glenn's widow Cindy filed a wrongful death suit against Mount Sinai Hospital and a gastroenterologist.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new lineup settled in, and its 2018 shows at the Forum in Los Angeles became a live album. In 2019 the band began playing all of Hotel California with an orchestra and choir, first in Las Vegas and then on a tour that the pandemic interrupted in 2020. According to Pollstar, the Hotel California tour grossed about 250 million dollars over ninety shows. In April 2022 Deacon Frey stepped away to forge his own path, with the band saying he had done an extraordinary thing by stepping into his father's very public world at twenty four. Gill took over Take It Easy, Already Gone and Tequila Sunrise, and Schmit took Peaceful Easy Feeling.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixth of July 2023 the Eagles announced The Long Goodbye, a farewell tour with Steely Dan, calling it their swan song and saying the time had come to close the circle. Deacon came back for it, and it opened at Madison Square Garden on the seventh of September. Before it began, on the twenty sixth of July 2023, Randy Meisner died in Los Angeles from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, aged seventy seven. The band called him an integral part of the Eagles and praised his astonishing vocal range. In September 2024 the Eagles lost another of their inner circle. JD Souther, co writer of Best of My Love, New Kid in Town and Heartache Tonight, died at home in New Mexico, aged seventy eight.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In early 2024 Henley took the witness stand in an unusual criminal case. Three men, the rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, the former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and the memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski, were accused of conspiring over about a hundred pages of Henley's handwritten lyrics to Hotel California and other songs. All three pleaded not guilty. The pages had come from the writer Ed Sanders, who worked on an authorised Eagles biography that was never published. Henley testified that he had only lent them for research. On the sixth of March 2024 prosecutors dropped the case midtrial, after Henley waived attorney client privilege and a batch of emails emerged. The judge said witnesses and their lawyers had used privilege to hide information.[1] [2] [3]

In September 2024 the Eagles began a residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, and by early 2026 they had announced more dates there than any other act. In January 2025 their guitarist of a quarter century, Steuart Smith, retired after being diagnosed with parkinsonism, and Dallas guitarist Chris Holt stepped in, saying he was trying to fill the giant shoes of those before him. In January 2026, almost fifty years after its release, Their Greatest Hits became the first album ever certified quadruple diamond, for forty million units, with Hotel California the third biggest album on the list. Henley said it was gratifying to be part of something that endures. As of 2026, Henley, Walsh and Schmit were still flying, with Vince Gill and Deacon Frey beside them.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Eagles

Glenn Frey and Don Henley. They met around the Troubadour in 1970 and decided to form a band on the first night of Linda Ronstadt's tour. Within a week of writing together they had Desperado and Tequila Sunrise, and they went on to write most of the Eagles' hits. Frey was the quarterback, Henley the secret weapon voice. By 1980 they were barely speaking, yet Henley said the bond they forged was never broken, and he called Glenn his brother when he died.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Glenn Frey and Don Felder. Glenn was the one who asked Felder to join in 1974, and the two traded guitar parts happily on One of These Nights. By The Long Run they were openly hostile, and at Long Beach in 1980 they spent a whole concert threatening each other. After Felder was fired in 2001 they spoke only through lawyers. When Glenn died, Felder said he had always hoped they would one day share a dinner and let it go with a handshake and a hug.[1] [2] [3]

Don Henley and Don Felder. Henley and Felder co wrote Visions and Hotel California, but losing the lead vocal on Victim of Love to Henley left Felder feeling the song had been taken from him. After Felder's firing and his lawsuit, Henley called him bitter and his memoir a cheap shot, while Felder called Henley a hypocrite for posing as a champion of artists' rights. By 2025, Felder said that when they bump into each other they are very cordial about it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Randy Meisner and Timothy B. Schmit. Schmit auditioned for Poco in 1968 and lost the job to Meisner. When Meisner quit Poco, Schmit replaced him, and when Meisner left the Eagles in 1977, Schmit replaced him again, since the band agreed he was the only candidate. There was no rivalry. The two sang backing vocals together on Richard Marx's Don't Mean Nothing, and Schmit paid tribute to Meisner in his Hall of Fame speech in 1998.[1] [2] [3]

Glenn Frey and Jackson Browne. They met playing the same Los Angeles clubs, and for a while lived in the same Echo Park building, where Glenn learned songwriting by listening to Browne through the floor. Browne helped get Glenn signed to Asylum, and together they finished Take It Easy, the Eagles' first single. Decades later Browne stood with the surviving Eagles at the 2016 Grammys to sing that song in Glenn's memory.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eagles and JD Souther. Souther was Glenn Frey's first partner in Longbranch Pennywhistle and later co wrote Best of My Love, New Kid in Town, Heartache Tonight and more. He was once invited to join, but after one rehearsal for Geffen he decided the band was exceptional as it was. Frey joked that Souther's solo career suffered because he gave the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt his best songs. Souther agreed that was sort of true, and asked critics whether they would like to see the royalty checks.[1] [2] [3]

