Credit: Far Out / Steve Alexander
Mon 11 May 2026 20:00, UK
There wasn’t anything standing in the way of Glenn Frey and country rock history when he met Don Henley.
Eagles may have only been an idea that they were spitballing in between working with Linda Ronstadt, but after spending most of their career trying to sing great tunes for her, the only thing that mattered to them was being able to make tunes that would last far longer than they would. All that mattered to them was trying to create something classic, but Frey knew that he needed more people behind him if they wanted to go down in history.
Even back when working with Longbranch Pennywhistle, he understood that JD Souther needed something a little bit more than the average rock and roll tune. His label told him that he didn’t have what it took as a solo artist when he first workshopped his songs, and getting people like Joe Walsh and Don Felder on their records was the greatest blessing that the band could have asked for when they worked on ‘Hotel California’.
Those guitar solos are good enough to stand with ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’, but the band was always greater than the sum of its parts. The country rock world wasn’t known for a band that had that many hooks, but Frey learned a long time ago that it was more about making music that made people feel good than worrying about the kind of showmanship that every other guitar hero had.
Walsh was their token guitar genius whenever he played, but back when Frey was a kid, he knew that there was no reason to work on Jimi Hendrix’s level by any stretch. The 1960s guitarist was making the kind of music that created different sonic colours whenever he played, and when Frey was woodshedding a lot of his ideas with Bob Seger, he felt like he would have needed to throw in the towel years before he even started working on his classics.
Seger was the one teaching him that it was possible to write songs, but when they both heard Are You Experienced for the first time, they didn’t hear anyone who was making music like that, with Seger recalling, “We were both dating girls who were in a band called the Mama Cats, and we were both in bands. He brought me home to his house in 1967, and we played Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. At the end, we looked at each other and said, ‘Are we out of a job?’”
But Frey would be out of a job a lot sooner when his mother was brought into the equation. She had caught him smoking pot when he was hanging out with Seger, and after agreeing to be his bassist, she was the one who insisted that Frey stay behind and kick some of his more naughty habits. But that wasn’t going to slow him down by any stretch when he got eyes for Los Angeles.
Further reading: From The Vault
The country rock movement was already becoming one of the biggest things in the world, and if The Byrds were making the jangly tunes that anyone could fall in love with, Frey felt like he could do the same thing once he heard Henley’s voice. He had some gold buried in his throat, and the rest of the band only needed to fill in the gaps when it came time for them to come up with tunes like ‘One of These Nights’ later on in their career.
Getting to the level of Hendrix would have been out of the question, but Frey didn’t mind bowing out to one of the kings of guitar. His strong suit was always in writing some of the best tunes that he could, and even if he was no good at playing lead or making the whammy bar bend every single note, he could definitely make people feel something by just strumming a guitar and telling them a story.
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