(Credits: Far Out / Steve Alexander)
Tue 30 December 2025 14:41, UK
No Eagles album would reach people’s ears until Glenn Frey was proud of it. Although he and Don Henley were the co-captains of the group throughout their glory years, the band originated in Frey’s mind first, and in some dire cases, most of them would defer to Frey to make the big decisions. The band would go on to make some of the biggest records of the 1970s, but at the time, Frey thought that the most accomplished record they made was On the Border.
This is a bold claim coming from a band that worked with an industry giant like Glyn Johns. Despite being behind the board for some of the greatest rock bands in the world, like The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Led Zeppelin, Johns didn’t agree with everything that the Eagles wanted to do, thinking that they were more country than rock and roll.
Although that flirtation with country music briefly worked on their first album, their conceptual masterpiece Desperado wasn’t anything the fans wanted, leading a lot of people to wonder if they had witnessed a band flame out. Once they hunkered down for their third release, change was in the air, and Frey had one order of business: getting rid of Johns.
The way Henley saw it, Johns just wanted to make songs that were a lot more laid-back, telling History of the Eagles, “He had been producing rock and roll for years. At that point, I think he just wanted mellow people and mellow music, and we weren’t really at the same stage in life.” Halfway through the project, Frey realised that Johns wasn’t going to get them the rest of the way, eventually going with Bill Szymczyk as tier next producer.
According to Henley, one of the big changes was getting the right drum sound, recalling, “[Johns] would just put three microphones on the drum kit. He used to say, ‘If you want the drum louder, hit it harder’… We wanted someone who could put one microphone on each and every drum so we could have more control over the mix.”
The Eagles, perhaps the most successful band of the 1970s. (Credits: Far Out / The Eagles)
Although some songs like ‘The Best of My Love’ survived Johns’s original edit, Frey said the final product was one of the best sonic experiences they ever made, saying, “On the Border was the best-sounding record we ever made, but that’s also experience. We’re just starting to learn how to become a recording artist, which is a little different from learning how to be a member of a band.”
It is something that appears to most artists over the years. As they gain experience, both in how to use the instruments and studio, the group also know how best to work with one another. Allowing certain bandmates to work on certain areas is the kind of know-how that will allow you as a band to flourish. For Frey, that’s what happened.
While On the Border is far from their greatest album songwriting-wise, it does at least have some of the most eclectic songs in their catalogue. There are a few clunkers in there, like their questionable cover of Tom Waits’s ‘Ol’ 55’, but the fact that they could go from rockers like ‘Already Gone’ to bluegrass on ‘Midnight Flyer’ and then cool things down with ballads like ‘My Man’ is a testament to how many road miles they had put on their songs.
The group was now able to hit the marks they wanted to in the studio. They might nto have had the same fire burning within their songs, but they knew how to make them sound as good as can be when they had the chance to sit down and record them.
There were definitely some stumbling blocks along the way when making On the Border, but now that they had found their sound, the future was wide open. It wasn’t going to take them long to reach the heights they were bound to reach on Hotel California.
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