Do It Yourself
It was the resolving of deep-seated 1970s-rooted resentments and personality clashes that fanned the flames of a new Eagles album. In Eagles-land, things do move slowly; it’s a giant machine, after all. Just to tour a new album took them around two years—and that’s with very few breaks during the road trek.
But in the early 2000s, with harmony restored and Henley and Frey running the show without interruption or dissent, the two Eagle leaders began to seriously contemplate recording new songs again. The record business had changed since the last time they made an album, and Henley had been heavily involved in analyzing the power shifts that had occurred since the 1990s. Record labels were no longer vast banks of cash that handed out candy to young artists, let them record in expensive studio for months on end, and then take back their investment dollars from album profits. Labels had shrunk; technology put creation back in the hands of the artists. Who needed Criteria Studios or the Record Plant when you could record on a laptop and send files over the Internet?
Home Grown
The plan was to slowly but surely write and record material while the Eagles convoy careened around the globe and then, when the work was complete and there was a solid window available for promotion and sales, the album could be let loose on the public. So the band, with Azoff’s encouragement, formed their own record company, thus ensuring greater control and a larger share of the profits.
“The Eagles don’t have a record deal,” Frey told the Herald Sun in October 2001. “We’re going to make a new record with our own money, our way, and we’re going to put it out ourselves. Call me kooky, but that’s what I want to do.”
The only downside to paying for all the recording costs is the up-front dollar investment. In the case of some of the richest men in rock, this was a non-issue, but the control they gained was a massive incentive to enjoy the new album and make it as far removed from the last studio record as humanly possible.
Mostly it was just personal, as Henley told USA Today in October of 2007. “We needed to do this album for our own personal fulfillment,” he said. “People tell us, ‘You’ve got enough money and fame. Why do this album?’ Being musicians is not a hobby. It’s a calling. There’s a life-affirming aspect to creating music. There’s more to it than getting songs on the radio and touring. It keeps us young and vital and off the shrink’s couch.”
Music City
Before Long Road Out of Eden was released, however, the Eagles tested the waters with a new single—or at least a new recording of a very old and very good J. D. Souther song, “How Long.” It was a classic Eagles tune and a live favorite that had mystifyingly been left unrecorded all those years.
The band debuted the single in Nashville. Ever since Henley’s duet with country star Trisha Yearwood in the ’90s and their involvement in their Eagles tribute album, there had been a reevaluation of where Eagles music fit on the genre landscape. Radio stations had merged and consolidated over the years, and airplay was harder than ever to find for any act outside the Top 20. Rock and roll had numerous sub-categories, and then there was oldies radio, but the Eagles wanted to be relevant.
Initially, Long Road Out of Eden was available in North America only via the Eagles’ own website, Wal-Mart, and Sam’s Club.
Henley and Frey were too edgy—too rock and roll—for country music in the early 1970s. Long hair was scorned, and literate, clever songwriters were distrusted in what was still a very traditional, conservative town. But by 2007, Nashville was a completely different environment. Rock and roll lived and breathed there. CMT was owned by Viacom, which also owned MTV, and country was finally hip and cool.
Henley and Frey both made regular statements about how they, the Eagles, were really a country band in the 2007 marketplace. “We have a very strong following in the country music audience,” Frey told CMT Insider in 2007, “and it’s not because we’re a country band, but I think it’s because we have respect for country music, American music, the popular song. Sometimes we rock a little more than country. What I like to say is we’re kind of country-tinged. The first country band that I thought we influenced was Alabama. In the ’80s, when Alabama broke through, they had a lot of songs where the choruses were always three-part harmony and there was a whole lot of singing going on.”
Indeed, the Eagles had been a massive influence on a genre of music that lives or dies on the strength of its songwriting. And so Nashville was delighted to welcome the Eagles to its prestigious Country Music Association Awards show, where the affable Vince Gill was clearly tickled to be able to introduce his personal heroes the Eagles to the stage. “For thirty-five years or more, these guys have been writing songs like this entire room wished they could write. They’ve been making records like we wished we could make and playing music like we wished we could play. These guys for thirty-five years have been the blueprint of what country-rock is all about. We are honored to have them on the CMA stage, ladies and gentlemen, the Eagles . . .”