Eagles and Irving Azoff. Azoff started out approving Glenn Frey's limousine request and took over as manager during the On the Border era. He was feared across the industry and nicknamed the Poison Dwarf, and Henley once said Azoff was Satan, but he was their Satan. He fought the band's battles for five decades, was sent to take Felder to dinner while Henley recorded over his vocal, organised the festivals that brought them back in 2017, and testified for Henley at the lyrics trial.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Eagles and Glyn Johns. The English producer shaped their early sound, falling for their harmonies when they sang Take the Devil and recording their first two albums in London. But he preferred them as a country rock band, banned drugs in the studio, and told them they were not a rock and roll band like the Who. The split came during On the Border, though his production of Best of My Love gave them their first number one.[1] [2] [3]

Eagles and Bill Szymczyk. Szymczyk, a former Navy sonar operator with no musical training, took over On the Border and produced every Eagles studio album from then until 1979, and again on Long Road Out of Eden. He recorded their harmonies as a group, stitched Hotel California together from thirty three edits, and suggested bringing in Joe Walsh, whom he had produced for years. The band called him Coach.[1] [2] [3]

Don Henley and David Geffen. Geffen signed the Eagles to Asylum and sent them to Aspen to learn their craft. Years later he became Henley's adversary. In 1993 Geffen Records sued Henley for thirty million dollars after he tried to leave his solo contract, and Henley countersued, claiming Geffen had arranged for other labels not to sign him. The dispute was only resolved when the Eagles reunited and Hell Freezes Over came out on Geffen Records.[1] [2] [3]

Glenn Frey and Bob Seger. Seger met Glenn in Detroit when Glenn was a teenager, and Glenn's mother caught them smoking pot together. Glenn sang on Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, and Seger encouraged him to write his own songs. Later Seger co wrote Heartache Tonight, Glenn sang on Fire Lake and Against the Wind, and Seger joined the Eagles at the 2017 Classic West to sing the song they wrote together. He called Glenn the kid brother he never had.[1] [2] [3]

Joe Walsh and Stevie Nicks. Walsh and Nicks were together in the mid eighties, and on tour in 1984 he took her to a park in Boulder where he had placed a drinking fountain in memory of his daughter Emma, who died in a car accident in 1974. That visit inspired Nicks's song Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You. She later called Walsh the great love of her life, and said he left because he feared their cocaine use would kill one of them.[1]

