<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is 2019. \u00a0Jeff Bridges tours between acting gigs with his band The Abiders. \u00a0The name, of course, was lifted from his character\u2019s oft quoted line in his 1997 movie <\/span>The Big Lebowski<\/span><\/i>, \u201cThe Dude abides\u201d (\u2018The Dude\u2019 being his self-bestowed handle in the movie). \u00a0From what I have seen and heard, Bridges\u2019 work with The Abiders straddles the musical line now called country rock (which probably explains why he didn\u2019t name the band \u2018The Trons\u2019), a genre his Dude character loathes in <\/span>The Big Lebowski<\/span><\/i>. \u00a0Sayeth The Dude, \u201cI hate the (expletive deleted) Eagles\u201d but that probably wasn\u2019t Bridges talking. \u00a0The movie hipster Coen Brother\u2019s no doubt brought the line into their film because it was cool to thump on the biggest band in the land when their chips were down. \u00a0<\/span>Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975<\/span><\/i> \u00a0ranks #1 on the all time US Charts having moved 38 million copies. \u00a0It became the first album to earn platinum level sales. The only other bands and artists to have exceeded The Eagles\u2019 150 million worldwide album sales are The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Elvis Presley, and Garth Brooks. \u00a0The problem was, by the end of the 1970s, the band was crumbling and perceived as more than a little arrogant. They were so successful, it was easy to hate them and revel in their millionaire misery.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One has to go back a little further in time to dissect exactly what happened to what singer-<\/span><\/p>\n songwriter J.D. Souther called \u2018America\u2019s band\u2019 (a term drummer\/vocalist Don Henley hates almost as much as the notion that they invented the soft California country rock sound). \u00a0Henley told <\/span>Classic Rock Magazine<\/span><\/i>, \u201cI think all of us were misfits in our own way, which is why we got into the business,\u201d to remind everyone that the Eagles formed and evolved like many other bands. \u00a0What the Eagles haters forget is they weren\u2019t just anointed as \u2018America\u2019s band\u2019. They worked for it and each misstep and\/or success along the way contributed to both the myth and the reality of the band.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The story opens with Henley living a lonely life in Los Angeles at the dawn of the 1970s. \u00a0Like many aspiring musicians, he left his small town Texas roots for the big glitz of Los Angeles. \u00a0\u00a0Like many other aspiring musicians, he filled his idle hours at the famed Troubadour club. It seemed to be the place where something was bound to happen and it was where he met a native Detroiter (and buddy of Bob Seger back in Michigan) named Glenn Frey. \u00a0Frey had moved west to escape being sucked into a life on the auto assembly line. They were far from famous and life in the fast lane when they met, but they shared a work ethic had been formed on a Texas farm and in Michigan\u2019s industrial belt. They had more than just musical talent; \u00a0they had the will to work hard to become successful. As Henley continued his \u201cmisfit\u201d comments, he mentioned that seeing fellow Texan Janis Joplin at the Troubadour less than a week before she died: \u201cShe looked sad and lonely sitting at a table with no one talking to her. She was another one who wanted to show everyone back home. \u00a0She was bullied in high school because she was different. She was looking for acceptance and that is why a lot of us came to California; to find our tribe. The popular kids at school were the football players and they got the pretty girls. A lot of famous rockers were high school nerds.\u201d From the release of their eponymous first album in 1972 and their \u2018flame out\u2019 sessions for their 1979 <\/span>The Long Run <\/span><\/i>LP, they struggled at times, but along the way (as Souther put it), \u201cThey wrote songs that evoked memories of the life you wished you lived.\u201d \u00a0It would be as hard to separate the Eagles from the fabric of America as it would be to removed The Beatles from the tapestry of England.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Playing in a bar band during the Eagles\u2019 prime meant playing Eagles\u2019 songs, but that wasn\u2019t as easy as it sounds on paper. \u00a0The craftsmanship displayed in their writing and performance made it difficult to do their music justice. If a band couldn\u2019t do the music well, then it was best to leave it alone. \u00a0It wasn\u2019t until I was in my third band (Sledgehammer) that I got to perform the Eagles\u2019 songs. We had four musicians who could play and sing plus our lead guitar player, Barry, was just beginning his studies as a vocal major in college. \u00a0Barry would break down the harmony parts and put the right voice in the right place to make the music work. To perform it onstage, our bass player and budding electronic engineer Mike designed a new PA from scratch replete with stage front monitors. \u00a0A few man hours in my dad\u2019s workshop (and a little expert table saw help from dad) and we had the tools to make our on-stage performance better. Singing with monitors so one can hear how all the parts blend together gave us a great advantage. The difference in the vocals isn\u2019t so obvious when cranking out three chord rock-n-roll (which was a good share of our set list), but we tended to erupt into smiles on stage when all the parts clicked on the Eagles\u2019 material. \u00a0I never had a dedicated monitor in the back line, but I certainly could hear the stage front monitors enough to make me wonder how I had ever managed without them.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As phase one of the Eagles career wound down (1972-1979), things were slowly coming unwound. \u00a0Henley and Frey had taken charge of the band early on and it was their shared ambition that drove the band to keep moving forward. \u00a0They ran the show, but they weren\u2019t clones of each other by any means. Henley\u2019s intensity and white-soul voice complimented Frey, the laconic, fun – loving R&B freak. \u00a0They looked at other successful bands of the era (Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin being good examples) as competition. It was this \u2018winner take all\u2019 attitude that generated some of the \u2018arrogant\u2019 perceptions. \u00a0Henley noted. \u201cWe were on good terms with everyone, but we\u2019d take note of how other bands were doing, chart-wise. We wanted to be in the game. We had a competitive spirit.