Glenn Frey, from Detroit to L.A.
In May 1982, Glenn Frey reminisced to Robert Hilburn of the L.A. Times, “We all watched the sunset in the West every night of adolescence and thought someday about coming out there. . . . It all seemed so romantic.”
Not that Glenn Frey lived in the middle of nowhere. He was raised in the Detroit suburbs at a time when the city was on a rapid upswing. The automobile industry had never had it so good, and Frey’s teen years coincided with Detroit’s rise in the music landscape, with pop combos, vocal groups, soul singers, and garage bands popping up all over town. And as soul and R&B took hold of Motor City, a small indie start-up, Motown, not only revolutionized dance and pop music but changed the racial complexion of radio and TV with a stream of hit records and pop classics.
A very rare photo of young Glenn. He may have been picked on as a kid, but Frey became quite the athlete and self-styled rebel as he progressed through his teenage years, before he fell in love with rock and roll.
Courtesy of Muriel Versagi, Curator of the Royal Oak Historical Society
Motown
Berry Gordy Jr. was still an autoworker when he started a record label out of his house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard. Taking inspiration from the automobile production line he knew only too well, Gordy came up with a business model that operated very much like a car factory. First, songwriters and producers scrambled to attend the 9:00 a.m. meeting where songs to be cut were analyzed and chosen. Then, once the material was deemed good enough to record, the nine-to-five house band, the legendary Funk Brothers (who appear on more #1 hit records than the Beatles, Elvis, the Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys put together) went to work with the singers.
The Motown label that emerged discovered and introduced a wealth of talent, notably the Supremes, Martha & the Vandellas, and the Temptations. As far as most of America (and certainly the rest of the world) was concerned, Detroit and Motown were synonymous. But while Motown had a huge cultural impact, within the city itself there was, naturally, a lot more to the pop story than the work of Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, and the rest of the Motown crew.
“Punk” Sound
At the same time Motown was putting Detroit firmly on the musical map, an underground, aggressive, and quite primitive strain of raw rock and roll burst out of the city. A blue-collar riposte to the British sound emerged, as the prototype “punk” sound of the MC5 (who caused a major stir with tracks like the expletive-laden “Kick Out the Jams” in 1968) and their followers, the Stooges and the Up.
Frey failed to respond musically to the more spiteful punk sounds that spewed from his town, but he did relate to their maverick outlook, and the attitude that emanated from their take on the American rock-and-roll lifestyle. He was a natural-born rebel, mistrustful of authority and never afraid to rely his own instincts.
Dancing in the Streets
Besides its burgeoning identity as the home of a thriving and creative music scene, Detroit was yet another American city coming to terms with social change and political upheaval. The summer of 1967 (when Frey was just nineteen years old) saw the city in flames during five days of rioting that ended with over forty people dead, 7,200 arrested, and more than 2,000 of Detroit’s buildings burned to the ground.
The unrest signaled the end of Detroit as a vital center of creativity and industry, as thousands chose to leave the city for the suburbs and far beyond. In the next twenty years, the city’s population fell by more than 50 percent, leaving much of it barren and dangerous. It’s no wonder, then, that Frey and those in his circle were driven to get away. His girlfriend, Joan Sliwin (also a singer), moved to California before Glenn and made that very point to Furious.com in March 2005: “You have to remember the summer of ’67 was the riots. . . . We were in L.A. the two weeks that the riots occurred. The exact two weeks. My mom had tanks on the front lawn where we lived. It was a tense time, and we missed all that. Coming out to L.A., we thought we had died and went to heaven. Everything was fun, L.A. was less congested, and we were in a good place.”
Frey would eventually find his way to the West, too. Detroit was dangerous, tense, and lacking in hope or music for the future. The hippie ideals emanating from the left coast seemed all the more appealing—not that anyone who had been close enough to burning riots to smell the ugly odor of desperation and violence would ever be totally engulfed in the simplistic “love is all you need” philosophy that many of the young generation subscribed to in California.
