(Credits: Far Out / Greenwich Entertainment)
Mon 15 September 2025 15:00, UK
Glenn Frey never had any aspirations beyond being one of the greatest musicians in the world.
Since the moment The Beatles lit his world on fire, he always wanted to make crowds move the same way that he saw from the back of a crowded theatre watching the Fab Four. He may have provided the soundtrack of millions of teenagers working their way through the 1970s, but when you leave a band as brilliant as the Eagles, where the hell are you supposed to go next?
Well, technically, the band never officially broke up. According to Frey in Hell Freezes Over, he always phrased the whole thing as an extremely long vacation from each other, but it’s not like there wasn’t bad blood. He had fought with Don Felder onstage and didn’t speak for years at a time, but even when Don Henley’s career was soaring, he still found inroads towards the hit parade as well.
After all, he was the one to put out the first official Eagles solo album. While Joe Walsh was already a solo star before the band broke up, No Fun Aloud was the first time people got to hear country-rock’s Lennon and McCartney duo separated. Frey was now simply looking to have some fun with his friends, but one of his saviours on the charts didn’t come from the radio. It came from the movie theatres.
Compared to everything else on his records, songs like ‘The Heat is On’ from Beverly Hills Cop and ‘You Belong to the City’ from the Miami Vice soundtrack were what caught people’s ear before anything else. Frey was still in fine form on both singles, but there was something about ‘Smuggler’s Blues’ that felt different.
Despite The Allnighter being mainly a downtempo record full of ballads, a song about a bunch of drug fiends trying to get their product across the country was almost too good not to feature in Miami Vice as well. But when Frey got the call saying that the producers wanted something else, they didn’t only want the song. They needed someone who could act, and Frey ended up walking away with a whole new career.
The Eagles had already been relatively new to the concept of music videos, but Frey credited ‘Smuggler’s Blues’ with giving him the acting bug, saying, “I was contacted when I was filming the video for ‘Smuggler’s Blues’. Miami Vice was filming its first episode, and they wanted to get the show somehow involved in the video. Michael [Mann] sat down with me, never asked me if I could act, and explained to me his concept of an episode based on ‘Smuggler’s Blues’. ‘You’re going to play this guy Jimmy, and you’ll be great.’”
And for what it’s worth, Frey is actually fairly great in the role. While he wasn’t going to be the next Tom Hanks or even Keanu Reeves, the subtle roles that he picked up throughout the course of his career showed that he had far more acting chops than you’d expect from the band that was known for practically looking like statues every single time they performed.
While Frey’s name on the big screen did end up keeping the Eagles brand alive for a while, he knew that he always had a home when the band eventually reunited in the 1990s. Still, for all of the iconic moments that came with the band’s reunion, Frey’s role as a businessman who wasn’t going to take shit off of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire might be the most iconic thing he did that decade.
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