Easily one of the most enjoyable assignments I’ve done in a long time, I listened to the entire catalog from The Eagles’ classic era (their six studio albums from 1972-79) and ranked their country songs. The list ran a couple of days after the anniversary of the band's infamous final show in 1980, where tempers flared so badly onstage that the band effectively imploded on the spot. (They reunited in 1994.)
Here’s a playlist of my picks (in reverse order, so my top choice plays last):
Yes, I hate using the word “best” — and ranking art is pretty much against my religion — but as I recently explained, I agree to do rankings EVERY time I’m asked.
They’re too much fun — and putting the work in is too gratifying — to say no.
Everybody wins — the outlet gets a cool piece for its audience, readers who care about debating whether certain songs are “better” how those songs rank get what they want, and I get what I want.
In this case, I’d never thought of The Eagles as a country-rock act, but as a ‘70s AM-radio staple somewhere between classic rock, soft rock and Southern rock. But they started out with a much more pronounced country/bluegrass element in their sound than what they arrived at later. Hotel California, their biggest studio album, is almost completely devoid of the rootsy touches from their earlier work.
I’d actually never given The Eagles much thought at all. I’d heard the big radio hits so I took ‘em for granted. I mean, even my mom — who wasn’t into rock music — bought Hotel California when I was a kid. That’s how much they had oozed into the pop fabric.
My mom was convinced, by the way, that the song “Hotel California” — which she really liked — contained Satanic references. That may sound batty, but I’m not persuaded that bands like that weren’t courting those kinds of subliminal suggestions. If so, we have no idea if they were serious about it, or whether they just meant to toy with people — especially religious people like my mom. After all the “Hotel California” lyrics, which you could describe as paradoxically blatant and suggestive, bait the listener into reading more into them. (Some demure commentary from the band here.)
A response to the above clip courtesy of YouTuber TH3 F4LC0N:
I've never understood why so many people think this song is so inscrutable. It's just a reflection on the "fame and fast living" lifestyle from someone who's been there. The dude starts out the song coming to the "Hotel California" and thinking it's awesome, then by the end he realizes it sucks and he tries to leave only to realize that you can't ever truly regain that innocence you had before. The Eagles spent years chasing fame and then they eventually got it. I'm pretty sure the song is just showing how something can look good from the outside but be unappealing on the inside.
I think TH3 F4LC0N makes a great point. Then again, that line is really easy to just chalk-up as a metaphor, but I wonder if Henley and Frey weren’t intending to push buttons…
I came across the idea that there might be something grim underlying Hotel California well after Jack Nicholson’s deranged expression from the film The Shining, had been seared into the public consciousness. Although Hotel California was released almost two months before Stephen King’s novel and almost four years before the film, I don’t actually remember a time where I wasn’t aware of The Shining. And director Stanley Kubrick’s unforgettable images of the Overlook Hotel left us all with a permanent sense that hotels can be places vested with evil.
Still, I’ve never quite been able to shake-off my mom’s insistence that Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s lyric They stab it with their steely knives / but they just can’t kill the beast was a reference to the devil. I also remember my mom pointing out that the image of Billy Joel that graces the cover of his Piano Man album had a morbid look to it — the color is drained from Joel’s skin, so he essentially looks like a corpse. And I remember as a kid getting a weird, almost scary vibe from the live photo of AC/DC on the inside gatefold of For Those About to Rock (one of my two favorite albums of theirs, btw).
The thing is, there was nothing suggestive about that photo. I just remember getting a vibe that the band was somehow flirting with darker energies. Now, you should know that I was like 10-11 years old at that time. I mean, when I first saw the picture of Angus Young sticking his guitar into himself on the cover of another album titled If You Want Blood, my reaction was “OMG, COULD THAT BE… REAL???”
