Stunner
06-05-2006, 11:51 AM
Don Henley, who has been remarkably relaxed so far, has just got a little tetchy. With the people who say the Eagles reformed out of greed. With the people who say the ticket prices for their summer shows are extortionate. And with one, unnamed member of the Rolling Stones.
"We are a brand, a bit like the Stones," he says, accepting there is little point pretending his band are at the cutting edge of rock'n'roll. "But we haven't exploited it in that way; we've never sold our name or our music for commercials for a product, and we're very proud of that. Which is not to say we may not do it in the future, but I think [the Stones] have gone a little bit further down that road. I mean, I remember when we first started elevating our ticket prices, one of them - I'm not naming names, but it wasn't Mick - saying in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, 'Well, how much do you want to pay for nostalgia?' And then a couple of years later, they're charging double or triple what we're charging. For nostalgia."
Tetchiness is what people expect of the Eagles. After all, they did dissolve at the height of their fame in 1980, the popular perception being that it was the result of the band's principals falling out bloodily after years of indulging in anything and everything that came to hand, a perception reinforced by the unending stream of magazine articles that tell the stories of their excesses. (Henley having the road crew cart his own bed around the US on one tour is a favourite. Another is the remark made by one member - not in the current line-up - to another towards the end of their final show: "Only three more songs till I kick your ass, pal.") Although they seem to get on well enough nowadays - perhaps helped by the fact that they travel on tour separately, with individual entourages - their pasts have been made too public for anyone to even attempt to kid themselves that this is no more than a band of buddies in search of some remunerative fun.
But today, outbursts about the Stones aside, the band - Henley, Timothy Schmidt, Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh, or four-fifths of the 1980 line-up - are in surprisingly sunny mood. Which is all the more remarkable given that they are spending a day in Los Angeles meeting journalists ahead of their "Farewell 1" European tour, which includes eight UK stadium and arena dates, starting on June 13. Few artists relish a media day, even those who enjoy a warm relationship with the press. And it's been three decades since the Eagles could be described as critics' darlings.
The band formed in 1971, having come together initially as Linda Ronstadt's backing band, split nine years later after several personnel changes, and reformed as a five-piece in 1994. They're back to four these days because Don Felder - the one who promised an ass-kicking in 1980 - was sacked in 2001. Felder and the band, inevitably, sued each other. In their early days, they were championed by Neil Young for carrying the baton dropped by his old band, Buffalo Springfield, but they've become used to being pilloried for being a business rather than a rock group, for putting the "r" into band. Unsurprisingly, then, their list of European press interviews is short: just two titles. The Guardian, says Henley, the most voluble of the four, "is a newspaper I actually read".
Of the four Eagles, only its newest member, Schmidt (who joined in 1977), looks like a rock star: slim with long brown hair (it doesn't look dyed) halfway down his back. Frey - along with Henley the longest-serving Eagle, dating back to day one - looks, with his combed-back hair, dark jacket and unbuttoned shirt jacket, like a cast member of The Sopranos. Joe Walsh (who joined in 1976), with his quizzical face, yellow hair and T-shirt flopped over a curiously round belly, looks like Robin Williams playing an old surfer dude. Henley, the Guardian reader, dressed like one of the smart-casual baby boomers you see at their shows, looks thoughtful. When at one point our conversation turns to their old friend Neil Young's new anti-Bush album Living with War, he reveals the Eagles are working on a new album that includes a protest song, Long Road Out of Eden, about the war in Iraq (puzzlingly, they dedicated a song to Saddam Hussein when they played at a Democratic party fundraiser in 1996).
The album might come out by next year but there's no rush. Depending on which Eagle's talking, that's good news or bad. Walsh's view is that if they had a record company "or somebody to yell at us, 'We're going to ship it Monday,' then it would get done. Because we have never done anything until we absolutely had to. We need some tension. We write the best with some tension and things get done better with tension." Henley takes the opposite tack. It was tension, he says - as opposed to the popular explanation of cocaine, egos and the hostility between the openly hedonistic Frey and the openly hedonistic but at the same time conflicted Henley - that caused the Eagles to implode the year after recording their last studio album, 1979's The Long Run.
And though some of that tension was self-generated, most, he says, came from record company demands that they go on the road to flog Hotel California and follow it with a new, even more commercial record. They never had the knack of simultaneous writing and touring, even at their peak. And now Henley, Frey and Walsh all have children under 12 (Schmidt, the longest married, has teenagers), life is "not so simple as when all we had to worry about was making music. This band thing doesn't always come first. We have to write when we can, and I live in Dallas, Texas, a thousand miles away from here. I have to commute to get to work."
