The Eagles

The next year, when I was 14, my friends Mel and Lenore invited me to go camping with them one summer’s eve. This was something we had been doing more of recently, and I eagerly jumped at the chance. The reason it had rapidly become a lot more popular was not that we had suddenly awoken to the wonders of the outdoors (growing up in rural Michigan, we were all pretty familiar with the natural world already). It had more to do with the fact that we were all going through puberty, and the opportunity to sleep together and perhaps cop the occasional feel was very enticing.

So I showed up at the appropriate campsite and found Mel and Lenore sitting around the campfire with…Mrs. C. I knew they had all become friends during 8th grade and stayed friends after graduation, but I was still surprised to see her there. I knew who she was and she had met me a few times (and had burned herself into my overheated imagination with an off-hand remark one morning about how she couldn’t scratch herself in a particular spot because she was in public).

I settled down next to the fire and joined the circle. It was a beautiful night and we spent many hours intently discussing, passionate arguing, and poignant confessing our hopes, dreams, and fears. Mel kept singing this Eagles song that was stuck in her head, repeating the phrase “but you only want the ones that you can’t get,” over and over throughout the evening. It was one of those magical, intimate nights when all’s right with the world, and I never wanted it to end.

Eventually, though, we were full of food and tired of toungue, so we crawled into the tent. I took my place between Mel and Mrs. C and settled down and waited. And waited. And waited until I was sure everybody was asleep. Then I reached my hand over as slowly and carefully as possible, and gently laid it on Mrs. C’s t-shirt, right over her left breast. I was praying that she was asleep, for I could never explain what I was doing. I knew it was wrong but I just didn’t care, my sexual curiosity was too great and I just had to carpe breastum.

Imagine my surprise when she suddenly rolled over on top of me and began kissing me. I was terrified and exhilarated beyond belief, but my excitement was short-lived, as she burst into tears and started whispering, “I’m sorry” over and over again in my ear. Confused, aroused, and feeling very much like a little boy, I patted her on the back and tried to make her feel better. She fell asleep, and I lay there perfectly still, twisting in the wind, flopping like a dying fish, thrilled and scared and excited and confused and elated and depressed. As soon as the sky started turning grey, I slipped out of the tent and walked home, the Eagles ringing in my ears.

The Eagles are the quintessential American band – not only in name, but also in style. There had been some previous attempts to merge country and rock – the Father and Son of American music (together with jazz, the Holy Spirit, making up the divine trinity of American popular music) – to varying degrees of success. It was a tantalizing possibility that lay just beyond reach for many years. Tantalizing because the fan bases for those two styles were huge and, traditionally, had very little crossover. If somebody could just find the right balance and tap into both markets, they could reach a level of financial and popular success that could only be dreamed of. The Flying Burrito Brothers tried it, but never really took off (never underestimate the value of a good name). Linda Ronstadt walked the line pretty successfully for a few years, but never really blew up. But her backing band – who became the Eagles – got it just right. They combined the familiar idioms of country with the energy and excitement of rock and carefully balanced just the right amount of sincere nostalgia with skeptical cynicism to keep almost everybody engaged. And almost everybody was engaged, at some point or another. Although it’s cool to hate The Eagles, most people must confess to liking at least a couple of their songs.

Such as Desperado, the title track from their second album. Desperado is their most famous and most popular ballad, and part of their popularity must be attributed to the fact that they could pull off these lonely country ballads with absolutely no hint of irony, which much have helped endear them to the country crowd immeasurably. The song is beautifully crafted, both musically and lyrically. They mine the rich vein of American mythology especially well on this track, referencing the lonesome, ruggedly independent cowboy out “riding fences”, and even manage to slip in a little poker analogy in the middle. I especially like the way the second verse ends with the line “you only want the ones that you can’t get” and then starts the next verse with “Desperado”, leading you to unconsciously finish the hanging rhyme and turn desperado into desperate.

My favorite aspect of this song, and one that just bolsters its quintessential Americanness to me, is something that isn’t part of the song at all. I used to like to try to make seamless DJ mixes using an old 4-track cassette deck. I didn’t have the two turntables (and a microphone) that were the trade tools of DJs, but I loved using my 4-track to blend different music together. In fact, for quite awhile in NYC, my roommate Eric and I would play mixer games – the sonic equivalent of Exquisite Corpse. The literary version of Exquisite Corpse involves writing a few sentences of a story, folding the paper over so only the last couple of lines are visible, and passing it on to someone else to continue. They do the same, and the story continues growing blindly until it is deemed done (everybody at the party’s written something, or you run out of time, or however you want to end it), then the story is read aloud, to the amusement of all. Eric and I would do the same thing with the mixer, blending music to creating an aural tapestry, and then leaving a few threads at the end for the other person to weave together, and so on back and forth until the whole tape was finished. And since you could only work on the mixes through headphones, the finished product would be a surprise to both of us. Anyway, I spent years making these mix tapes until my 4-track finally gave up the ghost for good.

One on tape, I had segued into Desperado and was trying to figure out what to blend it with, when it suddenly occurred to me that the ending was very similar to the beginning of Ray Charles’ iconic version of Georgia on My Mind. I dug out a copy and played it against the ending of Desperado and was stunned to discover that it was not only the same relative chord progression, but it was also in the same key and virtually the same tempo. I still have that mix tape and stop whatever I’m doing when it’s on to listen to the beautiful melding of those two iconic slices of Americana.

The Eagles spawned many hits and got bigger and bigger as time went on. Eventually, after The Long Run (which has some surprisingly weird tracks on it, such as Those Shoes and The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks), they broke up and went their own separate (and highly profitable) ways. Joe Walsh, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey all had very successful solo careers after the band broke up, and, even though they swore it would never happen, they did get back together for a reunion tour and album – called, ironically (or insincerely) enough, Hell Freezes Over. The reformation of The Eagles was enough to earn the band the legendary status that the successful blending of rock and country promised: shortly after the tour, the first volume of their greatest hits became the biggest selling album of all time, eclipsing Michael Jackson’s seemingly unapproachable Thriller, and cementing their reputation, for better or worse, as the ultimate expression of American popular music.