Frey would be criticized in later years for displaying a hard-faced attitude to success, fame, and money amid a sea of kaftan-wearing non-materialistic musos. His formative years in Detroit undoubtedly played a significant part in the songwriter’s more cynical approach to music and the music business, but at the time of the riots, he was hanging in bars, trying to master the art of underage drinking, and sports took up more of his time and enthusiasm than music.
Star Athlete Turned Musician
As with most teens, music was just one part of Glenn Frey’s growing-up experience. It was something he enjoyed but it certainly wasn’t a passion. It was always around, whether on the radio or on the TV, and Frey’s parents had the family regularly sit down to watch Hit Parade, but initially it was sports that fired the young Glenn’s passions.
The high-school athletics star from Motor City had a strict blue-collar upbringing. He went to school with the tough kids of car workers who thought nothing of giving the scrawny young Glenn a good beating. In April 1986, he told Jeff Yarbrough of Interview magazine, “I went to school with the sons and daughters of automobile factory workers—fathers who beat their wives and beat their kids. The kids would then go to school and beat on me! My father was a machinist in a shop that built the machines that build car parts. I had a pretty normal childhood. My parents weren’t drinkers. I always had clothes. I always went to camp for a week in the summer. My parents didn’t have enough money to buy me a car when I turned sixteen, but I had a great childhood.”
Playing sports was an answer to bullying, and once he toughened up, Frey won a place on the school wrestling team and blossomed into a high school athletics star. He did dabble with formal music training, however. While at Dondero High School, he played trumpet with the school marching band and took piano and keyboard lessons from a concert pianist called John Harrison. (The Dondero High yearbook for 1966 sees Glenn Frey voted—quite prophetically, as it happens—“Most likely to inhale.”)
The Beatles and Jelly Beans, Early Bands, and Bob Seger
On Sunday, September 6, 1964, sisters Lynn and Melissa Kaltenbach and their father drove to Detroit with Frey in the car. They were going to see the Beatles. Melissa recalled the day to Bill Castanier for the Lansing Online News in February 2014: “My dad drove us down and stayed with us. He was a bit eccentric and went around picking up fainting girls.”
At first, Kaltenbach hadn’t remembered who went to the concert with her and her sister Lynn, but later Melissa reminded her that Glenn Frey, founder of the Eagles, drove down to Detroit with them from their hometown of Birmingham. “I remember dad and Glenn arguing over a song,” she told Castanier.
After short sets from the Bill Black Combo, the Exciters, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, and Jackie DeShannon, the Beatles took the stage. John, Paul, George, and Ringo played two shows that day, cranking out a mix of their own sublime pop hits like “All My Loving,” “She Loves You,” “If I Fell,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Things We Said Today,” as well as a couple of their staple rock-and-roll rants, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Twist and Shout.”
The original Britpop band delighted the 30,000-plus fans who showed up, but with Beatlemania and hysteria in overdrive, the Detroit concerts made the history books for a couple of non-musical reasons, as for the first time at a Beatles concert, security and police ejected several fans from the gig for throwing jelly beans at the Fab Four. The “candy tossing” trend had begun in England in 1963, when George Harrison let it slip in a jokey interview that Jelly Babies were his favorite candy, and that John Lennon had grabbed them from him. Big mistake, George. Initially, the British postal service delivered thousands of boxes of the squishy soft candy to the Beatles, care of EMI, their record company. Then, at the next Beatles concert, they were pelted with Jelly Babies. This was annoying to say the least, but nothing compared to what they’d find in the United States.
American fans, having read the press about the candy-throwing, decided that their beloved Beatles must like jelly beans (there being no such thing as Jelly Babies in America) and used these instead. Unfortunately, and unbeknown to the young fans, British Jelly Babies are soft, with no hard outer shell. Jelly beans, U.S. style, are small and hard and built like missiles.
