Eagles: Their Greatest Hits at 50
Other than One of These Nights, I didn’t own any of the earlier Eagles albums when I purchased Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) fifty years ago. I just knew the radio songs, the Top 40 stuff that floated through the air with plenty of commercial interruption. What I didn’t know was that this record would define a whole internal season of my life.
I was driving around in a ’65 Ford Falcon, which felt like freedom simply because it moved and I was inside it alone or visiting friends. This album was on the radio and on my mind constantly. I played it endlessly, easily a hundred times, probably more. Every song worked. At the time, I found it amazing that one band could produce so many terrific hits.
I was sixteen and full of myself. I loved to laugh. I was discovering Tolkien and Thoreau and Kurt Vonnegut. My mind could not fully absorb my curiosity of and passion for the world. Eagles were my favorite band to all that fresh freedom.
Since they were not Top 40 hits, “Tequila Sunrise” and “Desperado” were complete discoveries. I’d never heard them before this record. “Tequila Sunrise” just drifted into the room and stayed there, sun-faded, resigned, oddly comforting. “Desperado” really grabbed me. I listened to it more than any other track, over and over. There was a time in my high school life when I listened to no song more than “Desperado.”
The album also functioned as a kind of musical education. “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” were among the first songs I learned to play on guitar. Open chords, clean progressions, melodies that wanted to be sung. I played them alone, then with friends, then wherever a guitar happened to be. That’s how music worked in my life then. You didn’t curate an identity, you shared songs. They passed easily between people. So I have that musical connection to them remembering when I played guitar, which was actually years later.
This record is a photorealistic image of mainstream America in the 1970’s, which is a big reason it has outsold almost everything else. It also marks the end of something. It’s the last word on the pre–Joe Walsh Eagles, the harmony-first band, the Southern California rock group before irony, darkness, and internal gravity took over. Later albums got bigger, sharper, more mythic, especially Hotel California, but they never sounded this relaxed again. Eagles before the edge hardened, the glory days, is what we get.
There’s a lot of talk about how the band didn’t want this album released, how the label pushed it through without consulting them, how Don Henley in particular objected. I get that. No artist wants to be summarized too early. The record company was being pushy for “content.” But history didn’t ask for permission. This thing went on to become one of the best-selling albums ever in the United States, trading places with Thriller year by year depending on the math. At some point the argument ends. You don’t debate gravity.
I suppose Eagles music is kitsch these days. I don’t listen to it any more, personally. It’s been a decade since I listened to them. I don’t even own this album any more. I played the fool out of it since my high school days but I sold it with my vinyl record collection long ago.
I used to play these songs on guitar and listen to them with friends and party to them. I remember what I was then. I was young and knew nothing about life except it was fun. So, now on the 50th anniversary of this album’s release, I have been listening again and, remembering, they still feel good. They remind me of being carefree and happy with a big future ahead. They remind me of driving with nowhere to go, of learning how to play, of music as something you lived inside rather than consumed.
Their Greatest Hits didn’t just capture a great band as it was building a marvelous peak. It captured a way music once fit into life. And somehow, improbably, it still does. That part is not kitsch.
Like an anthem, “Take It Easy,” gets going. Great sing-along song. In its debut, it rose to #12 on the Billboard Hot 100. That still feels shocking. This song sounds like a #1. It’s loose, confident, generous, and endlessly replayable. For me it was pure motion music, windows down, steering wheel loose in my hands. Later, when I learned it on guitar, it felt like learning a folk song that had always existed. Great vocal harmonies especially from Randy Meisner and Glenn Frey here. Bernie Leadon gets mean on the banjo.
“Witchy Woman” peaked at #9, which feels generous. It’s the strangest track on the album, a little spooky, a little theatrical, slightly goofy in hindsight, but still cool. This one definitely adds flavor. Every great album needs one song that leans into atmosphere over truth, and this is it. Don Henley and Leadon wrote this one. Heavy Leadon influence, Henley's first masterful vocals on display.
“Lyin' Eyes” climbed all the way to #2. That one makes sense. It’s long, detailed, emotionally observant, and generous with melody. It feels like a short story set to music. As a teenager, I didn’t see it for the cliché story that it is, I felt its adventurous qualities. It features truly impressive five-part harmony that is distinctive in rock music, still one of the highlights of the album for me today. It was also a cross-over Top 10 hit on the country charts at the time.
