A Vulture Takes Flight

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Glenn Frey is dead but that’s not stopping Don Henley and a band he still bills as ‘The Eagles’ from circling festivals this summer to pick what cash remains off the bones of life in the past lane

By Mark Cromer

Call it a peaceful, greedy feeding. Just don’t call it a tequila surprise.

If rock n’ roll in its glory years was occasionally defined by a beautifully hedonistic pageant of tragedies; from Janis Joplin found still tied-off in her dingy Hollywood motel room with her dealer’s change clutched in her hand to a blissfully bloated Jim Morrison internally bleeding out in the bathtub of his Paris apartment after his liver finally exploded, from Gram Parsons catching the mainline morphine train off the planet at the Joshua Tree Inn with an ice-cube shoved up his ass by his fellow junkies in a feeble effort to resuscitate him to an Elvis-cum-Jim Jones-a la-Evel Knievel exiting this mortal coil while actually sitting on the shitter, it shouldn’t be too shocking that following graceless death in rock there is little dignity to be found among the survivors in its aftermath.

And leave it to Donald Hugh Henley to make that case most convincingly.

Hardly a year has passed since Glenn Frey, one of the most important singer-songwriter-guitarists to shape the golden stretch of rock in the 1970s alongside Henley in their band The Eagles, died in a New York hospital bed from a wave of maladies that had set in following stomach surgery. It was the rare rock death that was oddly normal and at age 67, not entirely unexpected. The following month the band, along with their peer and original cohort Jackson Browne, took to the stage at The Grammys to pay homage to their friend and musical collaborator.

It certainly seemed a fitting coda to a magical multi-decade run for The Eagles and a wonderful send-off to their co-founder Frey, that casual denim genius of theirs that used to stand up front onstage and open shows with the sly if simple greeting of: “Hello, we’re The Eagles from Los Angeles.”

Frey’s classic opener was a tip of the hat to his fellow Angeleno also from somewhere else—Jim Morrison—who onstage with The Doors always reveled in reminding the audiences around the states that they were just another LA band. Dig it or suck it. Either way. Or better yet: both. Nonetheless Morrison always made sure the return address read: From Los Angeles, California.

So the Grammys 2016 sure seemed like the right last goodnight for The Eagles.

“That was the final farewell,” Henley said backstage in the aftermath. “I don’t think you’ll see us performing again. I think that was probably it. I think it was an appropriate farewell.”

Well, as it turns out, evidently not.

Just days before he turns 70 this July, Henley will take the stage at Dodger Stadium and, assuming he’ll still be sitting behind his drums, will drive a backbeat for some lineup that he and legendary rock manager Irving Azoff claim, on advice of legal counsel, are indeed The Eagles.

And a week later, their transparently Made In Hollywood imitation will do it again onstage at the appropriately named Citi Field in New York.

For long gone are the days when Frey and Henley would be whiffing bumpers of Bolivian after the show, more concerned about which chicks had been given their notorious ‘Third Encore’ backstage passes by The Eagles road crew than what the band’s take at the gate had been that night, now replaced by a team of CPAs that are working their laptops while the closest Henley comes to coke is the chilled bottle of Dasani he nurses as he waits to hear what his slice of the cash pie looks like, not his cut of the powder.

Glenn Frey, about to check in, circa 1976.

Well, I suppose to be fair, The Eagles had lost some of their authentic altitude sometime before Frey flatlined last year, as they’d started semi-methodically cashing in for years after their startling—and beautifully staged—Hell Freezes Over tour in the mid-1990s. That ice storm in Hades was conceived as a ‘continuation tour’ that picked up where the band had left off in the high summer of 1980 when their The Long Run tour imploded at its end after an infamously acrimonious show at the Long Beach Arena that Joe Walsh would later declare to be “The Long Night in Wrong Beach.”

With the same lineup that recorded and toured The Long Run, Frey, Henley, Walsh, Don Felder and Timothy B. Schmidt set forth across an American landscape that they helped define a generation earlier and they did it convincingly as men in their 40s who had survived to not just reflect on where they had been, but elaborate a little further on what it all meant and in doing so perhaps speculate as to where we we’re heading. They were five guys who still possessed the musical chops—there was blessedly no army of ‘supporting musicians’ half their age carrying the show from the shadows of the stage—and their five-part harmonies could still send shivers down the spine sans any assist from Auto-Tune.

