Quit defending the Eagles! They’re simply terrible

Zip it, Chuck Klosterman! Rock critics want you to reexamine the much-hated band. Don't -- they're still loathsome

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/08/quit_defending_the_eagles_theyre_simply_terrible/

simply

from the same writer:

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/meet_the_greatest_working_american_songwriter/

in that last one i learned that Lambchop have 11 near-perfect albums. who knew?

"Are you with me so far?" The Hotel California Poll

near the end of this thread people share their experiences growing up being fascinated with the song hotel california. moving stuff. klosterman otm at least in regard to this one song, which is a total classic.

this is why i hide polls on ilx. wait, no, sorry, i'm sure it was moving. i like that song.

some of ILM's best threads are in its polls. take off the filter and be surprised.

you can't make me.

all the threads i have created so far have been polls.

true, but you are missing half of what ILM does...

xpost

half of ilm is polls??? that can't be true. i probably only really need to know about half of what ilm does anyway.

it bugs me for some reason that salon doesn't put a period after the word terrible.

you are missing out but whatever and yes Treeship has had some amazing threads!

:)

Geezus, this shit...

they chose instead to let “Take It Easy” guide their career. It’s the first song on the album, but it’s also the most generic, with none of the country-rock or pop-bluegrass flourishes that animate much of the album.

Yeah, that song with the good ol' boy lyrics and rather prominent banjo part. THE SAME.

And the AV Club piece they link to as part of the Eagles revisionism is pretty lame, basically the writer finding 14 deep cuts and finding similarities with BANDS YOU HAVE TO LIKE (Big Star, Black Sabbath, Neil Young etc.) in each.

i like how that guy barely acknowledges that in the real world the eagles are one of the biggest-selling bands ever and that for like 99.9999 percent of ppl who have ever heard an eagles song their legacy is not defined by a throwaway line in 'the big lebowski' and "a stinging dismissal" by robert christgau.

i mean, i'm pretty indifferent to the eagles most of the time, but for chrissake it's not 'knee-jerk contrariness' or 'revisionism' to say you like one of the most popular bands of all time!

Yeah, between this and that Sheffield piece about Rush, wtf @ pop music journalist insularity.

And, yeah, I always think of "Take It Easy" as a prototype for later country radio. (It actually became a new country hit in Travis Tritt's faithful cover.)

BBC In Concert film of them was on again last night, Frey/Leadon/Meisner/Henley line-up, opens with them doing a Gene Clark song, so that's fine! Bernie Leadon seemed to be having a few problems with his guitar (tuning possibly or maybe just fingers) but, what can I say, it's entertaining stuff.

This reminds me of when cult acts Hall & Oates and Fleetwood Mac suddenly became "cool" again.

it tends to be indie-rock dudes who slam the eagles. and this guy slammed journey in another article. lambchop fans, what are you gonna do? lambchop ever write a song as good as "take it to the limit" on one of their 11 near-perfect albums?

i'm sure 2001-era ilm doesn't have much good to say about eagles.

it tends to be indie-rock dudes who slam the eagles.

All boohooing because it's Glenn Frey up there making all that moolah and not Gram Parsons

http://glennfreyonline.com/images/GFreySSShirtless.jpg

One of the sliest and funniest jokes in the Coen brothers film “The Big Lebowski” is the constant conflict between Creedence Clearwater Revival fans and Eagles fans. The film is set in a Los Angeles whose population is clearly delineated by its rock ‘n’ roll allegiances.

Is that what was going on? As I remember it, Eagles and Creedence were both only mentioned once.

out of fairness i just tried to listen to lambchop on youtube and i immediately remembered that voice from countless nu-americana uncut magazine compilations that i would try and listen to and that were filled with old 97s and calexico and all that other fauxspectable dreariness. i can't take that voice for more than a minute.

lol

i can't take that voice for more than a minute.

You and me both

calling them lowest common denominator is so dumb too. you can call them lots of thing. horrible people. satanically catchy. even capitalist tools. but one of the things i've always loved is the sound of those records. they are REALLY well-made. like, anally so. and the songs are so well-crafted. i get the faceless perfectionism thing that people hate about them, and yes they were cynical douchebags, but they worked on that sound to no end. if you listen to the shiloh and longbranch pennywhistle albums - henley and frey pre-eagles - they ARE the eagles pretty much. just a little more byrds-y cuz its the late 60's. but they knew exactly how they wanted to sound that early on. which is kind of a long way to go if you are just a cynical cashgrabber. let's just say they worked for their cash. and even they could have no idea how huge their thing would get. how could anyone know that?

i also get people hating them just cuz they have been on the radio every minute of every day for the last 35 years or whatever. kinda hard for people to even hear the songs when they've heard them that many times.

I hate the Eagles with a passion but this writer still sounds douchey

It is really that many different songs though? It tends to be same few ones over and over. No worse than the Dan in that respect. I can deal with that.

