At their favorite restaurant next to the Los Angeles club the Troubadour, Frey noticed an attractive blonde woman out to dinner with a much older man. The members of the Eagles were struggling to write strong material for the band’s fourth album when, one night in the mid-1970s, guitarist Glenn Frey went out to dinner with a friend, the songwriter J.D. In the sweeping yet cynical piano ballad “The Last Resort,” Henley is already bracing for the moment when the party has to end-not just for a band that would split within four years, but for the very notion of American capitalism itself. But Hotel California is both a portrait of ’70s excess from behind the velvet rope and the soundtrack to the inevitably cruel comedown. That swagger spills over into the brontosaurus stomp of “Victim of Love” (the closest this band ever got to heavy metal) and the disco-fied “Life in the Fast Lane,” an account of Hollywood hedonism as alluringly decadent as a penthouse masquerade ball with an open bar. Formerly the frontman of dirty-boogie outfit the James Gang and an eccentric, hard-rockin’ solo artist in his own right, Walsh immediately puts his stamp on the band with the opening “Hotel California,” where he and six-string wingman Don Felder added the exclamation point to Don Henley’s eerie, enigmatic narrative with one of the most dramatic, finger-aching guitar solos in the rock canon. That shift can be largely attributed to the new kid in town: Joe Walsh, who replaced outgoing founding guitarist Bernie Leadon. That honor, of course, goes to the title track of their 1976 smash Hotel California, the record where the Eagles expunged any lingering trace of their country-rock roots and took up residence in the football stadiums of the world. But here’s the crazy thing: The band’s most popular, career-defining song was still to come. "I'd love to get the legal pad for 'Lyin' Eyes' again," he said, "because I think there were verses we didn't use.To put the Eagles’ mid-’70s dominance into perspective, consider this: In early 1976, the group released Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, a compilation that would spend the next half decade in the Billboard Top 200 and go on to become the biggest-selling American album of the 20th century. "That's where we wrote ' One of These Nights,' 'Lyin' Eyes,' ' Take It to the Limit,' 'After the Thrill Is Gone' and a couple of other tunes for the One of These Nights album."Īnd there could have been more, Frey confirmed. "The house was up on Briarcrest Lane," Frey told Crowe. (Their next crossover Top 40 hit didn't arrive until 2007, with " How Long.") In the meantime, songs continued to spill out of the Trousdale home, which they started calling the Eagles' Nest. This initial crossover success led to a raft of down-home covers, as Buck Owens, Lynn Anderson, Moe Bandy, Diamond Rio and Dolly Parton offered their own takes on "Lyin' Eyes." The song also appeared in the 1980 movie Urban Cowboy.Įagles would never again reach such heights with country listeners, mainly because they were moving toward a more rock-focused approach. (The brutally edited single version deleted the entire second verse, the second chorus and four lines in the middle of the third verse.) 2 on the Billboard pop chart and an impressive No. Released in August 1975, "Lyin' Eyes" emerged as a rootsy, Grammy-winning story song, hitting No. "Just listen to the way he sings 'Lyin' Eyes.'" "As the saying goes, Henley could sing the phone book and make it sound interesting, but Glenn was a great storyteller," Leadon told Rolling Stone. "The 'ci' and 'ty' came from two different takes, 'girls' from another, and each word after that from different takes," producer Bill Szymczyk later told Rolling Stone.īernie Leadon's forlorn mandolin guided them home. They spent a second night sewing everything together then headed to the studio, where the Eagles displayed a similar meticulousness: The song's deeply resonant opening – "City girls just seem to find out early" – actually represents six different tries. "Lyrics just kept coming out, and that's not always the way songs get written." "I don't want to say it wrote itself, but once we started working on it, there were no sticking points," Frey added. Frey set about crafting a chorus, while Henley chipped in on some of the verses. The writing came easy, but perhaps never easier than on this evening. At night, the twinkling lights of the city below were breathtaking." In the daytime, we could see snowcapped peaks to the east and the blue Pacific to the west. "The house was located at the highest point on the hill, and we had a 360-degree panorama. "Glenn and I lived at opposite ends of the house, and we actually converted a music room to a full-on recording studio," Henley told Cameron Crowe in 2003. They scurried back to a scenic rental in the Trousdale area of Beverly Hills, originally constructed in the '40s for early-era movie star Dorothy Lamour.
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