Gone Country
In 1991, Irving Azoff was the head of Giant Records. The company was in good shape, having just released a monster-selling charity single, “Voices That Care,” and a huge album in the shape of the New Jack City movie soundtrack, and had signed some major names to its roster, notably Brian Wilson and Steely Dan.
In 1993, Azoff chose to open a Nashville division, and put record producer James Stroud in charge. Stroud was a former percussionist for the likes of the Pointer Sisters, Paul Simon, Gladys Knight, and Bob Seger, as well as the producer behind the triple-platinum “Misty Blue” by Dorothy Moore. In 1989, he discovered one of the biggest country acts of the ’90s, Clint Black, and produced his breakthrough album, Killin’ Time.
Azoff, ever the industry analyst, had been watching the dramatic increase in sales in country music and the power shift in country’s home city, Nashville. As the ’90s began, younger artists were making inroads, new producers were changing the formula, and the music was more popular than at any time in its history. The media called it “new country” when artists like Ricky Skaggs and Dwight Yoakam tired of the pop-influenced sound of the ’70s and early ’80s and went back to basics to discover a new sound that used new technology but had deep roots in the original sounds of the music.
Skaggs went back to Bill Monroe, founder of bluegrass, for his inspiration, but smacked it into overdrive with some hi-tech playing and production. Having brought traditional music to Emmylou Harris back in the early ’80s, he was now revolutionized mainstream country with a hi-tech bluegrass-flavored sound that gave him twelve #1 hits as a major-label international superstar.
Johnny Rottten Likes Country
Country music wasn’t feeling well when Dwight Yoakam headed to Nashville in the mid-’80s to introduce his brand of hardcore country music. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, country music was left staggering in an Urban Cowboy stupor, largely bland and pop-edged, with too many phased guitars and girlie background choirs. The record companies had told Yoakam he was too country, but then CBS told Johnny Cash the same thing. Outraged, Yoakam let rip at the Nashville establishment in the media. The rock press immediately took notice, and Yoakam was set as country’s coolest maverick since Cash in the ’60s.
It was on moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s that Yoakam, a Buck Owens and Byrds fan in equal measure, found his true musical home. Playing the same clubs as the bands from L.A.’s burgeoning post-punk scene, Yoakam was so country he was rock. He even got the Johnny Rotten seal of approval. And then there was the debut album, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. If it was Garth Brooks that made country music popular again in 1990, it was Dwight who forged the trail, reminding music fans that country music in its purest form is as valid as rockabilly, blues, and rock and roll.
He also happened to be an Eagles supporter. “I mean, the Eagles proved to everyone watching that country music was a valid format for mainstream music fans,” he told me in 1992. “They took country and played it in a way that spread the music around the world. That country music exploded in the 1990s has a direct connection to what the Eagles did in the 1970s.”
Garth
Then, in 1989, an artist emerged who would single-handedly revolutionize Nashville, the music, the look, the business operations of country music. The hat-wearing, Oklahoma-raised Garth Brooks refused to be limited by country music’s historically down-home, small-town mentality. Brooks had grown up watching MTV and listening to Dan Fogelberg, Billy Joel, and the Eagles. He loved the drama of KISS and the emotion of Don Henley and Elton John. But he also admired the deep humanity of his own country-music heroes, the two Georges, Strait and Jones.
Brooks’ vocals, pop instincts, and country delivery combined to create a rocking but country sound that hadn’t been heard on radio since the glory days of the early 1970s. He didn’t sound exactly like the Eagles, but he captured the same sense of blending styles and warm, upbeat material that went straight to the heart. His 1991 album Ropin’ the Wind went to the top of the Billboard chart—not the country chart but the overall chart. His next album, The Chase, sold faster than any country album in history, and Brooks’ phenomenal sales had a domino effect on other country artists. People who liked Brooks would try out some other new Nashville product, and they tended to like it. Suddenly, the poor cousins of the American record business were grabbing sales and attention from the big boys in L.A. and New York.
Country music came of age in the middle 1990s. Garth Brooks mixed country rock and pop and took the Nashville music global, selling out concerts around the world, including huge shows in the U.K. and Ireland.