Anyway, The Eagles were never very much on my radar. I’d first heard longtime guitarist Don Felder’s two solo tunes from the soundtrack to the animated film Heavy Metal — probably the pivotal album in my discovery of rock music — and I’d read Felder’s 2008 autobiography Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles. I’d picked it up off the shelf specifically because it was about an artist I wasn’t all that invested in. I could read it without concern over whether anything was missing or off-base.
I’d always liked Felder’s those two Heavy Metal solo songs more than just about anything by The Eagles. The song that made the #1 slot on my list is the only song of theirs that I’d say I truly loved, and to this day it reminds me of hearing it for the first time in a friend’s dorm room my freshman year in college. But in sitting down with their catalog I was able to discover some gems I’d overlooked.
I never hated them outright — the Big Lebowski clip above is hilarious, and I chuckle at comments from some friends who just loathe the band — but The Eagles represented the antithesis of the passion and fire that I crave from rock music. When trying, for example, to fathom the mystery of why Van Halen were such an unbridled force of nature in concert during their classic period, I would always arrive at the same thought: We can’t just attribute it to the cocaine — because after all, The Eagles snorted tons of the stuff too.
Indeed, if you go back to live recordings from the ‘70s, The Eagles were almost aggressively lax in their delivery — so much so that one could accuse them of being a pretend rock band. They were also pretty easy to dismiss as cynical interlopers who appropriated country hallmarks in the service of crafting safe, harmless music. Going through their body of work, I came to find those assessments both fair and unfair. In some cases, I thought the way they used guitar twang was so schmaltzy it almost made me laugh. But in other cases, I found myself really admiring just how imaginative they were at blending country with rock.
Like here:
and here:
And this was cut from the intro to my Holler list:
Masters at grafting country stylings onto other forms, it’s to their ultimate credit that The Eagles never really indulged in hillbilly affectations. In some respects, The Eagles couldn’t have been further from the commercial country music of their era. That didn’t stop them from earning Vocal Group of the Year nominations from the Country Music Association in 1976 and ‘77. If we can imagine that adding some drawl to their vocals* would have edged their sound closer to the Nashville standard, it would also have nullified what made their sound so distinct.
In their own way The Eagles stayed true to who they were.
* (Note: Henley was born in raised in a small town in Northeastern Texas. He actually speaks with a Texan accent which, oddly enough, doesn’t come through in his singing.)
More than anything, though, I’d regarded always regarded The Eagles as the commercial behemoth that snatched up one of my all-time favorites, guitarist Joe Walsh (a late-career addition who joined in time for Hotel California). That move always seemed to have a gratuitous quality to it, like the musical equivalent of the New York Yankees signing Reggie Jackson after Jackson had already won three championships with the Oakland A’s. Jackson’s legacy was already sealed, but his accomplishments in Oakland always get overshadowed. He’ll forever be remembered in pinstripes because of his affiliation with this bigger organization that just takes up more space than it should.
To me, Walsh (both on his own and in his time fronting the iconic trio The James Gang) oozed with what I think of as Midwestern grit — a stark contrast to The Eagles’ sleepy-eyed California cool. His explosive style and outsized personality were, in my book, a total mismatch for Henley and company. That said, Henley, Frey, and Eagles co-founder Randy Meisner actually appeared on one of my all-time favorite albums, Joe Walsh’s 1974 solo disc So What.
On this song, which pre-dates Walsh’s recruitment, we actually get a great snapshot of what could happen when Walsh met The Eagles halfway — much moreso than anything they did after he joined (with the exception of “In The City”):
Alas, I had a tremendous amount of fun putting this list together. Shout-out to the great editorial team at Holler for greenlighting it.
If you’re able, I would highly recommend spending a few days getting through an artist’s complete catalog on Spotify, where you can gather all of that artist’s albums into a single playlist. I walked away with a newfound appreciation for the band, and found that I wasn’t quite as indifferent to their huge hits as I’d long thought.
But you like the Joe Walsh clip above and want to go off the beaten path, ya might enjoy my deep-cut classic rock playlist:
Don’t hurt yourself!
<3 SRK