(Credits: Far Out / Steve Alexander)
Sat 17 January 2026 18:30, UK
The year is 1968, and Glenn Frey is first getting a taste of what rock and roll could be like.
He was a fan ever since he saw The Beatles play on The Ed Sullivan Show, but after getting shown the ropes by Bob Seger, he was already starting to get the big idea that all rock stars get when they first get an idea of what a professional musician does. That dream was becoming an obsession, but for a kid who was stuck in Detroit, the idea of going to Los Angeles made about as much sense as going to the Emerald City.
After all, Frey hardly even had enough songs in his arsenal to even hope to be a star. He had done okay on the circuit playing the average bar band tunes, and while Seger was his ticket out of town, the idea was quickly squashed when his mom caught him smoking pot with a couple of friends before he hit the road. But it’s not like Seger didn’t leave him with some valuable advice before he left.
That advice being: KEEP WRITING. No one got to where they are in the charts by writing classics on their first try, and eventually, Frey had the confidence to actually go over to California. The flavours of the day in the ‘Motor City’ were still great at the time, but the thought of Frey becoming a Motown artist or trying his hand at being the next Iggy Pop wasn’t really in the cards. He had other plans in mind, especially when listening to the mellow music coming out of Los Angeles.
The Haight-Ashbury scene was starting to die down at that point, and in its place were artists who were focused on the singer-songwriter approach. There would be hopefuls around everywhere when Frey arrived, and with future friends like Jackson Browne and Don Henley prowling the streets as well, everything was set for him to find that perfect bunch of guys that would help lead him to stardom. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t get starstruck along the way.
For as much as Frey managed to appear like the single coolest person in the room during Eagles interviews, he was still a fan like everyone else. And even when he was looking for places to play the minute that he arrived on the Sunset Strip, he was rendered speechless the moment he came face to face with David Crosby for the first time.
This was the kind of living legend that seemed to live on album covers, and while he only saw him for a second, Frey turned into that same kid from Detroit when he saw the former Byrds member, saying, “The whole vibe of LA hit me right off. The first day I got to LA I saw David Crosby sitting on the steps of the Country Store in Laurel Canyon, wearing the same hat and green leather bat cape he had worn on ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’. To me that was an omen. Being in Los Angeles, I was a little bit intimidated, a little bit awed. But I got over that and decided that I would just try to make something out of my life in California.”
In fact, maybe that wonder and awe rubbed off a little too much. While there was no one mistaking Eagles for anyone else when Frey started the band, those soaring harmonies do owe a little bit to the finesse that Crosby, Stills, and Nash had when they got started. They were already crossing paths, but whereas Crosby wanted to expand the folk scene, Frey wanted to go down with legends like The Beatles on every single record they made.
Whether or not they achieved that high a milestone is hard to really gauge, but looking at the raw sales that the band had during their peak and beyond, it was a tremendous journey Frey took from being a doe-eyed kid first arriving in California to the stadiums of the world. Then again, stranger things have happened when someone has a dream and the right people to help realise it.
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