Tim Riley: Rural Jurors

The Eagles, Joe Walsh, and Country Pretense

Welcome music lovers to another edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

It’s my pleasure to turn things over this time around to

Tim Riley

of the riley rock report. Tim is a music writer and critic of great distinction (among the books he has published is Tell Me Why: The Beatles: Album By Album, Song By Song, The Sixties And After—I remember checking it out of my local library back when I was first discovering the Fab Four) as well as a professor of digital journalism at Emerson College, a pianist and a public speaker. I’ll let Tim take over from here but will mention before I get out of the way that my response to Tim’s piece is in today’s edition of his Substack, one of the top music newsletters on this platform. If you haven’t already, subscribe to it. You won’t be sorry. - Robert C. Gilbert

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Rural Jurors
The Eagles, Joe Walsh, and Country Pretense

By: Tim Riley

I’ve enjoyed reading Robert Gilbert’s tribute to Rudy Van Gelder, his tour of obscure psychedelia, and his elegy for Charlie Watts. More recently, he let it drop that he can’t stand the Eagles. I felt a tingle of critical affinity even though jazz is still a scam. But Gilbert stopped short of addressing 1976’s Hotel California, which anchors that band’s Big Problem. So I wrote him a note. Silly man, he wrote back. Then we discovered we agreed on some important things for completely different reasons… 

In March, when Justice Curtis Farber threw out Don Henley’s criminal case against author Ed Sanders, it made news mostly because he followed the law (the action featured "jarringly late disclosure," even as Henley plans his civil suit). But Sanders (the Fugs’s savant) deserves a better antagonist than Henley (the Eagles’ lead singer and drummer, aggrieved for leaking innocuous interview notes from an unpublished bio). Aging rock’n’rollers thrill to any whisper of justice. At a Beatles White Album conference at in 2018, a greyed Sanders came and sang to a group of musicologists after dinner with his ukulele, and everyone froze with wonder: I can’t remember what he sang, but his presence transcended the idea of quirky icon, and he held us spellbound though the silliest and simplest of numbers. He’s far more than the founder of the Fugs, or author of 1971’s The Family, that early Manson epic. I’d take his side in any kickball dispute.

Henley tries to inspire fear and trembling in his subjects simply because of his rock star status, and the coconut on his shoulders simply does not weigh as much as he thinks. He and Glenn Frey ran the Eagles like a corporation, which made them cute, but as far as aesthetic orbits go, they got lapped early by Steely Dan, Roxy Music, even perhaps Led Zeppelin. Call them the Pink Floyd of Americana: the Eagles didn’t seem to realize their better stripes until a country tribute record, Common Threads, came out in 1993 that made the argument for them. This should intrigue many more people. What if they had just made a damned Country album? Consider John Fogerty, who led one of those Important Bands, Creedence Clearwater Revival. The first thing he did going solo: Blue Ridge Rangers, a pure deathless country turn. Overlooking country, Beyoncé will tell you, can prove downright careless.

Some historical context: When Joe Walsh joined the Eagles in late 1975, nobody was worried about how much mainstream pop watered down anybody’s “pure” country status. But Walsh’s move was still an aesthetic scandal. Not that we didn’t wish him well: “Funk #49” still had a grip on FM radio in certain areas, and how could you slag on a guy who quoted Ravel’s “Bolero” note-for-note in “The Bomber,” the very next song on James Gang's Rides Again (1971). Walsh played out the early idea of guitarist as showboating fool, and had a comic wildness about him that made the Eagles sound prim. 

In our Boulder, Colorado, circles, where we took pride in local Elton John sightings, and how he dubbed his hit album Caribou for the studio he frequented in nearby Nederland, Walsh carried authentic hometown credibility. He had once lived where the Buffs’ Folsom field doubled as a rock arena for memorable shows from Leon Russell, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, and the Grateful Dead. Before Walsh moved to LA, he produced an album by pretty boy Dan Fogelberg called *Souvenirs*, from which we plucked “Part of the Plan” as our one of our high school graduation numbers. Fogelberg’s debut held promise with Walsh’s bandleader muscle kicking lesser songs into album tracks (”Illinois,” “Souvenirs”). After James Gang disbanded, Walsh scored some FM jolts with the joyously self-deprecating “Life’s Been Good,” which punctured rock star arrogance to make him a shoe-in for Ringo’s All-Stars.

So when we read in Rolling Stone that Walsh had joined the Eagles, we fretted. This whole 70s scene had gone screwy by presuming the Eagles a Big Important Band ahead of Fleetwood Mac or the Doobie Brothers or ZZ Top, and the cynicism on Eagles’ records surfed on vaguely ignoble airs, decidedly not of a piece with the 60s rock value system. “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969…” Henley sang, flipping off the whole of the 60s with one disparaging rejoinder.

Early on, tracks like “Take It Easy” (by one Jackson Browne) and “Take It To the Limit” gave the band hits, the kind of second-rate songs a sharp producer like Glyn Johns propped up with swollen arrangements. You could also tell that the banjo wouldn’t last long—their pop feel had far more ambition than any Americana allegiances. The competition, another California racket dubbed America, steered into soft-pop like 1973’s “Sister Golden Hair Surprise.”