As the tides of their fate would have it, they reconvened at that perfect and last moment of their musical lives when those who saw them at Cal Jam in 1974 or at Anaheim Stadium in 1975 or at The Forum in 1976 or during their epic week-long run of shows back at the intimate Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 1980 could still say, with a straight face, that they didn’t sound or even look any worse for the journey. They could say The Eagles still sounded, well, the same, in a better than good way.

In rock n’ roll, that’s a rare feat indeed.

In the midsummer’s night dream that were my college days in the 1980s, I managed to catch all of the band’s key players separately and surprisingly sometimes together, and always for less than thirty bucks.

Standing a few feet from the stage that was so pleasantly close to the bar at The Coach House in San Juan Capistrano to watch Joe Walsh, adorned in a baseball batter’s helmet turned catcher’s backward and sporting Gestapo boots, blaze through a catalog of his James Gang and solo work before turning to his contributions to The Eagles remains one of the unforgettable moments of my own rock mental museum. It was followed by watching Don Henley at the Pacific Amphitheater roll through a fine selection of his solo collection before telling the crowd “Some of you may remember I was in a band back in the ‘70s, well, you’re in for a treat tonight.” A collective gasp of hope went up as the crowd instinctively came to its feet. Then Henley delivered. “Would you please welcome my friend, Mr. Glenn Frey!”

As Frey came onstage with his guitar, Henley left the mic at the front of the stage where he had been singing all night, sat down behind the vacated drum kit, rolled up his sleeves and then the two of them got to work on an all too brief blast through their heady past. Henley was right: it was quite the treat.

Welcome to The Hotel California. Rumor had it that while the rest of the band finally went to sleep knowing they had this photo shoot the next morning, Frey split and kept going, only to return in time for the shoot and had to be tucked in between Meisner and Felder, which was why no one was laughing but Henley.

I went on to see Henley again at The Forum and Joe Walsh again at The Greek Theatre, then Frey and Walsh together at the Universal Amphitheatre and in every show there were celebratory moments of what The Eagles had accomplished and sarcastic allusions to the bitter infighting that finally laid the band low. Onstage at the Universal, Walsh remarked “I don’t know why we don’t do this more often?” Frey didn’t miss a beat, retorting “I do” and on cue Walsh spun toward the drum riser and started faux bowing in a Wayne’s Worldesque ‘We’re not worthy!’ before remarking “Actually, I’m not sure if Don remembers how to play the drums anymore.”

The water might have been running under their bridge but it was still carrying at least a mild hint of sewage down river. But whatever wounds time can’t completely heal, the prospect of penning a better closing chapter to a musical life’s endeavor and earning a Brink’s truck of cash in the process can certainly act like Bactine to ease the lingering sting of pain.

So hell froze over and it turned out that Henley did remember how to play the drums and he could still carry a fine tune at the same time.

And it must have been especially sweet for The Eagles to watch their ‘continuation tour’ in the mid-1990s swamp large arenas and then stadiums for multi-night engagements as those for whom the band tolled emerged legion once more to take that drive down a dark desert highway with them.

For Frey and Henley in particular, America’s fairly ecstatic reaction to the return of the band that they co-founded behind Linda Ronstadt and propelled for a decade with their songwriting was beyond mere validation, it was a saber-sharp vindication of the lasting power and cultural importance of their work, one that was pointed directly into the collective faces of the East Coast Cosa Nostra of rock critics and cultural snoots who tended to savor songs penned and performed for the glory of shooting heroin in a Harlem squat while dismissing tunes that explored the essence of deceitful women over a few rounds at Dan Tana’s on a California’s summer evening before heading back up into Laurel Canyon and the casually carnal pleasures to be found there amid the candle light.

The Gospel According to Jann Wenner held that The Eagles simply didn’t possess the artistic credibility of Lou Reed or the urgent authenticity of Bruce Springsteen, but the band had responded by simply smiling and advising Rolling Stone, et al, to ‘take it easy’ over their raised middle fingers. Yet for Henley and Frey, the transparent snobbery of Gothamists lecturing on the cultural shortcomings of the LA rock scene and the Southern California sound it defined clearly was an irritant throughout much of the band’s 1970s salad days. They handled the criticism perfectly back then by largely ignoring it as they got progressively better and bigger all while having a well-documented blast—which only further embittered Greil Marcus and his classroom—but it was clear that if they didn’t crave acceptance from rock’s self-anointed literati they certainly wanted their body of work not to be just enjoyed but respected by everyone else.

And perhaps slightly more zealously than even Frey, Henley wanted to make sure that The Eagles music en total was taken as a serious testament of the watershed era in America from which they took flight to document.