So, in the absence of a new record, this tour is promoting a compilation, Complete Eagles Greatest Hits, which is not to be confused with 2003's Eagles: The Very Best Of, 1986's Greatest Hits 2, or the Rolls-Royce of Eagles best-ofs, Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, which, with almost 30 million people possessing a copy, is officially the best-selling rock album ever. And the figures do matter to the Eagles and their management. While press releases for most rock bands are full of impenetrably purple prose about their musical innovations, the Eagles press pack has more in common with a corporation's annual report: it's all bullet points and sales figures. In the first six months of last year, for instance, the band earned $76.7m, making them 2005's second-highest grossing act (U2 came first). As for music, it says a new single No More Cloudy Days will be available for download in June. When I mention it to the band, they look puzzled. Cloudy Days is an old song, they say; they know nothing about a download.
With new Eagles material so slow in coming, and the Farewell 1 tour so slow in leaving (though the "farewell" bit, they explain, was a joke; after the time and effort it took to get back together, they're not planning to stop) you might suspect a desire to preserve the cash cow in formaldehyde. But they've actually tried recording a new album before now, says Schmidt, only "the timing seemed to be wrong". (It certainly was; having booked a studio the same week in September that the planes crashed into New York's Twin Towers, they cancelled the sessions. Hole in the World, the closing track on the new best-of, is a Henley-penned reflection on 9/11.)
The image of rock stars as businessmen is incongruous but not entirely inappropriate. If Henley bristles a bit when he says, "This is a job, not a hobby," it's because it rankles that their 1994 reunion, which they dubbed "The Hell Freezes Over Tour" (that being the date Frey once gave a journalist who asked if the Eagles would ever play together again) was redubbed "The Greed Tour" by the rock press, especially as those same writers greeted the Sex Pistols' statement that they'd reformed for the money with bemused smiles.
But the Sex Pistols weren't charging up to £75 a ticket, which is what the Eagles are doing this summer. "Yes, we do have high ticket prices," says Henley, "but I think that reflects our status in the industry. You don't hear much squawking about the presidents of corporations or businesses who get these outrageous salaries and then they screw up, get fired, and get even more money for leaving. And the cost of doing this goes up every year, the gasoline and the salaries we have to pay all these people."
All these people means the 100 or so who work for the band on tour, "not to mention the infrastructure here in Los Angeles which is spread out over three or four different offices. We employ a lot of people. This is what we had to try to explain to Congress a few times when I testified before a Senate committee about piracy and the stealing [free downloading] of music. I said, look, we create jobs here. It's not just about people onstage playing music, it's about the people who make guitars, the people who make guitar strings, the people who drive trucks, the lighting people, the catering people - even," he says, pausing for effect, "the press. It's a ripple effect that goes out from here that gives a lot of people work. And I don't think kids look at it that way; they just see celebrities on TV with a lot of money, and they don't think about all the various levels and layers of the business. I don't understand why it's OK to steal music but it's not OK to steal cars or gasoline or houses or anything that can't be digitised."
Schmidt, wanting to bring it back to the music, interjects that they give "a good show" for the money, "a long show. We really feel that we give them their money's worth." It's also pointed out that a good amount of money generated goes to unnamed charities - including, presumably, the environmental causes they've long supported, and possibly some political ones. Though Walsh's runs for president in 1980 and vice-president in 1992 came to nothing, there seems no love for the current US administration. Henley, the most outspoken, was booed in, of all places, California, for speaking out onstage in support of his former employer, Linda Ronstadt, whose onstage praise for Michael Moore during a show at the Aladdin Casino in Las Vegas angered the venue's management and caused controversy. "Rock'n'roll," Henley says heatedly, "is founded on dissent and suddenly we're all supposed to look pretty and dance and keep our mouths shut and make nice, saccharine little non-offensive songs for everybody?"
Before I leave I ask whether the high ticket prices attract a different crowd from the stoned, gentle post-hippies who came to their early 1970s concerts, and if that ever brings a lump to the throat. Not really, they answer, they're just as loud and enthusiastic, if a bit less bedraggled and better behaved.
"You don't see as many fights breaking out or people getting carried out on stretchers for taking too many drug overdoses." They also "for the most part" - gratifyingly, one assumes, though they diplomatically decline to comment - "keep their clothes on. But there's always some entertainment. You get people flashing sometimes, and the occasional bra or car keys come sailing up on the stage. In the old days it was whisky bottles. It's a little more orderly, that's all." And that's how they like it? Henley nods. "We can't deal with any more chaos."
