![hotel california live hotel california live](https://societyofrock.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/JoeWalsh-DonFelder-735x413.jpg)
They weren’t going to just sit there and be pop stars. And riches were cool in 1976: The Eagles embraced, as the phrase goes, the lifestyle.īut gorgeous Glenn Frey and sharp-eyed Don Henley, the drummer with the “sweetly frayed high tenor” (as the critic Barney Hoskyns called it), came out of L.A.’s self-regarding singer-songwriter scene. Their previous album, Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975), was a behemoth it would go on to be the biggest-selling U.S. Pained lyrics about runaround women, sung by long-haired alpha guys. Mildly rocking, beautifully harmonizing, with songs that folded shivery Neil Young vibes into a seam of near-disco sleekness, the Eagles appeared to have found the elixir. The Southern California sound, which they had helped invent, ruled the airwaves: an edgeless boogie on the low end, a keening country-folk white man on top. And what about us, the asses in the seats? We too were sort of a patched-up postmodern proposition: haggard loyalists, jolly middle-of-the-roaders, multigenerational clumps.īy the time the Eagles released Hotel California, they were knee-deep in experience.
![hotel california live hotel california live](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51eLXqB0coL.jpg)
The musicians wear white shirts and black waistcoats, Western tailoring: Senior desperado is the look. His place is taken by his son Deacon, with the lineup further augmented by the country star Vince Gill and the fabulously discreet guitarist/sideman Steuart Smith. Eagles 2021 is sort of a patched-up postmodern proposition: Timothy Schmit, bassist since 1977, is still there, as is guitarist Joe Walsh, but Glenn Frey, Henley’s other half in the band, died in 2016. We had gathered, masked and flapping our vaccination cards, to watch the Eagles perform their 1976 album, Hotel California, beginning to end, with a greatest-hits set to follow. (Hoarse, intense.) Up in the clanging concrete tiers, we commiserated with whoops and waved cellphones. How does he feel about them now? Rather deeply, to judge from his delivery. Henley is 74 he wrote those lines (from “Wasted Time”) 45 years ago. I could have done so many things, sang Don Henley at Boston’s TD Garden Saturday night, if I could only stop my mind. And then they grow old, and it all comes true. Wide-eyed they sing them, these songs of experience.
![hotel california live hotel california live](https://societyofrock.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/eagles-hotel-california-capital-centre-.jpg)
Whiskery wisdom ballads, epics of regret, failure binge blues, and howling prophetic voyages. Men and women barely into their 20s, dewy young people without a mark on them, somehow contrive to write songs of shattering, been-there maturity. Rock and roll’s relationship with time-as in Father Time, not, you know, tempo-is fascinating.