Rare facts about Eagles

• Before they had a name, the Eagles played their first show as Teen King and the Emergencies. The gig was at a club called The Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, in October 1971, where David Geffen had sent them to develop as a band. Teen King was one of Glenn Frey's nicknames.[1] [2]
• The band posed for the inside photo of their first album while on peyote in Joshua Tree. Glenn Frey revealed it in History of the Eagles. David Geffen also glued the planned fold out poster shut, so the gatefold picture ended up upside down.[1]
• A song swap on the debut album gave Henley a second lead vocal and cost Frey one. Nightingale, sung by Henley, was meant to be a B side, but was added to the album. Frey's Get You in the Mood was dropped and became the B side of Take It Easy.[1] [2]
• Desperado is the only Eagles album with the band on the front cover. The back cover restages the capture of the Dalton Gang, with the four Eagles, Jackson Browne and JD Souther lying dead, and producer Glyn Johns among the posse. Sam Peckinpah once planned to turn the album into a film.[1]
• Best of My Love became a national number one because of one radio station in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Disc jockey Jim Higgs kept playing the album track at WKMI. Asylum tested a thousand local copies before giving the single a full release in November 1974.[1]
• Irving Azoff answered an unauthorised edit of Best of My Love with the Golden Hacksaw Award. Asylum shortened the single without the band's permission. When it sold a million, Azoff sent the label a gold record with a piece cut out, mounted on a plaque.[1]
• Eagles records hid jokes in the vinyl run out grooves. On the Border reads, he who hesitates is lunch. One of These Nights says, don't worry, nothing will be OK. The Long Run says, never let your monster lay down.[1] [2] [3]
• The vocal credit T.N.T.S. on On the Border stands for Tanqueray and tonic. It was producer Bill Szymczyk's favourite drink, and Henley said it helped loosen up the hand claps and backing vocals on the title track.[1]
• At the end of the song On the Border, Glenn Frey whispers say goodnight, Dick. The line borrowed a catchphrase from Rowan and Martin but aimed it at Richard Nixon. He resigned five months after the album came out.[1]
• Bernie Leadon's banjo piece Journey of the Sorcerer became the theme of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams wanted something that sounded spacey but not serious, found it on One of These Nights, and used it for the BBC radio series from 1978.[1] [2]
• Their Greatest Hits was the first album ever certified platinum. The RIAA introduced the platinum award in 1976, and the compilation received it on the twenty fourth of February, a week after release.[1]
• Randy Meisner wrote Take It to the Limit one lonely night at home in Los Angeles. He said he was feeling lonely and began singing the opening line about being all alone at the end of the evening. The song spent twenty three weeks on the Hot 100.[1] [2]
• The first line of Lyin' Eyes was stitched together from six takes recorded on four different days. Bill Szymczyk said even the two syllables of the word city came from two separate vocal performances. He called it their nitpick phase.[1]
• Black Sabbath were recording next door while the Eagles made Hotel California. Sabbath were so loud at Criteria Studios in Miami that the Eagles' quiet closer, The Last Resort, had to be recorded several times.[1] [2]
• On the Hotel California tour, Don Henley's own king size mattress travelled with the equipment. He had terrible back pain from singing while drumming. The crew hauled it everywhere, but according to one electrician no hotel ever let them bring it in.[1]
• The Hotel California cover was shot from a sixty foot cherry picker over Sunset Boulevard. Photographer David Alexander and designer Kosh shot the Beverly Hills Hotel at sunset in rush hour traffic. When people worked out which hotel it was, it threatened legal action.[1] [2]
• Felder's housekeeper helped finish Hotel California by holding a phone up to a cassette player. Henley wanted the closing solos played exactly as on Felder's year old demo, which was at his house in Malibu, while the band was recording in Miami.[1] [2]
• The steely knives in Hotel California are a nod to Steely Dan. Steely Dan had sung about turning up the Eagles in their song Everything You Did, so Glenn Frey returned the favour.[1]
• American crew members held in China in 2001 were reportedly asked to recite Hotel California. After a US spy plane made an emergency landing, their captors apparently treated the song as a symbol of America and used it to test their nationality.[1]
• The Eagles' version of Please Come Home for Christmas was the first Christmas song in the top twenty since 1963. It reached number eighteen in 1978, the first holiday hit that high since Roy Orbison's Pretty Paper, and it came back to the Hot 100 in 2021.[1]
• Timothy B. Schmit sings the soaring high vocals at the end of Toto's Africa. He also played twelve string guitar on it. While touring with Jimmy Buffett in the mid eighties, he coined the word Parrotheads for Buffett's fans.[1]
• Timothy B. Schmit is the only Eagle actually born in California. The Eagles are seen as the ultimate California band, yet Frey came from Detroit, Henley from Texas, Meisner from Nebraska, Felder from Florida and Walsh from Kansas. Schmit was born in Oakland.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
• For about twenty years a con man impersonated Randy Meisner. Lewis Peter Morgan used the disguise to con hotels, instrument makers, casinos and women. He had earlier been charged with impersonating Don Henley.[1]
• Joe Walsh once sold his Les Paul guitar to Jimmy Page for about 1,200 dollars. It happened in 1969, while Walsh was the guitarist in the James Gang, the band that first made his name.[1]
• Joe Walsh ran a joke campaign for president in 1980, promising free gas for everyone. He was only thirty two, too young to serve, and pledged to make Life's Been Good the national song. In 1992 he ran a mock vice presidential campaign.[1]
• Part of Walsh's guitar in Life in the Fast Lane came from a solo he played years earlier. In 1973 he played a slide solo on Michael Stanley's Rosewood Bitters, and later lifted part of it for the Eagles hit.[1]
• The Eagles turned down two million dollars to add two new songs to Eagles Live. The band was barely speaking in 1980, so the album was stitched together by post, with five lawyers thanked in the liner notes.[1]
• Glenn Frey played basketball with a vertical leap Randy Newman estimated at forty inches. Newman played with him on a small indoor court at Amigo studios and said Glenn kept soaring up despite being about five foot eleven.[1]
• Henley and Frey wrote in a rented house partly so Henley would stop tidying up after Glenn. Irving Azoff testified in 2024 that Henley picked up Frey's beer bottles and cigarette butts, which drove them both crazy. Henley wrote on yellow legal pads, Frey on white.[1] [2]
• Long Road Out of Eden kept Britney Spears's Blackout from debuting at number one. Billboard changed its rules at the last minute to count albums sold exclusively through one retailer, and the Walmart only Eagles album sold more than seven hundred thousand copies in week one.[1] [2]
• Two days after their last public show with Glenn Frey, the Eagles played a secret private concert. They performed nine songs for three hundred guests at a school in St. Louis for a donor's fifty ninth birthday, and even the guests did not know in advance.[1]
• A statue of Glenn Frey now stands on the famous corner in Winslow, Arizona. It was unveiled on the twenty fourth of September 2016 at Standin' on the Corner Park, funded partly by a Phoenix classic rock radio show.[1] [2]
• Before Hell Freezes Over, Glenn Frey was the lone holdout against a reunion. A 1990 attempt failed because of him. Filming Travis Tritt's video in 1993, he said he remembered how much they had genuinely liked each other.[1]
• Henley's Walden Woods Project helped protect the land around Thoreau's famous pond. He founded it in 1990, and in 2005 held a fundraising concert with Elton John to buy Brister's Hill, part of the woods, as a hiking trail.[1]
• In 2022 Joe Walsh reunited the James Gang for the Taylor Hawkins tribute at Wembley. It was the trio's first show in sixteen years, and Dave Grohl joined on drums for Funk Number Forty Nine, noting that Hawkins often wore a James Gang hat.[1]
• Felder claimed he taught a young Tom Petty to play guitar, but Petty disagreed. Petty said Felder never taught him guitar at the Gainesville music shop, though he did teach him piano.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.