\u201d They may have been living in the penthouse, but the foundation of their building was beginning to crack.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Henley recalls the 1970s as a time when their extravagant behavior (like spending both an eon and a fortune in the studio recording <\/span>The Long Run<\/span><\/i>) was fueled by their success. \u00a0He told <\/span>CRM, <\/span><\/i>\u201cEverybody gets frightened when success hits and you\u2019re in your twenties and suddenly you\u2019ve got all this notoriety and money being thrown at you and you don\u2019t know what to do with it. \u00a0Everybody has that insecurity: \u2018Am I worth of all this attention? Am I good enough?\u2019\u201d When asked if the success should have made the band more bulletproof, Henley explained, \u201cNo. During the seventies, every morning I woke up and thought: \u00a0\u2018This could end today.\u2019 We all did. Sometimes we\u2019d do a concert and have a really bad night or get a bad review and I\u2019d go: \u2018Okay, that\u2019s it. That\u2019s the end.\u2019 You question it. So you turn to drugs or you explode your career somehow.\u201d It seems that the Eagles proceeded to try both routes.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The first sign of trouble in a band is the \u201cwe changed out a a band member because we had creative differences\u201d cliche. \u00a0Multi-instrumentalist Bernie Leadon was the first tire to be swapped out. It is hard to say exactly what friction brought about Leadon\u2019s departure, but bassist Randy Meisner wasn\u2019t too far behind. \u00a0Leadon was replaced by Don Felder whose <\/span>Hotel California <\/span><\/i>guitar work helped propel yet another strong album to the top of the charts. \u00a0Meisner was replaced by Timothy B. Schmit, late of the band Poco, who brought his crystal clear high voicals into the mix. \u00a0Ex-James Gang member and quirky solo artist Joe Walsh expanded the band to a sextet and to quote one his own lyrics, \u201cThe band played on.\u201d \u00a0Some questioned why the band even needed to add Walsh to the already solid line up, but the dividends of having him on board were evident in their live shows. \u00a0It also never hurts to have another songwriter (and fun guy) in the band.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is hard to say what precipitated the big break up; \u00a0it takes many drops of water to fill a bucket but it only takes the last one to make it overflow. \u00a0Legend has it that the band officially ended after a benefit show for Democratic Senator Alan Cranston where a mixing board recording picked up Frey threatening to kick guitarist Don Felder\u2019s ass. \u00a0He even counted down the number of songs that would be played before he would do it and later camera footage captured the furious Frey chasing Felder\u2019s limo after the show. Schmidt called Frey to ask if it was true that the band was done only to be told, \u201cThat\u2019s it, it\u2019s over.\u201d \u00a0Schmidt and Henley both confessed that they were deeply affected by the abrupt end, Henley recalling, \u201cI was just lost.\u201d Henley spent the 1980s as a successful solo artist and famously quipped that the Eagles would reunite, \u201cWhen hell freezes over,\u201d yet being a solo artist was a different kind of success. \u00a0He later corrected himself about the \u2018hell freezes over\u2019 comment: \u201cI missed the good parts of it. I didn\u2019t miss the bad parts. [As a solo artist] once in a while I got tired of making all the decisions, having the weight and the criticism all fall on my shoulders. I had a great solo band…but sometimes I would long for a band where the spotlight isn\u2019t just on you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When Ohio\u2019s M105 radio began marketing itself as \u201cCleveland\u2019s Classic Rock\u201d station in the 1980s, the new genre spread like wildfire and in the absence of the band, the Eagles\u2019 music was in constant rotation on the nation\u2019s airwaves. \u00a0Frey had bailed on the first attempt at a reunion in 1990, but by 1994, they were ready to put the old animosities aside and recorded an album that could only be called <\/span>Hell Freezes Over<\/span><\/i> (which also became the name of the subsequent tour). \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This became the template of the massive world tours that followed and surely would have continued if Frey had not succumbed to a host of illnesses and passed on in January of 2016. \u00a0The Eagles haters would finally see the band come to an end, but their music would continue to be heard on many different platforms. Following Glenn\u2019s death, a February Grammy Award performance of Frey\u2019s signature song <\/span>Take It Easy (<\/span><\/i>with old friend Jackson Browne covering the lead vocal) was supposed to be the exclamation at the end of their story. \u00a0Everybody knew that this was the end of the band, until two years later when Henley made another hard career choice: it was time to resurrect the Eagles, but would they be accepted? The band drafted Frey\u2019s son Deacon and country star (and former member of Pure Prairie League) Vince Gill to fill out the line up.\u00a0 They began the resurrection tour in March of 2018 and by July, it was already the sixth-highest-grossing tour of the year. \u00a0The tour will close with six final shows in the UK (including the famed Wembley Stadium) in June of 2019. \u201cF.Scott Fitzgerald once famously said that there are no second acts in American life,\u201d says Henley. \u201cI think we\u2019ve proved that not only are there second acts, but there are third acts, too.\u201d The band may have been unsure of how they would be received, but rather than book a few smaller warm up gigs, they played their first shows with the new line up in front of 56,000 at Dodger Stadium and 41,000 at New York\u2019s Citi Field.<\/span><\/p>\n Henley recalls that they were surprised at the warm reception that they received on both coasts: \u201cIt surprised all of us. \u00a0That is when we knew we might be able to do this, we might be able to continue.\u201d Take THAT all you Eagles haters!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 The ‘new’ Eagles perform ‘Take it to the limit<\/em>” in October of 2018