Credit: Arts.guardian.co.uk/
"We are a brand, a bit like the Stones," he says, accepting there is little point pretending his band are at the cutting edge of rock'n'roll. "But we haven't exploited it in that way; we've never sold our name or our music for commercials for a product, and we're very proud of that. Which is not to say we may not do it in the future, but I think [the Stones] have gone a little bit further down that road. I mean, I remember when we first started elevating our ticket prices, one of them - I'm not naming names, but it wasn't Mick - saying in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, 'Well, how much do you want to pay for nostalgia?' And then a couple of years later, they're charging double or triple what we're charging. For nostalgia."
Tetchiness is what people expect of the Eagles. After all, they did dissolve at the height of their fame in 1980, the popular perception being that it was the result of the band's principals falling out bloodily after years of indulging in anything and everything that came to hand, a perception reinforced by the unending stream of magazine articles that tell the stories of their excesses. (Henley having the road crew cart his own bed around the US on one tour is a favourite. Another is the remark made by one member - not in the current line-up - to another towards the end of their final show: "Only three more songs till I kick your ass, pal.") Although they seem to get on well enough nowadays - perhaps helped by the fact that they travel on tour separately, with individual entourages - their pasts have been made too public for anyone to even attempt to kid themselves that this is no more than a band of buddies in search of some remunerative fun.
But today, outbursts about the Stones aside, the band - Henley, Timothy Schmidt, Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh, or four-fifths of the 1980 line-up - are in surprisingly sunny mood. Which is all the more remarkable given that they are spending a day in Los Angeles meeting journalists ahead of their "Farewell 1" European tour, which includes eight UK stadium and arena dates, starting on June 13. Few artists relish a media day, even those who enjoy a warm relationship with the press. And it's been three decades since the Eagles could be described as critics' darlings.
The band formed in 1971, having come together initially as Linda Ronstadt's backing band, split nine years later after several personnel changes, and reformed as a five-piece in 1994. They're back to four these days because Don Felder - the one who promised an ass-kicking in 1980 - was sacked in 2001. Felder and the band, inevitably, sued each other. In their early days, they were championed by Neil Young for carrying the baton dropped by his old band, Buffalo Springfield, but they've become used to being pilloried for being a business rather than a rock group, for putting the "r" into band. Unsurprisingly, then, their list of European press interviews is short: just two titles. The Guardian, says Henley, the most voluble of the four, "is a newspaper I actually read".
Of the four Eagles, only its newest member, Schmidt (who joined in 1977), looks like a rock star: slim with long brown hair (it doesn't look dyed) halfway down his back. Frey - along with Henley the longest-serving Eagle, dating back to day one - looks, with his combed-back hair, dark jacket and unbuttoned shirt jacket, like a cast member of The Sopranos. Joe Walsh (who joined in 1976), with his quizzical face, yellow hair and T-shirt flopped over a curiously round belly, looks like Robin Williams playing an old surfer dude. Henley, the Guardian reader, dressed like one of the smart-casual baby boomers you see at their shows, looks thoughtful. When at one point our conversation turns to their old friend Neil Young's new anti-Bush album Living with War, he reveals the Eagles are working on a new album that includes a protest song, Long Road Out of Eden, about the war in Iraq (puzzlingly, they dedicated a song to Saddam Hussein when they played at a Democratic party fundraiser in 1996).
The album might come out by next year but there's no rush. Depending on which Eagle's talking, that's good news or bad. Walsh's view is that if they had a record company "or somebody to yell at us, 'We're going to ship it Monday,' then it would get done. Because we have never done anything until we absolutely had to. We need some tension. We write the best with some tension and things get done better with tension." Henley takes the opposite tack. It was tension, he says - as opposed to the popular explanation of cocaine, egos and the hostility between the openly hedonistic Frey and the openly hedonistic but at the same time conflicted Henley - that caused the Eagles to implode the year after recording their last studio album, 1979's The Long Run.
And though some of that tension was self-generated, most, he says, came from record company demands that they go on the road to flog Hotel California and follow it with a new, even more commercial record. They never had the knack of simultaneous writing and touring, even at their peak. And now Henley, Frey and Walsh all have children under 12 (Schmidt, the longest married, has teenagers), life is "not so simple as when all we had to worry about was making music. This band thing doesn't always come first. We have to write when we can, and I live in Dallas, Texas, a thousand miles away from here. I have to commute to get to work."