“Take It to the Limit” peaked at #4, and that still undersells its impact. Meisner’s voice is iconic on this track. That final note isn’t a stunt, it’s a risk. Hearing it back then, and hearing it live later, it felt like a moment the band couldn’t fake. Meisner brought a solid bass guitar and a wide emotional register vocally that accented and, at times, surpassed the excellent vocals of Henley and Frey. I’ll repeat myself, I fell in love for the first time slow-dancing to this song. Or at least that is the story my brain has constructed about it. Sounds good and definitely shows how personal this track is to me even if I don't listen to it anymore.
“Desperado” wasn’t a hit at all, as I said. They never released it as a single. And yet it became one of the defining Eagles songs, especially live. It was one of my ritual songs at sixteen. I would play it every day, it seemed. One could argue that its inclusion of it here, the “least hit” on the album, is what made it a hit. That was my personal experience with it.
Flip to side two.
“One of These Nights” hit #1, and you can hear the confidence in it. This is where the band tightens the screws, leans into mood, boogies just enough, and starts sounding nocturnal. It’s polished, sleek, and slightly daring (disco influenced) compared to the earlier songs. You can feel ignition in the main engines of the rocket ship here. This band is about to seriously take off.
“Tequila Sunrise” barely cracked the charts at all, peaking somewhere around #64. It’s still amazing to me I did not know about it back then. It became one of my favorite tracks immediately. The easy-going Western appeal of the tune is an American classic. I really loved discovering this song as a teen.
"Already Gone" was an early Eagles song that hooked me before I owned any of their music. This song stuck in my brain in 1974 even though it peaked at just #32. Oddly, I didn't connect this band with "Take It Easy" at the time. This one introduced Don Felder as lead guitarist. It is a great high school rocker with all that energy and naivete about it. It seems like a silly song to me today but I was into it back then. I laughed listening to it again.
“Peaceful Easy Feeling” only reached about #22, which is almost funny. This song feels like the soul of early Eagles. Calm without being sleepy, warm without being sentimental. Earthy. When I learned to play it on guitar, it taught me how to sing and play at the same time, how to bring a song . It never needed chart dominance. It needed space. A wonderful country rock song.
Finally there’s “Best of My Love,” which did go to #1. Soft, harmonious with some biting lyrics. It’s the kind of song that proves how disciplined the band really was. No excess, no melodrama, just craft doing its job. Beautiful and lyrical, yet strangely torn and confused. Fantastic vocals by Henley, Frey and Meisner. A great way to end an album with no weak songs on it.
Here’s a small but fun fact. Beginning with One of The Nights, Eagles vinyl albums contained an etched message on each side of the inner record ring. That album offered: “Don’t worry - ” on side one and “- Nothing will be O.K.!” on side two. Greatest Hits offered a message from the album’s two producers: “Happy New Year, Glyn” and “With Love from Bill”.
Greatest Hits recently passed the 40 million mark in sales, making it, as of this post, the all-time greatest selling album in the US. That’s obviously impressive and probably what makes the whole thing supposedly kitsch. You can’t get more cookie-cutter pop than that. But, what strikes me now listening to this material again after many years away from it is that those astonishing numbers are equaled by the album’s emotional range.
Some of the best songs weren’t hits, and some of the biggest hits weren’t the ones that stayed closest to the heart. But every song on the album is solid, polished and infinitely replayable. For a sixteen-year-old kid driving around in a Ford Falcon, discovering songs that radio had missed, it didn’t feel like history being documented. Nothing ever does when you are living it. Once Eagles music soundtracked my life in real time.
Eagles: Their Greatest Hits (1971 - 1975) was released 50 years ago today.
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Don Henley interviewed recently on CBS's Sunday Morning program.
An older 60 Minutes interview.
1998 Rock Hall of Fame induction acceptance speeches. I'm pretty sure this was the only time all seven members of the band shared a stage.
Unrelated to this album, I explored all the pre-Joe Walsh Eagles. "Most Of Us Are Sad" was a song that stuck in my mind. It wasn't a hit but it made an impression on me when I finally heard it years after it's release in 1972. It shows what Meisner's voice could do on a waltzing tune written and arranged by Frey. So nostalgic. Both those guys are gone now, the first Eagles to permanently exit the stage.
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