(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 2 June 2025 17:30, UK
Anyone who has ever tried to achieve literally anything will know what it feels like when something suddenly shifts. You might try again and again with no luck, until one magical day, something clicks into place, and you think, “This feels different”. It’d be easy to pull up something like the law of attraction to explain these moments, but if you’re like the Eagles, it’s best to let it be what it is: magic.
Obviously, that kind of talk is neither here nor there, but there are certain things that can’t really be anything else, can they? Every band needs a set of components to make it work, but sometimes, you either have it or you don’t. And from the very beginning (and despite their very rocky, not-so-gracious ending), the Eagles had it. Which is all a very long way of basically saying: they had Don Henley.
That said, even his trusty leadership couldn’t stop the Eagles’ story from following the same familiar tropes. It’s a tale as old as time. When you break it all down, it’s simple to see that the more money that got involved, the more grounds there were for fights and disagreements, and eventually, that’s exactly what happened. But the brutality of the Eagles’ fallout isn’t really a secret, nor does it represent anything all that unique in the broader contexts of their story.
At least, not really. After all, when it comes to discussing infamous band break ups, there are a host of names that usually come first before the Eagles are generally even thought of, which, even though it doesn’t distract from the bitterness of the feud that ended them, says quite a lot about the other parts of their story that feel far more important than what ultimately destroyed them.
Or maybe it’s not like that at all. Either way, the point is that the most important part of the Eagles’ story (or the part that feels especially foundational) is, you guessed it, their beginning. Just as it’s no secret how their story came to an end, the Eagles’ journey to formation is pretty well-known, and centres around the bigger dreams of two musicians who started thinking outside of the world that brought them along for the ride, even if at first it felt fairly casual.
Glenn Frey and Don Henley started playing around with sounds and ideas while on the road with Linda Ronstadt and had formed the band by the end of the tour. Soon enough, the whole operation was in full force, with Frey barely stepping away from his crucial position at the front to lead them through. As someone always thought of as the leader who made anything possible, it’s no wonder that Don Felder felt he was absolutely vital to their success, the whole way through.
“Glenn’s passing was so unexpected and has left me with a very heavy heart filled with sorrow,” he later reflected. Praising his position in the band and as a musician, he continued: “He was so young and still full of amazing genius. He was an extremely talented songwriter, arranger, leader, singer, guitarist – you name it – and Glenn could do it and create ‘Magic’ on the spot.”
While there were moments when even Frey felt that the Eagles had become far too big to carry on, his challenge came from a place of knowing why exactly that had happened: from the beginning, he poured his “magic” into whatever it was they had to offer, even though it wasn’t always clear at that point, and came only from a shared desire to jam along to sounds they felt had something unique. But even beyond those make-or-break moments, Frey performed the role of the anchor, facing turbulence with inbuilt know-how, even if he couldn’t always fix it.
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