(Credits: TIDAL)
Fri 14 November 2025 19:30, UK
When Glenn Frey first landed in Los Angeles, he wasn’t exactly cut out to be a rock and roll star.
He wanted his name in lights the same way that his idols did, but it’s not like anyone was going to look at some random kid from Detroit and think that he was immediately cut out for prime time. He needed to have a band behind him, but even when the Eagles were fully formed, it’s not like they could take flight right out of the gate.
Which is strange, considering the pedigree that everyone was working at the time. Bernie Leadon was one of the greatest players in the country rock movement, and Randy Meisner had been gaining steam ever since working in Poco, but when you’re shopping around to record companies, you tend to learn a few lessons pretty quickly. And in Frey’s case, it was that no amount of credibility meant anything unless they had the right chemistry and the right songs to get them over the line.
So when they walked into David Geffen’s office for the first time, it was a bit of a shock for them to be rejected on the spot. They clearly weren’t ready to record yet, so after honing their chops for a while, they needed to find the real magic whenever they played. ‘Tryin’ and ‘Chug All Night’ could have been pretty acceptable garage rockers if they played them as they were when they started, but when Glyn Johns walked into the room, Frey knew they needed to be on their best behaviour.
They were standing next to the producer who had helmed records with The Who and The Rolling Stones, but Johns wasn’t particularly impressed. None of the classic songs were clicking just yet, but once he heard them singing in harmony together, he had the same feeling that George Martin probably felt when hearing The Beatles. They had a lot of work to do, but there was potential, and when hearing ‘Take it Easy’, they could capitalise on that potential pretty quickly.
And for all of the bad blood in the intervening years, Frey did admit that the band wouldn’t have been anywhere close to stardom without Johns’s help, saying, “He was the key to our success in a lot of ways. He’d been working with all these classic English rock & roll bands…the Who, the Stones…he didn’t want to hear us squashing out Chuck Berry licks. I didn’t mind him pointing us in a certain direction. We just didn’t want to make another limp-wristed L.A. country-rock record.”
Even if Johns had their best interests at heart, he did critically misunderstand what they wanted to be. In his mind, the band were a country band with an occasional rock and roll flair, and since the band wanted to have the same kind of power that they heard on their favourite Zeppelin records, they were shocked when Johns said that they weren’t capable of ever reaching that level.
Perhaps they were at that point, but as soon as they ditched him on On the Border, you can hear a slight edge being put back into their sound. ‘Already Gone’ is far from the best tune they ever wrote, but hearing them put a little bit of bite back into the guitars was all they had been asking for since the days of working on ‘Witchy Woman’.
Johns was more than happy to leave them behind, but what he did for the group could never be forgotten. Everyone has those few people who taught them the ropes of recording, and while many people disguise their petty grievances behind the “creative differences” label, there truly was no other word for their issues.
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