So, in the absence of a new record, this tour is promoting a compilation, Complete Eagles Greatest Hits, which is not to be confused with 2003's Eagles: The Very Best Of, 1986's Greatest Hits 2, or the Rolls-Royce of Eagles best-ofs, Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, which, with almost 30 million people possessing a copy, is officially the best-selling rock album ever. And the figures do matter to the Eagles and their management. While press releases for most rock bands are full of impenetrably purple prose about their musical innovations, the Eagles press pack has more in common with a corporation's annual report: it's all bullet points and sales figures. In the first six months of last year, for instance, the band earned $76.7m, making them 2005's second-highest grossing act (U2 came first). As for music, it says a new single No More Cloudy Days will be available for download in June. When I mention it to the band, they look puzzled. Cloudy Days is an old song, they say; they know nothing about a download.
With new Eagles material so slow in coming, and the Farewell 1 tour so slow in leaving (though the "farewell" bit, they explain, was a joke; after the time and effort it took to get back together, they're not planning to stop) you might suspect a desire to preserve the cash cow in formaldehyde. But they've actually tried recording a new album before now, says Schmidt, only "the timing seemed to be wrong". (It certainly was; having booked a studio the same week in September that the planes crashed into New York's Twin Towers, they cancelled the sessions. Hole in the World, the closing track on the new best-of, is a Henley-penned reflection on 9/11.)
The image of rock stars as businessmen is incongruous but not entirely inappropriate. If Henley bristles a bit when he says, "This is a job, not a hobby," it's because it rankles that their 1994 reunion, which they dubbed "The Hell Freezes Over Tour" (that being the date Frey once gave a journalist who asked if the Eagles would ever play together again) was redubbed "The Greed Tour" by the rock press, especially as those same writers greeted the Sex Pistols' statement that they'd reformed for the money with bemused smiles.
But the Sex Pistols weren't charging up to £75 a ticket, which is what the Eagles are doing this summer. "Yes, we do have high ticket prices," says Henley, "but I think that reflects our status in the industry. You don't hear much squawking about the presidents of corporations or businesses who get these outrageous salaries and then they screw up, get fired, and get even more money for leaving. And the cost of doing this goes up every year, the gasoline and the salaries we have to pay all these people."
All these people means the 100 or so who work for the band on tour, "not to mention the infrastructure here in Los Angeles which is spread out over three or four different offices. We employ a lot of people. This is what we had to try to explain to Congress a few times when I testified before a Senate committee about piracy and the stealing [free downloading] of music. I said, look, we create jobs here. It's not just about people onstage playing music, it's about the people who make guitars, the people who make guitar strings, the people who drive trucks, the lighting people, the catering people - even," he says, pausing for effect, "the press. It's a ripple effect that goes out from here that gives a lot of people work. And I don't think kids look at it that way; they just see celebrities on TV with a lot of money, and they don't think about all the various levels and layers of the business. I don't understand why it's OK to steal music but it's not OK to steal cars or gasoline or houses or anything that can't be digitised."
Schmidt, wanting to bring it back to the music, interjects that they give "a good show" for the money, "a long show. We really feel that we give them their money's worth." It's also pointed out that a good amount of money generated goes to unnamed charities - including, presumably, the environmental causes they've long supported, and possibly some political ones. Though Walsh's runs for president in 1980 and vice-president in 1992 came to nothing, there seems no love for the current US administration. Henley, the most outspoken, was booed in, of all places, California, for speaking out onstage in support of his former employer, Linda Ronstadt, whose onstage praise for Michael Moore during a show at the Aladdin Casino in Las Vegas angered the venue's management and caused controversy. "Rock'n'roll," Henley says heatedly, "is founded on dissent and suddenly we're all supposed to look pretty and dance and keep our mouths shut and make nice, saccharine little non-offensive songs for everybody?"
Before I leave I ask whether the high ticket prices attract a different crowd from the stoned, gentle post-hippies who came to their early 1970s concerts, and if that ever brings a lump to the throat. Not really, they answer, they're just as loud and enthusiastic, if a bit less bedraggled and better behaved.
"You don't see as many fights breaking out or people getting carried out on stretchers for taking too many drug overdoses." They also "for the most part" - gratifyingly, one assumes, though they diplomatically decline to comment - "keep their clothes on. But there's always some entertainment. You get people flashing sometimes, and the occasional bra or car keys come sailing up on the stage. In the old days it was whisky bottles. It's a little more orderly, that's all." And that's how they like it? Henley nods. "We can't deal with any more chaos."
Credit: Arts.guardian.co.uk/