Photo by Nubar Alexanian/Woodfin Camp/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
As far as Brooks was concerned, the Nashville he embraced was closer to the Eagles and Dan Fogelberg of the 1970s than it was to country music from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. And it seemed the American—and later worldwide—audience agreed with him. For anyone not interested in the current vogue for house music and hip-hop, radio was a barren place; pop was too dance-oriented, and rock and roll had been taken over by those loud and aggressive screamers out of Seattle, as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden spewed their grunge across the United States. Simple, lilting, good-natured rock and roll was only found on “oldies” and classic-rock stations. New material that captured the easygoing rock-and-roll days of the past was not coming from L.A., New York, or London; Nashville was the new center for melodic soft rock with a country twist.
Numerous Nashville bands attempted to duplicate the Eagles’ vocal magic, but none succeed exactly—a compliment to just how good musically the Eagles actually were. “If the Eagles were around now, if they released a record like ‘Desperado’ to radio today, it would be to country radio,” Garth Brooks told me in 1991. “Rock and roll has changed, and so has country music. The kinds of sounds that were radio hits in the early ’70s like James Taylor and the Eagles would now be labeled country music.”
Country music had changed, and was now offering less twang, more production, less hokey lyrics, more story-telling authenticity. And pop music that relied on melody and lyrics was now being produced in small studios on Nashville’s Music Row.
Garth Brooks’ great rival in 1989 and 1990 was a Texas hat-wearing singer/songwriter called Clint Black. Black was country through and through, and a gifted songwriter, but he got his start singing ’70s singer/songwriter classics by the likes of James Taylor, Fogelberg, America, and the Eagles in lounges and clubs in Houston. “Country music and rock and roll used to be kind of different animals, but now, most of the artists on country music grew up on both,” he told me in 1990. “I listened to classic country and to James Taylor and Jackson Browne and the Eagles so our sound has some of everything. And I think that the fans, like us, also grew up with the singer/songwriters and rock and roll, so they have moved and changed as well.”
Booom!
Baby boomers flocked to country music, and Nashville responded with its own version of MTV, a twenty-four-hour country music video channel called CMT, or Country Music Television. Sitting next to the Grand Ole Opry, home of traditional country music, the CMT studios were run by a hip young crowd. TVs in the complex were tuned to VH1 and MTV, while the country-music videos offered for broadcast were becoming slicker and more contemporary by the day. As CMT Head of Programs Tracy Storey explained at the time, the channel was responding to a new, younger audience that had grown up on country and rock and roll. CMT was selling itself as music for people who liked the Eagles but couldn’t find that style of music on the radio or TV. Country was the new home for country-rock—for melodic music that told a story.
Don Henley is nothing if not an astute social observer, and he had seen the change in country music for himself. Despite never associating himself with the country label before, he understood the music better than most and responded positively to a duet request from country singer Trisha Yearwood (then a new face on the block, now an award-winning superstar married to Brooks). He slipped his world-weary vocals into “Walk Away Joe” like he was a CMT regular, blending beautifully with Yearwood’s Ronstadt-like singing and helping make the song a crossover hit. Indeed, so successful was the pairing and the single that Yearwood and Henley performed it live at the 1992 Country Music Association Awards show, broadcast live around the world from Nashville. Yearwood couldn’t believe her luck; she referred to herself as the coolest girl on the planet, since here she was, a country girl who grew up on the Eagles, playing the biggest show in the Nashville calendar with the Don Henley.
Soon after that, James Stroud and Irving Azoff hatched the idea of an Eagles tribute album. If the country music stars of the ’90s would keep name-checking the ’70s L.A. band in interviews, maybe there was some mileage in combining the two. There was little—make that no—chance of the Eagles re-forming to make a country-music album for Azoff, but what if Nashville’s new stars all picked their favorite Eagles track for a compilation album? Azoff won Henley’s blessing for the project by promising a portion of the royalties to the Walden Woods Project, founded in 1990 by Henley to help preserve the forest near Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond retreat.
Giants of Country
Giant Records assembled a stellar lineup of country’s major stars, including Vince Gill, Travis Tritt, Little Texas, Lorrie Morgan, Clint Black, Billy Dean, John Anderson, Alan Jackson, Suzy Bogguss, Diamond Rio, Trisha Yearwood, and Tanya Tucker. Producer James Stroud then asked his artists what Eagles songs they wanted to perform, assembled a list, and figured out who would cut what track.
“It was a pretty easy task,” he told me in 2011, “because everyone involved was such a huge Eagles fan they were all willing to fit in with our needs and make the project work. They all wanted to do different songs, fortunately. Travis Tritt told me he was doing ‘Take It Easy’—‘It’s my song,’ he said. But it was pretty easy; nobody held out for a particular song or anything like that. It was one of the coolest records I’ve ever been involved with. In fact I think we should do a Common Thread 2—it’s not like the Eagles don’t have plenty of great material!”