The Beatles hated what was happening and were rightly concerned about injury. In a 1963 letter from Harrison to a fan sold at auction by Woolley & Wallis in England, the Beatles guitarist wrote, “P.S. We don’t like jelly babies, or fruit gums for that matter, so think how we feel standing on stage trying to dodge the stuff, before you throw some more at us. Couldn’t you eat them yourself, besides it is dangerous. I was hit in the eye once with a boiled sweet, and it’s not funny!” At a press conference, Paul McCartney noted, “It has become a bit of a trademark with our shows, but we’d prefer they throw nothing at all.”
Seeing, hearing, and feeling the Beatles changed everything in Frey’s life that night. That was it for the boring piano lessons. Guitar was in, keyboards were out! Frey and some acoustic guitar–owning pals soon formed a group, the Disciples, but that was a fairly short-lived venture. At Dondero High School in Royal Oak, he teamed up with Doug Edwards, Bill Barns, Bob Wilson, and Doug Gunsch as the Hideouts, which were named for a popular nightclub, the Hideout.
“It was this really cool nightclub,” ’70s star Suzi Quatro, who grew up during the same era as Frey, told me in 1989. “Detroit was a ‘buzzing’ place, there was a huge teen scene with all these kids inspired by the Beatles wanting to get into music and do the band thing.”
Young promoters Dave Leone and Ed “Punch” Andrews (today Kid Rock’s manager) started their pop-music club in Harper Woods, Michigan, in 1963, and hosted pretty much every act of note that surfaced in Detroit in the mid-1960s. Suzi Quatro (then with the Pleasure Seekers), Bob Seger, the Fugitives, Ted Nugent, and many, many more were regulars. The club charged a one-dollar admission fee and became the place for Detroit pop fans to hang out, even spawning its own record label.
The Hideouts changed their name to the Subterraneans, but their music was all very light and poppy and Beatles-esque. After a while, Glenn fancied something a shade darker, and his next group, the Mushrooms, were definitely more rock than pop.
All the hopeful bands in Detroit looked up to Seger, who would go on to become a major global star himself in the 1970s. He was obviously the best local act in town, and the most likely to succeed, and all the start-up musical unions looked up to him and gravitated toward his orbit for advice and reflected glory. Seger’s manager, Punch Andrews, also managed the Mushrooms—a happenstance that put Frey directly into the musical path of Detroit’s best-known rockers.
The Detroit pop and rock scene was different from that of a lot of U.S. cities. Seger remembers that bands like Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Ted Nugent & the Amboy Dukes, Terry Knight & the Pack, Suzi Quatro, and ? & the Mysterians (of “96 Tears” fame) played a very teen-oriented circuit in the region. “We didn’t play bars,” he told Rolling Stone’s Patrick Goldstein in July 1976. “There was no booze, just cokes, teenagers, and a couple dollars admission. There were probably thirty or forty of these joints around the state, places like the Mt. Holly Ski Lodge, the Riviera, clubs in Saginaw and Caseville, and we played ’em all. No one ever got paid more than a couple hundred bucks unless they were headliners; it was $500 tops.”
While Frey may have learned some musical chops from Seger, it was Seger’s understanding of the business part of the “music business” game that most affected the curious Frey. Frey explained the relationship to PBS’ Tavis Smiley this way: “Bob Seger took a liking to me when he saw my band, and he kind of took me under his wing. He took me in the recording studio with him, he let me sing and play guitar on ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.’ He showed me how to make records. He introduced me to Mickey Stevenson, who was a producer over at Motown.”
Old-Time Rock and Roll
Bob “Night Moves” Seger made it big in 1976, but he’d been a mainstay of the Detroit rock-and-roll scene for over a decade before anyone outside of Michigan really knew who he was. The son of a Ford plant worker (and part-time musician, with his own big band, the thirteen-piece Stewart Seger Orchestra), Seger had never had a regular job. He’d started his first group, the Decibels, when he was just fifteen years old. They played hundreds of gigs, cut a few singles, and found a manager in Punch Andrews, who’d stay with Seger for years.