During The Eagles first act, Henley and Frey worked together to guard the band’s legacy even as they built it, and despite their trademark denim-clad casualness, there was also a tremendous amount of careful consideration that the band put into their albums, their shows and their presence, which onstage was intentionally defined by not having much of one beyond the music and some nice art for the backdrops.

It wasn’t contradictory as much as it was complimentary.

The Eagles may have been an amalgamation of country and rock, of casual and calculated, but the band’s bloodshot eyes were clear about what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it. They’d walk onstage, plug-in and play. No smoke pots or dry ice, no sirens, no face paint or costumes, no pyrotechnic flash-bangs, no Broadway dancer ensemble, no leaping off amps with windmill power chords and even no clear front man, though Frey came the closest and seemed a natural at it. During one of the band’s shows in Houston when what appeared to be a small bindle of cocaine was tossed onstage in between songs, Frey instinctively snatched it up, looked at for a split second and then looked back at the audience declaring “Alright! Royalties!” before tossing it over his shoulder as the band tore into its next song.

Following their crash-landing as the ‘80s got underway, Henley saw his opportunity to walk out of the wreckage and not so much re-brand himself as fine polish the image he’d been working on all along, that of the agrarian poet that had found himself in the vanishing forests of a post-industrial world. Henley’s entrée into the Reagan era was not a transformation as much as it was an accelerating evolution and without Frey alongside to check its excesses it turned out to be the end of our innocence about Don.

Henley the singer-songwriter behind the drums became Henley the preacher man at the front of the stage. And it says something about Don Henley that he actually managed to pull it off, sort of, which is what his grade of talent will allow. It’s just a shame he knew it.

So as Glenn Frey stumbled out of ‘Partytown’ and into The Allnighter, Henley was out there building his perfect beast and when he finally unleashed, er, released it, well, it was a beautiful creation and one that sent the rest of his fellow former bandmates the clear message that he was in no hurry to return to a musical nest with grenades in it.

Yet there was a subtle twist of lyric tucked into the track The Boys of Summer, Henley’s hauntingly smooth rumination of the passing of a time that once was disguised in the metaphor of a girl he once loved:

Don’t look back, you can never look back

I thought I knew what love was

What did I know

Those days are gone forever

I should just let them go

but…

Of course a girl you once loved and a time that once was tends to be one and the same, so maybe Henley really had been literally driving by her house thinking about those empty streets and that empty beach, but it’s hard to believe after circling her block a few times he didn’t head back to Malibu to open a fresh bottle, light another smoke and put on One Of These Nights and wonder why they just let them go.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone heard Henley’s ‘but’ louder than Frey, save perhaps Irving Azoff, The Eagles former manager who undoubtedly heard a whisper of the future in Henley’s pensive ode to the past. And thus Azoff the manager became Irv the MFT for as long as it took to broker a reconciliation that would deliver The Eagles v.2.

As journalist Marc Eliot describes in his fairly definitive 1998 biography of the band, To The Limit: The Untold Story of The Eagles, Azoff’s years-long struggle of deftly maneuvering, patiently placating and salaciously propositioning his former clients with pornographic profits finally paid off in what will assuredly go down in rock’s annals as the all-time resumption of a band that actually was able to restart the engine when it could still rev. Eliot ends his book in January of 1998, as The Eagles made what seemed like their perfect final entrance: their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As Eliot points out, the irony of their formal arrival in the Pantheon of rock critics—with Wenner in the audience—was not lost on a band that had made a ‘fuck you’ habit of skipping The Grammys every year.

Henley spoke first and Frey spoke last, with Glenn offering a brief reflection on the advice Bob Seger had given him as a young guitarist in Detroit and then noting “The next bit of free advice I got was from David Geffen, who told me that I should get in a band and find a songwriting partner. I did both. And we’re all here to celebrate the fruits of David’s advice.”

With that, as Eliot writes, “Frey stepped back. The boys in the band looked at each other and for one last time approached the equipment waiting behind them on the stage…When they finished, there was an awkward moment of silence followed by applause as they slowly put down their instruments and walked into the shadows of the wings. The lights came up and the audience slowly dispersed. The big show was over.”

Except it wasn’t.

What was a book ending moment for Eliot proved to be only a breather for the band, which oddly seemed to collectively think that once they came back to The Eagles there was really nothing else left.

And that’s when their Second Act turned into a Third and stunning triumph began to teeter toward comic tragedy, without much of the comedy.

