Rethinking The Seventies: The Eagles

If I’ve learned one thing after leaving my post-adolescent years, it’s that there are few things in the world more useless than rock critics.

Not every rock critic.  Not all the time.  But as a job classification, rock critics are somewhere between supermodels and professional reality-TV contestants in terms of useful output generated per unit of input.

Of course, part of my emnity with rock critics is embarassment over the way the adolescent Mitch ate up the crap they were peddling.   I managed to evade some of the more embarassing adolescent gaffes of the eighties, of course – photos of me with a frizzy seventies perm, or supporting Gary Hart – but I sure did drink up the whole jug of “rock critic as social commentator” koolaid.

I’ll forgive myself for missing it, of course, because like any teenager, my perspective started in junior high; nothing that came before counted, naturally.  Even moreso – growing up in rural North Dakota, my main window into pop culture, and pop counterculture, was through the issue of Rolling Stone that came to the Jamestown Library every week.

And in RS, every week, the “great” critics of the day – Dave Marsh, Robert Christgau, Cameron Crowe – and the not so great (the execrable Parke Puterbaugh) held forth on the changing culture…

…through the medium of the album review.  The self-important, “English majors gone wild”-style attempts to turn snark about this week’s entertainment product into commentary on Deep Thoughts-style reviews that you went to Rolling Stone for.

Anyway – the geist of that particular zeit, was “old is bad – new is good”.

Same as it ever was and ever shall be, of course.

And so by the time I became aware of the musical world outside Jamestown, the new and loud and snotty – the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, reggae, ska, punk in general – was in.  The old and measured and, worst of all, commercial – everything from Led Zeppelin and Bad Company to Linda Ronstadt and Elton John – was out.

And one of the big losers in that calculus was The Eagles.

And truth be told, I was always fine with that.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve always had a few Eagles songs that, deep in the back of my musical consciousness, I’ve loved.  “Take it to the Limit” is one of my favorite last-call songs ever.  “Already Gone” is one of my favorite guitar raveups – I’ve always wanted to play it in a cover band.  And the guitar player in me has spent hours dissecting all of the glorious technical nuance in “Hotel California”.

Last week, I wound up watching the movie “History of the Eagles”, covering the band’s story up through their breakup in 1980 (and the sequal, covering their various solo careers and reunions after 1994).

Lessons learned:

• The re-united Eagles are an extraordinarily un-compelling band whose muse has left them.
• But that implies that the Eagles had a muse to lose.  And up through about 1977, they did.

The snotty teenage Mitch chose to ignore the latter point – and never really stopped until last weekend.

But the more I learn – or re-learn – about the Eagles in their original incarnation, the more I think I may have short-changed my adolescent self.

Videos below the jump.

Truth be told, even when I was in the worst throes of my “too good for anything before punk” teenage wasteland years, I secretly loved the sh*tkicker anthem “Already Gone”, here in a gloriously sloppy :

And then there’s “Take It To The Limit”.  Sung by original bass player Randy Meissner, for my money it’s behind only “Hearts of Stone” as the best last-call song in the history of pop music:

And then there’s “Hotel California” – the song that, along with “Stairway to Heaven” and “Baba O’Riley” (and, yes, “Can’t Get Enough”), launched the entire “Classic Rock” genre.

Forget all of the Eagles social and historical overhead, though.  Just focus on two things:

First: The guitar interplay between Don Felder and Joe Walsh.  It’s so well-known it’s become something of a musical cliche, like the first eight bars of “Stairway to Heaven” or the riff to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or “Sweet Home Alabama” – the musical equivalent of saying “Y’know what I mean”, and they do.

But listen to it; the intro, with Don Felder’s capoed 12-strong with the chiming harmonics; Felder and Joe Walsh’s almost orchestral harmony behind Henley’s vocal in the second half of each verse; and, of course, the call and answer guitar solo with Felder and Walsh at the end of the song.  Like “Sweet Child of Mine” or “Just Between You And Me”, it’s one of those guitar parts that’s a rite of passage for pretty much everyone that plays the instrument (or at least those of us who started playing between 1977 and 1995; I have no idea what the kids learn today, if anything).

Second, and even more interesting?  Watch and listen to the interplay between Randy Meissner’s bass and Don Henley’s drums.  That’s right; a song that was the nucleus of American “classic rock” of the Seventies was a reggae song.  Or at least had a thick but nuanced reggae influence in the rhythm.