Trisha Yearwood comes as close as anyone to matching the vocal heights of the Eagles at their prime with her version of “New Kid in Town.” Clint Black is note-perfect on “Desperado,” Alan Jackson masterfully redneck on “Tequila Sunrise,” while Tanya Tucker—a ’70s contemporary of the Eagles—blows everyone away with her rendition of “Already Gone.” “Hell, it’s hard to mess up a song like that,” she told me in 2008. “Those guys knew how to write songs, and as a singer that’s all you ask for. That Eagles project was one of the coolest things I have done. Singers love good songs and the Eagles wrote some of the best of all time.”
Travis Tritt’s raspy and sincere version of the Eagles’ first single, “Take It Easy,” sets the album up. It’s a strong, rocking version, but it does indeed prove right those who claimed the Eagles would fit perfectly on country radio. The song fits Tritt’s contemporary country vocals well, and the instrumentation is fuller and rockier than on the Eagles original but close enough to be respectful.
In the early 1990s, Tritt was one of the most popular and charismatic characters in country music. His soulful fusion of Southern rock and country brought millions of rock fans to the genre, and Tritt rode his popularity and subsequent power in the industry for his own benefit. He wanted to see the Eagles back together, as did millions of country and rock-and-roll fans. Stories of bad blood and feuds between members only made the thought of a reunion more appealing.
Never one to hold back, Tritt told Azoff that if he was going to make a video to promote his version of “Take It Easy,” he had one small request: he wanted the Eagles in the video. In fact, he had come up with an amusing concept: while he plays the song, Don Henley and Glenn Frey should be trading blows behind him. It was a funny idea, and one that was discussed. It wasn’t going to happen, of course, but Tritt’s desire to have the L.A. legends in the video clip was taken seriously. Azoff set about making it a reality and soon had Henley and Frey on board. And with that done, the others followed easily. Time had been a healer, and while expectations were kept low of them all actually being in the same place at the same time again, everyone was secretly hopeful that this day out at a video shoot could lead to something more—something far more significant—for the Eagles.
Come the day of the shoot, Tritt was a bag of nerves, especially since Henley showed up forty-five minutes after the rest of the band, putting a huge question mark over the reunion. But show up he did. Tritt had his backing band in place for the video, but before they got down to filming Tritt’s promo video, the Eagles, as musicians tend to do, started jamming and noodling around on a song. They played “Rocky Mountain Way” like the past fourteen years had never happened.
It was a magical moment for everyone there, and the Eagles seemed to be enjoying themselves—even Henley. As he told The Morning Call in September 1994, “We played together; they had some instruments set up, and we played ‘Rocky Mountain Way,’ ‘Take It Easy,’ and some blues. And we kind of liked it.”
Cash Cow
James Stroud told me in 2011 that seeing the Eagles back together again was a very emotional moment for Travis and for him. “I looked across the room and saw Irving in tears. I asked him if he was OK and he said he was just thinking about how much money he was going to make from the reunion!”
Could Henley’s famous quote that the Eagles would get back together when Hell freezes over be defrosting? Certainly, those around the band and those involved in Common Thread had hopes that something new from the Eagles could come to fruition.
The fact that the album was an instant smash hit on release didn’t go unnoticed in the Eagles camp, and nor by Irving Azoff, either. The record sold a remarkable two million copies in just two months and boosted sales of the Eagles’ back catalogue by 20 percent. Two Eagles albums went back into the Top 15 of Billboard’s compilation chart. Azoff, thinking about a potential Eagles tour, told the L.A. Times in January 1994 that he was confident that they could play any venue, such was their renewed popularity. The Common Thread album, he added, “has impressed upon them that they’re still a vibrant, important force on the marketplace. Everybody’s on speaking terms and I do think they’re awed and a little bit shocked by this success. But there’s nothing officially in discussion right now. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did get back together, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t.”
Azoff—still a band insider and confidante, even if he wasn’t officially their manager—chose to make the reunion a priority. With the ice thawing, he felt the time was right to test how warm the reunion waters really were. He chatted to the band members, talked up the idea of a reunion, outlined the potential rewards, set up different scenarios, and generally sold the notion, as subtly or directly as the situation required. He even came up with something concrete to make the reunion a reality: how about they film a one-off reunion special for MTV?
It was an intriguing idea.