None of Seger’s records were able to push him to recognition outside of the Detroit scene until he signed to Capitol in 1968 and put out “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.” The track reached #17 on the national charts and allowed Seger to tour a wider region, until he hit the big time with the global classic “Night Moves” in the mid-’70s. Seger was a genuine friend and mentor to Frey, and the two remained close over the years, later co-writing “Funky New Year” and “Heartache Tonight” together with the Eagles. He also made a few guest appearances on Frey’s solo albums.
Frey reminisced about Seger in the Detroit Free Press in March 2004. “Punch put Bob and I together,” he recalled. “He said, ‘I’d like to record you, but you don’t write any songs, so I’m going to have Seger write and produce for you.’ The most important thing that happened to me in Detroit was meeting Bob and getting to know him. He took me under his wing. We’d drive around all night and smoke dope and listen to the radio. We’d drive to Ann Arbor and hang with (musician) Scott Richardson at his house, go to the Fifth Dimension club and see the Who and Jimi Hendrix there.”
Seger’s music-business savvy was taken to heart by quick-study Frey, who learned a few good lessons well, especially when it came to what makes an artist successful. Seger believed wholeheartedly that writing original material was the key ingredient in any success. “You’re going to write some bad songs,” Frey recalled Seger telling him, in an interview with Tavis Smiley, “but just keep writing, and eventually you’ll write a good one.”
Frey also joined a folksy band called the Four of Us, based in Birmingham, Michigan, who introduced him to the power and beauty of vocal harmonies. He told Smiley that they were doing “Beach Boy songs and Beatles songs and Buckinghams and songs with background vocals, so I really kind of got into the group singing thing and the melodic thing.”
Frey’s final Detroit musical adventure, during the latter part of 1967, was the formation of another rock band, this time the oddly named Heavy Metal Kids. Frey handled guitar and vocals, Lance Dickerson (who would go on to play with Commander Cody) was on drums, Paul Kelcouse played electric guitar, and old Mushrooms keys man Jeff Burrows completed the lineup. Nothing much happened for the Heavy Metal Kids, however, and Frey was ready to quit Detroit.
Frey recalled that feeling to Jeff Yarbrough in a piece for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in April 1986. “It was 1967, and the hippie thing was happening. I got into experimenting with drugs while I was in college in Michigan. I didn’t really try hard in college. I was much more interested in going to see the Grateful Dead at the Grandee Ballroom. I had been bitten by the rock ’n’ roll bug, and I was sitting there in Detroit thinking, ‘God, Buffalo Springfield is 2,000 miles to the west, and the Byrds, and the Beach Boys.’ I read the Life magazine articles about free love and free dope in California. I said, ‘That’s the place for me,’ and at age 20 I drove to Los Angeles.”
First Days Out West
So, Glenn and his bandmates Jeff and Lance sold what they could—including Frey’s ’55 Chevy—for gas and supplies, and headed down Route 66 with a few other Detroit buddies. They stopped in Reno for some fun and rested in Oakland, California, where they crashed with a musician friend, Larry Welker, who was, at the time, bluesman Charlie Musselwhite’s guitar player. They then cruised down the picturesque coast roads to Los Angeles to look up Frey’s girlfriend, Joanie.
It was on this journey to the mythical City of Angels that Frey famously pulled in to the Laurel Canyon Country Store and spotted David Crosby, formerly of the Byrds, decked out in trademark attire, in a hat and a green leather cape. In September 1975 Frey told Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe that he took it as an omen.
Frey felt both daunted and excited to have landed in a town where you could rub shoulders with an ex-Byrd or two. As exciting as it was, as a genuine fan of the band’s music and craft, he saw something quite daunting in pitting himself against the best in the business. Fortunately, soon after stumbling across one of the genuine leaders of the L.A. music scene, Frey ran into another hopeful young musician who would prove a valuable partner and great source of support over the next few years: J. D. Souther, an accomplished musician with no lack of confidence in his abilities. Their meeting and friendship arose from yet another strange but simple twist of fate.