The Eagles are better than every Uncut-sponsored Americana act put together

every track on their greatest hits album gets played on american fm radio somewhere every day. i'm guessing.

and hotel california stuff isn't even on their greatest hits album.

well, not on the first greatest hits album.

first greatest hits album here is just wow:

Australia (ARIA)[18] 8× Platinum 560,000^
Canada (Music Canada)[19] 2× Diamond 2,000,000^
Hong Kong (IFPI Hong Kong)[20] Platinum 15,000*[21]
United Kingdom (BPI)[22] Platinum 300,000^
United States (RIAA)[23] 29× Platinum 29,000,000^

Elaine on Seinfeld singing "Witchy Woman" was a slyer takedown than Lebowski

The overexposure still keeps me from hearing them objectively. Those triads on the Hotel California solo feel like a worm actually burrowing into my ear. But even before I was overexposed, I couldn't get into my cousins Eagles 8-track the way I could Billy Squire or Styx or Triumph.

and after checking, 6 out of 10 songs on the 2nd greatest hits album are standard FM fare. so, that's 16 songs that are still in pretty heavy rotation at least here in the states.

dunno much about the eagles but don henley's solo stuff is music to my ears. currently spinning sunset grill on the reg!

What is "Desperado" doing on the Greatest Hits LP? It was never a hit and never released as a single. Its presence on the hits album made it a 70s-pop radio standard though.

out of fairness i just tried to listen to lambchop on youtube and i immediately remembered that voice from countless nu-americana uncut magazine compilations that i would try and listen to and that were filled with old 97s and calexico and all that other fauxspectable dreariness. i can't take that voice for more than a minute.

qft

I don't really know the eagles but I like boys of summer

that's bc it is one of the best songs of all time

ya and also because it was the name of an album which had gotta be worth points

also first song they wrote together iirc

Boys Of Summer is one of the greatest singles of all time

i honestly kind of can't listen to it around ppl

fun fact: Friedrich Engels' motto was "take it easy".

Bashing Calexico and Lambchop in a an Eagles thread? What is this dark place?

I have a troubled relationship with fretless bass, but it sounds SO GOOD in "Sunset Grill".

wow this article sucks. 50000 words of "i still hate my parents." and christgaus responsible for more artistic crimes than any eagle.

"Addicted to Love" is cut from the same cloth and could follow it up nicely on the coke-dusted dance floor

I'm sure it did.

lol all you guys w your guilty pleasure rationalizations "I only like the hits" etc. The hits suck, this band is awful, "Boys of Summer" is the best thing that ever came out of this camp hands down (altho tbf Joe Walsh is alright, James Gang is great)

addicted to love takes place entirely within the sphere of sex though, it's not like henley's 'she's too hot to care about world news' shit

Best-selling LP of the 20th century, Shakey, deal with it. (Wayfarers lower onto face.)

no such thing as guilty pleasures

except Glenn Frey's for Babe Ruth bars

This thread is making me feel a lot better about myself cause I recently watched that doc on Netflix and was seriously starting to question my sanity, glad to know y'all are right there with me living life in the fast lane. It's a fascinating study in petty personalities, all the rock-doc autopilot techniques applied to a group of largely mediocre or undistinctive musicians (excepting Walsh, and maybe Frey as songwriter and Henley as vocalist), with very little to say about anything other than ntra-band politics and success itself. I think I heard maybe two unfamiliar songs and there was almost nothing at all about the creation of the music itself unless it involved a grievance over credit, a brief shopworn anecdote of the genesis of a song ttle, or against Glyn Johns. Kinda odd since normally with these things you figure the fans will be all about making-of details for deep cuts (''...and that got me thinking, maybe a dobro would give the bridge that touch of sweetness'') though also I guess they'd already know the trivia.... and, also, be disproportionately interested in the reunion era. That's them out there in the crowd with the kids on their shoulders, ahhh remember the good old days. I coulda done with a little more detail on the solo era but of course, without Eagles around to cast shade on, what could a guy possibly say about fifteen years of his working life?

The only people I came away liking were Ronstadt, Brown, Walsh (who I was predisposed towards, he's become like a top ten guitarist for me since the days of the ILX classic rock poll) (even though he seems to end up siding with the bad guys, it comes off as him actually having no clue what's going on, like the comic relief dopey henchman who joins the heroes at the end), that Timothy guy and maybe Randy Meisner though he's barely in it - just want to side with him against the tyrants. I guess JD Souther seems like a decent dude, had the sense to keep his involvement at a non-memberly distance. Frey and Henley are monsters in this totally banal ego dude way. Love the recurrent ''it'll be good for the Eagles'' argument, lol what manipulative BS.

For all that, oddly, grimly curious about their discography, deeply sad to have missed the track-by-track thread, and still a little too self-conscious to walk into my local shop and walk out with an Eagles LP.

Souther probably has ten gallons of syphilis germs in him

still a little too self-conscious to walk into my local shop and walk out with an Eagles LP

You can get a CD box set with all six of their albums (I don't care about the reunion and neither should you) on eBay for like $30. That's what I did.

no such thing as guilty pleasures

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 28, 2017 1:35 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except Glenn Frey's for Babe Ruth bars

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 28, 2017 1:36 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Glenn: But not for Babes named Ruth!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OBGa6R6NEN4/hqdefault.jpg

I like to think that when Randy Meisner dies, Schmit will just move into his house and take over for him.