                []

It’s a late April evening and I find myself walking into a Chevron station alongside another old local and a former neighbor here in Claremont, the legendary session musician David Lindley. “Hey man, I just had James Taylor on my turntable with In The Pocket and that is such a great album,” I say, and Lindley’s frosted wildman mutton chops flare even wider as he breaks into a big smile. “You know, I hear albums from back then now and I wonder ‘who’s that guy?’ playing that part because I sure don’t sound like that anymore,” he says.

Modesty is apparently another of Lindley’s strong qualities, as anyone who has seen him play—whether locally here at the Claremont Folk Festival last spring or around the country with his old friend Jackson Browne—can attest that Lindley’s unvanquished skill with that guitar remains redolent of his slide solo on Browne’s Running On Empty.

As we wait on the clerk inside we share some thoughts about the changes occurring around this small college town of ours, but since I was already writing this and it seemed nothing short of cosmic serendipity that I bump back into a guy who was on the ground floor of a musical tribe that became known as ‘the Avocado mafia,’ those musicians that had drifted into LA at the dawn of the ‘70s to blend folk, rock and country in the stewpot of The Troubadour and other notable joints around town amid various iterations of The Flying Burrito Brothers, Rick Nelson & The Stone Canyon Band, Linda Rondstadt, J.D. Souther, Long Branch Pennywhistle, Poco and Jackson Browne, well, I just had to ask him.

And perhaps my segue way from dying trees and the blooming of malignant development back to the fate of The Eagles wasn’t such a jarring change of conversational course after all.

“So what do you make of Henley taking something he’s actually calling ‘The Eagles’ out on the road for shows this summer?” I ask Lindley. “What with Frey being dead and all.”

His smile evaporates into a head-shaking wince that conveys a sense of deep disappointment if not downright disgust. Then he breaks into a smile again, like he just remembered the answer to a crossword puzzle.

“You know, something tells me we need to be talking to Joe about this,” he says. “I have a feeling that Walsh may have had a hand in this.”

“For sure, but it was Henley’s call. And he’s going to own it,” I reply.

“Yeah, but you know, it’s got to be this” Lindley says, holding up his hand and rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign-language that reads ‘Cash.’

“If the publishing royalties from The Eagles catalog isn’t providing Henley with enough cash, then something is horribly, horribly wrong,” I say.

“I wasn’t thinking so much about Henley,” Lindley says.

“So Walsh?” I ask.

“Getting warmer,” Lindley says. “Look, the rest of the band probably really needs it.”

“Sure, but that’s the point, it’s not the band anymore. Whatever it is, it’s not The Eagles,” I say. “And for Henley, who branded himself as some sort of Second Coming of Thoreau, rock’s philosopher prince lost deep in thought in the woods, to then pimp out the very legacy he built with Frey for however much more cash he can grab is obscene.”

“Well that’s true. Henley’s overplayed that hand for a long time,” Lindley says. “We keep expecting grace and dignity and respect for legacy in rock when we shouldn’t. That’s just the sad fact of it.”

Back outside we stand there for a spell and I tell Lindley he’s right that it should hardly come as a surprise, that I had seen The Who on their ‘farewell tour’ in 1982 with 100,000 other fans at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a wonderful send-off with The Clash and T. Bone Burnett on hand to open the proceedings, as the band that was part of rock’s first triumvirate—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who—bade us farewell in fine fashion and while still in top form.

“I can’t remember how long it was before they were back out on the road after that,” I say. “But my friends and I took to calling that first ‘farewell tour’ of The Who as the ‘We Fooled You Again Tour.’ With Keith and John already dead, I suppose if Roger dies next, Pete will hire a vocalist from a cover band and continue on as ‘The Who,’ in Roger’s memory of course, and hell, he’ll probably play Coachella again to a crowd that wouldn’t know the difference or care if they did. And pay three C-notes for the pleasure of it.”

As Lindley noted, it’s a sad fact, but we both start cracking up again before shaking hands and heading back to our respective cars. “Hey, by the way,” he says. “Did you hear about what they’re doing to Wolfe’s? They’re turning it into a restaurant!”

“Yeah, I know, but I hear they’re going to have a full bar, so trying to look at the glass half-full,” I say.

“A full bar!” he says, eyes lighting playfully up.

“I know, right? See you there.”

[]

It didn’t take long for The Eagles to go back on the road after their permanent installment in rock’s Hall of The Most Antithetical to Rock and Roll Museum, and they rang in the Millennium with a New Year’s show at Staples Center downtown in the city where it all began.

