E is for ‘Eagles’

Friday 9th November

People talk nostalgically but in my mind slightly mistakenly about the great music of the sixties; true there was some excellent stuff then, from the Beatles and Stones through to Tamla Motown and The Beach Boys.  But it was the early seventies that really was the Golden Age, and as well as all the Prog Rock and Glam in Britain there was something special happening in America, mostly in California.  Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and James Taylor all emerged around 1970, and they all shared a musical heritage that included both rock’n’roll and country.  They built on the sound of the Byrds and Gram Parsons and the Band and developed a new and wonderful music which has endured and lasted far longer than most other musical trends.  And then along came the Eagles.  I first heard them as the warm-up to a radio 1 concert by Joni Mitchell, who had just released Blue.  They were an instant hit and though the personnel changed a bit over the years they never released a duff album; and hardly a poor song either.  Their masterpiece was Hotel California, a near perfect slice of American self doubt and self analysis, wrapped up in the most gorgeous melodies and wonderful singing.

The band struggled on after this and released a couple of semi-decent albums, and broke up and occasionally reformed for yet another World Tour.  They were incredibly popular, their Greatest Hits album being by some counts the biggest selling LP in history.  But despite the brilliance of songs like ‘Tequila Sunrise’ and ‘Take it to the Limit’ it is always Hotel California I return to, with those great lines ‘You can check out anytime, but you can never leave’

According to several articles on the band they apparently hated each other, and tours were fuelled by industrial quantities of cocaine, but none of that matters whenever I hear ‘New Kid in Town’ or ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ again.   Pure heaven, and no, I don’t ever want to check out of the Hotel California.

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