Before Frey left Michigan for the sunshine, he had been dating Joan Sliwin, a singer in an all-white, all-female vocal group called the Mama Cats. They were based in downtown Detroit, and their concert repertoire was classic Motown. Frey’s band the Mushrooms backed the Mama Cats at gigs, and when they got a chance to put out a single, it was written and produced for them by Bob Seger.
Like most acts with ambition, the Mama Cats understood that fame and fortune—and the experience of playing a part in the late-1960s music revolution that was happening on the streets and in the mainstream media—were not to be found in Detroit. At a time in history, long before society broke off into tiny subgroups and niches for its social and artistic entertainment, Americans enjoyed more shared, common experiences. With limited TV channels, a whole nation really could watch the Beatles play The Ed Sullivan Show—and all at the same time. When something, anything, stirred in San Francisco or Los Angeles, newsreel and television stations covered it. The young generation that the Beatles and Dylan represented was not just making its mark in pop and rock and roll: they were becoming journalists, writers, radio presenters, movie directors, and TV producers. Kids in Detroit, or Baltimore, or Memphis knew all about Dylan and the Byrds, and Laurel Canyon and the Troubadour. So, in 1968, it was the turn of the Mama Cats—Laura Polkinghome, Marsha Jo Temmer, and sisters Alexandra and Joan Sliwin—to quit Detroit for Los Angeles, hoping to find their own slice of success in Tinseltown.
They’d read all the stories of groups making it in Los Angeles after being spotted in the right place at the right time. Fantasy, perhaps? Perhaps not. Remarkably, the Mama Cats got lucky with their very first meeting after impressing record-biz icon and impresario Lee Hazlewood. Hazlewood gave them a record deal with his own LHI label, changed their name to Honey Ltd., and put them in the studio.
Things didn’t work with regards to breaking into the big time, but the Mama Cats had a fun run in the California sun. And, through Joan, the group played a significant part in the Glenn Frey Hollywood story, too. When Glenn decided to follow Joan to California, he found himself a new musical soul mate. His girlfriend’s sister was dating John David Souther. “So I started hanging out with him,” Frey told Tavis Smiley. “He was into a lot of music that I wasn’t familiar with—jazz, R&B. We had a lot of time to burn, so we listened to a lot of records the first couple years I was out here.”
The relationship was intertwined with music, but Frey and Souther would have become friends regardless of their chosen professions. Both were handsome, athletic young men with an eye for the ladies, and they had no trouble finding female companionship. They were popular and cool, even if Frey’s motormouth upset a few along the way.
It made sense to try a music project together, so Frey and Souther formed a folk-rock duo with the odd name Longbranch Pennywhistle. They practiced, wrote songs, and played the folk circuit as often as they could get a booking or an open-mic slot, depending on the venue. And they became pretty good very quickly.
A few degrees of Texas separation later, Longbranch Pennywhistle landed a deal with Jimmy Bowen’s Amos Records. They recorded one self-titled album in 1969, but the label was going nowhere, sales were small, and the arrangement subsided. Frey and Souther were so filled with ambition and talent, though, that they saw these setbacks as mere bumps on the road to musical success.
One of their fellow strugglers was a young songwriter called Jackson Browne, with whom they shared an Echo Park apartment complex. Frey explained the setup in his notes for The Very Best of the Eagles in August 2003. “Jackson Browne, J. D. Souther, and I all lived at 1020 Laguna in Echo Park. J. D. and I shared a $60-a-month, one-room apartment, a couch, and kind of a bed with a curtain in front of it. Right underneath us in an even smaller studio apartment was Jackson. He had his piano and guitars down there. I didn’t really know how to sit down and work on a song until I heard him playing underneath us in the basement.”
One of the songs Frey heard over and over from Browne’s room was a lilting rock song with a country twist. That song was “Take It Easy,” a tune that Frey would tweak after Browne offered it to him for his new project, the Eagles.