Turns out, of course, Bill Szymczyk, the guy who engineered those James Gang albums, had grown into a producer and did for the Eagles what Phil Spector had done for the Righteous Brothers ten years earlier: turned a second-rate act into a colossus (if only for one record). The Eagles were too cynical to give up after one hit, and they kept firing band members as if that made them “outlaws.” You could tell their “allegiance” to a roots-rock or country affiliation was wafer-thin, and that banjo player Bernie Leadon was not going to steer them into the mainstream they felt destined to conquer (this was not the type of group to insist that The Banjo Stays, popularity be damned). (Just imagine “Hotel California” with a BANJO.)

Sure enough, with phony cowboy ballads like “Desperado” and “Tequila Sunrise,” they burnished their image into something like “authentic” purveyors of an “honest” approach to American roots in a way that the Doobie Brothers didn’t care about. Ironically, Michael McDonald joining that band turned out to serve as the most relevant comparison and led them to even bigger hits by the end of the decade as the Eagles came to the end of their Long Run (1980). That last album gathers up even more Walsh influence and carves a template for Dwight Yoakam.

When Hotel California appeared, it felt like pure platinum, one of the first albums to signify platinum even more than Big Statement. And that’s how many spoke of it as they heard it: not as great music, but the sound of a massive land grab. In the previous season, product like Elton John’s or the Eagles’ own Greatest Hits actually shipped platinum (a million units pressed before release), and that was the kind of thing that made the news. The album’s lead track had a certain louche swagger, all right, and made the record mandatory radio for about two years. The next number, “New Kid In Town,” had as much confidence and savvy as any Country turn, and threw down a gauntlet: take us seriously, damnit. 

“New Kid” grew in stature even at first hearing: in a bath of sweet harmonies singing a languorous melody, they sang about adolescent cruelty and loneliness almost enough to convince you they might have grown out of it themselves. Then Joe Walsh broke the spell. 

“Life in the Fast Lane” presented the Walsh dilemma sharply: here was a James Gang-ish guitar platform posing as an Eagles song, complete with a heady opening riff packed with suspenseful silences that led into a tight groove worthy of its setup. Weirdly, Walsh sang lead, which suggested that Henley had lost an argument but knew he wasn’t quite right for the job after making “James Dean” such an embarrassing attempt at “heavy” (and so quotable: ”Too tired to live, too fast to die/Bye bye…”) As we’d feared, it sounded more like the Eagles had harnessed Walsh than that Walsh had brought any madness or spontaneity to the party. Your ears dreamed of a more nervy drummer on “Fast Lane,” not that weak-ass clippety-clop. 

Still, Walsh leaned into his guitar like a self-respecting non-singer; you could now list the Eagles as listenable if only for his dandy touchés. After the opening, a verse and a refrain, the track swerved into a classic Fender break that recalls George Harrison interrupting “Got to Get You Into my Life” or Free’s “All Right Now,” the kind of riffage that turns electric jollies into quivering colors to light up the rest of the song. You could anticipate that break through every repeat and still get tingles, a Power Pop Pez ball. And for a glistening moment, the album seemed like it might redeem its premise of self-aware foreboding. 

Three opening tracks that strong made it easy to get stuck on side one, and they dropped the conversation between Country and Riffage, the most promising tension, right there. Turning the record over yielded a better Walsh song, “Pretty Maids All in a Row,” that found a certain ache and timidity, and “The Last Resort,” which closed with a lingering twilight vibe, an epic fade-out into the distance like one of those inebriated sunsets.

The album’s preening almost stole attention from its weakness: typically, this band’s reach exceeded its grasp, but in a way that curiously cheapened the record’s better ideas: "California’s one big glittering fraud,” though not original, had enough room for poetry, but somehow Henley and Frey had propped up the band’s image on seeing through that very notion. As hipsters, if these guys had declared themselves a Dallas band, they could never have fallen for such arid pomp. The Band had already cemented in California hokum, so turning around to give listeners this Big Reveal (the game is rigged) seemed both lacking in self-awareness layered with disingenuousness. They sold us California, for Chrissakes, now they’re better than that? That’s like a Hollywood movie that moves through decadence while decrying degeneracy, or spouts feminism while showing acres of female skin. You marveled at how blinded the Eagles were by their own lack of self-awareness… which may be the most California thing of all.

Hm, so Walsh brought Detroit street cred, supple guitar work, and crystalline moments to a band that owed more to Country than they ever realized, and sang lyrics like “Some dance to remember, some dance to forget” as if it had depth. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” the title song’s weak-ass kicker, somehow hit the zeitgeist’s emptiness, the way Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender,” soon would. “Country Rock,” a conundrum legacy that sprang from Dylan, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, had grown up and spun gold only to achieve the cheapest cynicism. The album’s kicker, “The Last Resort,” signed off with a giant admonishment: “Call something paradise, kiss it goodbye…” How could you admire the crossover success of these smug perfectionists with a softcore pose so phony it beckoned Punk to go all Medieval on its ass? 

It’s not just that Hollywood’s Chinatown made glamorous corruption with more ambition and daring during that purgatory between Nixon and Carter, but the Country genre might have borne some of this arching Eagles self-pity, or at least modulated it. Worse than coopting a guitarist, the Eagles made Walsh sound tame, which felt criminal. In a more just world, a Walsh country album would vie with Ringo’s or Fogerty’s or (please God) Bonnie Raitt’s.  

Can we please put on some Lefty Frizzell now? 

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