Having witnessed several superstar events at the CMA Awards shows over several years, many in the media were shocked at the audience and industry reaction. This was different—this reaction was one of respect and awe, a truly remarkable welcome for any band to walk onstage to.
Brothers in Arms
And they looked like a band. Elder statesmen, perhaps, but still gloriously cool in their sharp black suits. As they say on sports commentaries, the crowd—a mix of the general public plus celebs and musicians—went wild. Everyone stood in respect for the Eagles. It was one of the loudest, most sincere standing ovations in CMA history.
The record itself presented a unified front, despite having been recorded over a seven-year period. Now, Henley and Frey were finally happy with it. “We ultimately concluded that what people like about the Eagles is our singing,” Frey told USA Today in October 2007. “So the criteria became: Can we sing this? Does it sound like the Eagles? It didn’t matter if it was rock, a ballad, a cappella, country or a Mexican song. As long as it’s a good song with our voices and Joe Walsh’s guitar, we’d be all right.”
The band’s old-time folk meets country influence was upfront in the mix and in the running order, with the opening harmony-laden “No More Walks in the Wood” taking its cue from the Henley’s Walden-inspired environmentalism but presenting it in a classic old-school Eagles vein. “How Long” absolutely sounds like a Troubadour song, for those nostalgia buffs and Eagles historians, while Frey’s wish for Walsh to bring his magic is confirmed on the guitarist’s snappy “Guilty of the Crime.”
Frey’s vocals belie his years, which is probably down to his dramatic change in lifestyle. His vocal work on “No More Cloudy Days” is impeccable. And, somehow, Henley manages to balance his desire for social comment with good catchy material—something he mastered at the end of his solo career. “Business as Usual” is pure Henley.
The Eagles were back and happy with their achievement. And there would probably be more, too, with Henley admitting to CBS News, “It’s addictive. And you wanna keep doing it.”
Rolling Stone was impressed by the album, with reviewer David Fricke drawing comparison between the ten-minute title track and the band’s past glories, noting, “There is a potent restraint to ‘Long Road Out of Eden,’ in the bleak, hollow mix of acoustic guitar and electric piano in the verses and the overcast sigh of the harmonies.”
But that was only part of the story. The Eagles grabbed almost as many headlines for their new business model and distribution deal as they did for the new music.
Walmart
Owning the album themselves this time around, the Eagles were able to skip the tried-and-tested record-company business model and do something different. Having conceived, recorded, mastered, and packaged Long Road Out of Eden in-house, the band met with Walmart to investigate the best way of offering the album exclusively to the retail giant. It was an idea that had previously been attempted with great success by country superstar Garth Brooks, whose records had flown out of the stores. The Internet may be big, Henley reasoned, but he understood very well that people still like to buy CDs and DVDs, especially if the price is right.
Part of the deal meant that the record would be sold exclusively by Walmart for one year. It wasn’t a decision Henley took lightly. “I’ve never been a fan of big-box retailers,” he admitted to USA Today. “My daddy was a small businessman.” But his overall belief was that record companies are hardly paragons of business virtue either, and that it’s better to be on the inside fighting unfair practices than on the outside. Frey took a simpler approach. “I felt like they gave us the best chance to sell the most records,” he explained, in the same interview.
The deal worked, and the recording industry took notice. The new Eagles album debuted at #1 and sold almost four million copies in America. It was the top-selling album in the United States that year, and was also a smash around the globe, debuting at #1 in the album charts of Norway, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. Sales would eventually put it at #1 in ten more countries. And aside from sheer volume and popularity, the Eagles were welcomed back by their peers when they won two Grammy Awards for “How Long” and “I Dreamed There Was No War.”
What Henley would do next was anyone’s guess, but he was upbeat and positive when talking to Catholic Online in 2008: “These past 37 years have been amazing and wonderful beyond my wildest dreams, and I am as thankful as I can be. But I’m tired of packing and unpacking. I’m tired of airplanes and hotel rooms. I’m ready for a quieter, simpler life. Of course, I’ve been saying that for 30 years.”