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.<\/p>\n
Not every <\/em>rock critic.\u00a0 Not all the time.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Of course, part of my emnity with rock critics is embarassment over the way the adolescent Mitch ate up the crap they were peddling.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u00a0“rock critic as social commentator” koolaid.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Even moreso – growing up in rural North Dakota, my main window into pop culture, and pop counterculture, was through the issue of Rolling Stone <\/em>that came to the Jamestown Library every week.<\/p>\n And in RS<\/em>, 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…<\/p>\n …through the medium of the album review.\u00a0 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 <\/em>for.<\/p>\n Anyway – the geist <\/em>of that particular zeit, <\/em>was “old is bad – new is good”.<\/p>\n Same as it ever was and ever shall be, of course.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 The old and measured and, worst of all, commercial – everything from Led Zeppelin and Bad Company to Linda Ronstadt and Elton John – was out.<\/p>\n And one of the big losers in that calculus was The Eagles.<\/p>\n And truth be told, I was always fine with that.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 “Take it to the Limit” is one of my favorite last-call songs ever.\u00a0 “Already Gone” is one of my favorite guitar raveups – I’ve always wanted to play it in a cover band.\u00a0 And the guitar player in me has spent hours dissecting all of the glorious technical nuance in “Hotel California”.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n Lessons learned:<\/p>\n The snotty teenage Mitch\u00a0chose to ignore the latter point – and never really stopped until last weekend.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Videos below the jump.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 :<\/p>\n\n