How do you follow an album as brilliant and successful as Hotel California? That was the dilemma facing the Eagles at the end of the ‘70s – and in the end, the pressure was too much.
The band’s 1979 album The Long Run arrived three years after Hotel California – an eternity by the standards of that time, when major acts regularly delivered an album every year.
The Long Run was also the last album the band made before breaking up in 1980.
It was 14 years later that the band reunited with the album Hell Freezes Over, a live recording bolstered with four brand new studio tracks.
In an interview with Classic Rock in 2001, Eagles drummer and co-lead vocalist Don Henley recalled the making of The Long Run and the pressure that went with it.
“It made us ill,” Henley said. “Well, we made ourselves ill!”
Henley was speaking to Classic Rock with Glenn Frey, the band’s other leading figure – also a co-founder, principal songwriter and lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist and piano player.
In 2001, Henley and Frey had just begun planning a new Eagles album with lead guitarist Joe Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmit. That album, titled Long Road Out Of Eden, would eventually be released in 2007.
It was the Eagles’ sixth US No.1, and America’s biggest selling album of 2007.
It was also the final Eagles album, following Glenn Frey's death in 2016.
Long Road Out Of Eden was a challenging project – exactly as Henley and Frey had anticipated when they talked to Classic Rock in 2001.
“A lot of things have to come together for the Eagles to do anything,” Frey said. “We’re living in different places, we all have families – it’s a lot different to what it was in the late ’70s. But now the time is right.
“We can’t do it long distance with Don living in Dallas and coming to LA for two weeks at a time. We all have to be in the same zip code for a period of time for the songs to get written and for it all to happen naturally.”
Henley concurred: “It’s tricky at this stage of the game. We’re 30 years on here, and we’re known for all that stuff in the ’70s. So it’s going to be tricky to be who we are and yet be contemporary.
“It’s a fine line. We don’t want to sound like we’re trying too hard to be trendy, and we don’t want to sound antiquated either. So it’s like walking a tightrope. How are we going to sound fresh and new and still sound like the Eagles?”
Frey concluded: “We’ll make a record for us – songs we like. We think it will sound like an Eagles record. I’m not being sarcastic. Honestly!”
The pair were asked if there was an element of fear in making a new Eagles album – a fear that it might fall short of the band’s classic records.
Henley replied: “It’s been over 20 years since our last album, so we don’t really have to compare or compete with that. I think we have a sense of a fresh start. But I don’t think any of us wants to just dash something off and hope that it sells based on past laurels or fame from the old days. It has to be a credible album.
“Certainly, we don’t want to fail. We’ve never really known much failure. And I can’t think of another instance where a band has not made an album of new material in 20 years and has then made a triumphant return. So that, to me personally, is pressure – to prove that we can do it.”
Frey admitted: “It’s a double-edged sword. Whatever the Eagles do is going to be highly scrutinised. There’s going to be a lot of expectation.
“But on the other hand, I really don’t think we would do anything that would tarnish our legacy. We discussed it: what do we want to do, what do we expect out of this? And the genesis of it was: we’re going to be the Eagles!
“We’re going to make a record with the talent that we have. And well, we won’t put it out if it’s bad, how about that? I just figured it out!”
Long Road Out Of Eden was a double album with a broad range of material. The song most typical of the Eagles’ early country-rock style was actually a cover of the track How Long, written and recorded in 1971 by JD Souther, a close friend of Henley and Frey who also co-wrote Eagles hits including Best Of My Love, New Kid In Town and Heartache Tonight.
The title track on Long Road Out Of Eden was an epic reminiscent of Henley’s solo material. Perhaps the best song on the album was Frey’s No More Cloudy Days.
![Eagles - No More Cloudy Days (Live) (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/o96_R0UqSa0/maxresdefault.jpg)
In the ’70s, the Eagles’ motto was ‘Song Power’. And in 2001, Don Henley was confident they still had it.
“We can write good songs,” he said. “I feel – we all feel – more enthusiastic about this right now than we have since probably the mid-’70s.
“While we can’t go back and create those fabulous desert days of yore, when we were the hip young LA cowboys, I think musically speaking we’ll be all right. A good song is a good song. And we can produce them in a way that will be contemporary – without destroying the essence of whatever it is that people like about us.
“I don’t think we’ll have to go out into the desert and take peyote and puke, like we did in the old days…
“These Indian tribal rituals we did with peyote, they were beautiful, sacrificial. I’ve got pictures of us puking.
He smiled: “Well, it didn’t make me puke, but some of the other guys puked for all of us.”
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