I liked the part where Glenn was angry at Randy. "JUST SING YOUR F'ING SONG DUDE"

Props to Felder, "You're welcome, I guess" is genuinely funny. Fuck Glenn Frey.

They're not a guilty pleasure. They have a bunch of songs that I like but if you call me an Eagles fan I'll kill your family, that's all

and so will Don if he learns you sampled "A Month of Sundays" without permission

this is my favorite Eagles song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlR6ujpB89k

I was just checking out The Eagles' entry on wiki, and misread "The Eagles are one of the world's best-selling bands of all time..." as "The Eagles are one of the worst best-selling bands of all time."

"misread"

ha, yeah, I know...

Props to Felder, "You're welcome, I guess" is genuinely funny. Fuck Glenn Frey.

― Lauren Schumer Donor (Phil D.), Tuesday, February 28, 2017 3:45 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The whole Wrong Beach account was hilarious. They even fight boring! "Three more songs, and I'm gonna kick your ass!" How quaintly professional of them to finish the set! Mick Avory nearly killed Dave Davies once in the middle of a show, and John Entwistle once threw his bass at Roger Daltrey mid-song and said, "You play the fuckin' thing!" but no, the Eags have to play "Already Gone," "Take Me To The Lemon," and "Life In The Fast Lane" first before they hit each other.

they'd even hit each other! Felder jumped in a limo and took off.

*they didn't, that is

take me to the lemon party

Sat down and knocked out the last 20 minutes of the doc, I guess I petered out wondering wtf I was doing with my life watching a documentary on the Eagles reunion but it was basically worth it to see Frey laying out his justification for firing Don Felder. Ice-cold, no remorse or doubt whatsoever. Amazing they even bothered assembling a 'reunion' lineup in the first place given their long long history of firing and hiring. The part when they first picked up Joe Walsh was very telling, like Don 'n' Glenn are just working on their fantasy football league: "Well, Joe can't sing very good, but we're going to kick. some. ass." Gag me.

Amazing they even bothered assembling a 'reunion' lineup in the first place given their long long history of firing and hiring.

The argument I've seen (in the Eliot book iirc) was that it wasn't a reunion, it was a continuation. They got the last lineup (which only made one full lp, btw) back together and moved on without any consideration made re: Leadon & Meisner.

Speaking of the last part of the doc, I love that little moment w/Schmidt where he's talking about working with the guys again to promote Common Thread* when it was uncertain there would actually be a reunion. He comes over all like Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.

*Which, whoo boy, is that a forgotten Pop Culture artifact of the Real 90s...

they'd even hit each other! Felder jumped in a limo and took off.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 28, 2017 3:35 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Felder made a big show of smashing a acoustic against a wall--with shards flying in Frey's general direction--before he left, to which Frey quipped something along the lines of "...of course that asshole would smash the cheapest guitar!"

http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7709414/eagles-fleetwood-mac-festival-new-york-los-angeles

"We could never go on without Glenn. They are offering how much? Fxxx it, were in."

HOLOGRAM GLENN

Will they get j browne to do the Glenn stuff?

Frankly that photo of Don Henley there looks like one of those 'photoshop Trump (or whoever) and make his face smaller but keep the head the same size' deals:

http://www.billboard.com/files/styles/article_main_image/public/media/Lindsey-Buckingham-Stevie-Nicks-Don-Henley-2017-billboard-1548.jpg

Two of rock’s most venerable acts are planning a bi-coastal music festival this summer and are hoping to develop an annual franchise around the concert series.

Which will last mmmmaybe another four, five years at most.

but think of the pleasure!

I do not wish to think of Azoff thinking about pleasure.

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/2594808/the-boys-of-summer-o.gif

Lindsey and Stevie should do a mime routine during Life in the Fast Lane

omg yes

I once remixed "Hotel California" by inserting the chorus at the end of every line. It really works hearing it go from "I called to the captain, please bring me my Hotel California".

Okay that has really got me tickled. Reminds me of my never-executed scheme to insert ''... GROCERY BAG'' as the punchline for every single 'joke' on ''Bedrock.''

they stabbed it with their steely knives but they just cant kill the hoteeeeel califoooorniiiia

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8f2cSRXkAEIY8R.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8f2cSaXYAAOfTV.jpg

Omg

The Eagles documentary is amazing because it turns into a mockumentary against it's will. Any Fox News documentary inevitably would as well.

This summers tour is going to be Eagles / Dan / Doobies in the same night. Questions are will Dan play "everything you did" (prob no) and will MacD join the Dan for anything (prob yes)

Lowest price tix seem to be $200

my mom’s friend was their waitress at a restaurant once in the 70s, they tipped her with fake Eagles cash with like Don and Glenn’s face on front

lol meant to post on the Henley thread. blame it on the disco strangler.

Can't wait for the inevitable Eagles NFTs.