Not long after that they began writing and recording what would become their last studio album and whatever one may say about their decision to keep on chugging, The Long Road Out of Eden proved to be a worthy affair. Released appropriately at the end of October in 2007, as those dying leaves stirred in the crisp fall air, the album trod all too familiar musical territory but did so with a comfortable panache of ‘we know you’ve all heard this before, but we do it so well’ that reminded us once more of why they could get away with it.

On their way to that Long Night in Wrong Beach, 1980. Frey seems to get it. Thanks Don.

Hey, if The Stones can do it, so can The Eagles.

And as Frey and Henley would have it, the album is bookended by them singing about themselves, to each other and for that matter the rest of us who, as Frey once put it: “Went on a fandango with us.” Henley opens it with No More Walks in the Wood and Frey closes it with It’s Your World Now. Both of them hit their marks, again, and it sure sounded once more like a fine goodbye.

To a sparse guitar Henley advises his long walk has come to an end.

“No more walks in the wood

this is the aftermath…

…we and the trees and the way

back from the fields of play

lasted as long as we could

no more walks in the wood…”

But then Frey gets his last words in:

“A perfect day, the sun is sinking low

as evening falls, the gentle breezes blow

the time we shared went by so fast

just like a dream, we knew it couldn’t last

but I’d do it all again

if I could, somehow

but I must be leaving soon

it’s your world now…”

It’s hard to believe that the two of them, at that moment, like their heroes Lennon and McCartney as the recording of Abbey Road wound down, didn’t understand where they were at and what it meant. They were certainly as calculated as John and Paul, but unlike them, Don and Glenn couldn’t just leave well enough alone and let history do the rest.

No.

From that long night at that wrong beach in 1980 to their return to the stage in 1994, to their formal ‘thank you’ to the crowd of critics that had always hated them in 1998 to another long stretch of shows all over the world, and then to that one last moment in the studio where they recorded the double-album they always desired, it still just wasn’t enough.

And so twenty years after The Eagles legitimately decided to turn it back on they couldn’t seem to figure out how to shut it off. They went back out on the road again.

There’s gotta be a cocaine analogy in there somewhere.

Tragedy struck even before Frey actually died. He recorded and then dared to release After Hours, a 2012 popcorn fart of an album that the marketing men at Universal did their best to pitch as “Glenn’s doing his favorites from the American classic songbook!” It opened with For Sentimental Reasons and flatlined less than four minutes later. It was perhaps the only moment of their relationship when Henley had a legitimate reason to quietly hang his head and wonder why.

Well, that and South of Sunset.

As the second decade of the 21st Century passed its tipping point, a place where The Eagles were glimpsed onstage in dinner jackets and ties—yes, I’m afraid yes—but before they were to be honored at The Kennedy Center, Frey fell ill and was hospitalized, never to return to the band, the stage, studio or life.

And shortly thereafter his friend, collaborator and, musically-speaking, his long time companion Don Henley paid tribute with the rest of the band and uttered those long overdue words: “I don’t think you’ll see us performing again. I think that was probably it. I think it was an appropriate farewell.”

Even before the show, when he was advised of Frey’s death, Henley had ‘released’ this statement about his friend’s passing on to the other side, in relevant part: “…it will be very strange going forward in a world without him in it, but I will be grateful, every day, that he was in my life…”

Ah, Donald, always the sweet-talker.

At least Macca had the gum-chewing courage to tell the reporters that mugged him on a London street in December 1980 barking in his face about Lennon’s murder the night before: “It’s a drag, isn’t it? Ok, cheers.”

And he’s caught hell about that shell-shocked moment ever since.

But one thing Paul McCartney has never done over the better part of these past four decades since John Lennon’s death is attempt to reassemble something he calls ‘The Beatles’ and tour behind it. McCartney has remembered, honored and moved on.

Henley with Frey? Well, as it turns out, not so much.

And these days, the best of Don’s love is going to run you about $327-a-seat to get anywhere near Henley’s guilty face for it to come clearly into focus at Dodger Stadium or Citi Field. Thinking about David Lindley’s observation to me a few nights ago, one wonders what the band’s now bleached Stepford Wife, Joe Walsh, cut of that loot will look like? Joe always liked to say ‘How ya’ doin’?’ but at this point maybe we should ask ‘Joe, what are you doing?’

On the other hand, maybe we should fear his answer.

But if you go to see Henley, Walsh & Co. warble whatever, just understand you didn’t pay that to see The Eagles. That band died, somewhat belatedly, with Glenn Frey.

Welcome to The Gone Run tour.

Thanks, Donald.