Eagles, p.1
Eagles, page 1
EAGLES
BEFORE THE BAND
RIK FORGO
Copyright © 2019 by Time Passages LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage, and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For my wife Maureen and
daughter, Emily, whose
support for this project
was unwavering.
A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis, whose tireless efforts to inform, educate and empower people who suffer from this terrible disease is inspiring. For more information, visit:
overcomingms.org
Time Passages started out as an idea for a rock music research project hatched between me and my best friend from childhood, Eric Rumburg, in the front seat of my 1979 MG Midget in 1984. Music was an important part of our lives. His sisters, Amy and Laura, would join us shouting out songs at the top of our lungs as we drove through the streets of La Plata, Maryland. Eric would swap out cassette tapes of various artists from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s and we would regurgitate all the stories we had read about our favorite bands. What inspired the songs? Who played on that album? What gave them their big break? When did everything fall apart? The stories were eternal, but the structure was missing.
We thought it would be cool to gather these stories together, organize them chronologically and weave together everything that happened into a continuous narrative. That little dream is achieved with this book, at least to a minor degree. Eric passed away in 2014 so he sadly never got to see the final product. I suspect he would approve, and he would demand changes because that was his way. I thank him for being my friend and planting the seed in my brain that evolved into Time Passages.
Special gratitude goes out to my lovely wife, Maureen, who was my sage advisor and enthusiastic cheerleader for this project. Her extreme patience for the long nights, early mornings and lost weekends needed to finish this book was, frankly, saint-like. Thanks babe, I love you.
We are also grateful for the help provided by Danielle Anderson, who did such a great job copy editing the manuscripts; Bruce Elrond and Sandy Graham, of Cashbox and Record World, who allowed us access to their company’s treasure trove of music history; MJ at Gryphon Publishing Consulting, LLC, who so professionally handled the right clearances for our photos and illustrations; Henry Diltz, Gary Stroble and Michael D. Miller for their last-minute help with critical photos; Todd Bates for the brilliantly conceived cover art and the interior design; Shaun Loftus and her team, who managed our marketing and helped us understand the world of social media. This project does not succeed without their assistance, contributions and encouragement. Thank you all!
—Rik Forgo
Time Passages books tracks a band’s history one season at a time. The important moments in a band’s origin story appear as events occurred, broken down by season. Dates are estimated using the best data available, and are nested within a specific season. These events are categorized to give readers a view of milestones and events of different band members that illustrate how origin stories overlap and sometimes co-mingle. Informational graphics help illustrate important milestones in each band member’s story, keeping pace with everything from singles releases to collaborations, touring partners and televised appearances. Those informational graphics cover:
ALBUM MILESTONES
Charts when the band and its individual band member’s albums and singles reach sales milestones, including Recording Industry Association of America designations for gold (500,000 albums sold or 1 million singles sold), platinum (1 million albums sold or 2 million singles) and diamond (10 million album or singles) certifications.
AWARDS & HONORS
Recognition of awards and honors bestowed on the band and its individual members, including Grammy, hall of fame and other music industry awards, as well as pop culture awards. Sources: various halls of fame, Grammies, television networks.
COLLABORATIONS
Identifies when members of the band participated with other artists in duets/group sessions, or provided studio support for other musicians. These listings are exhaustive, but incomplete as there is no absolute way to capture every collaborative instance. The intent is to show how band members contributed their talents to – and were sought out by – other artists. Sources: Record labels (Asylum, Warner Brothers, etc.), Discogs.com
END NOTES
Citations for the source material for stories, briefs and snippets are tagged at the end of each article as an end note. A full listing of citations can be found at the end of the book.
ON SCREEN
Appearances on television and movies are cited, along with the date of the appearance for the band or individual band members. Citations are based on verifiable sources and are exhaustive, but may not be complete because records for every appearance may not be published.
ON THE ROAD WITH …
Tracks who the band toured with or appeared on stage with for a given season. Tours and tour partners are highlighted, and appearances with other artists for one-off televised concerts and rock festivals are also cataloged. The listing is exhaustive, but not complete. Sources: Setlist.fm, TourDatabase.com, magazine and newspaper references
PATHWAYS
Tracks important albums and singles completed by the band and band members.
RELEASES
Tracks the release of singles and albums from the band, its individual members, and bands they participated in prior to joining the Eagles (e.g., Poco, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Flow, Longbranch/Pennywhistle, Shiloh, etc.).
CHAPTER 1 - INSPIRATIONS
Elvis, the Beatles and Motown were inspirations that helped propel the Eagles into their musical careers. Electrified folk and bluegrass music were also key components that moved the band into a period of self-discovery and creativity that evolved the California sound.
Before AM radio stations across the nation started playing “Take It Easy” to fans who couldn’t get enough of the new country-rock sound coming from Los Angeles, the individual members of the Eagles were spread across the country in very different environments. They were raised in hard-working, regular American families that shared a common theme: they all loved music and passed that love down to their children. Another common inspirational theme among all the Eagles? Their love for The Beatles and Elvis Presley.
The leader of the Eagles, Glenn Frey, had a mother who insisted he learn to play piano. And he grudgingly did. But he also loved Elvis, Motown and, especially, he loved The Beatles. The day his aunt took him to see the Fab Four play live in Detroit’s Olympia Hall in 1964 was an inspirational moment for him, and he often cited it as an important moment in his musical career.
Likewise, Don Henley’s musical inspirations emerged from a family who would religiously turn on the radio to listen to the Louisiana Hayride on Sunday evenings. From their East Texas home, he and his family would gather to listen to Elvis, Hank Williams and a host of country legends perform every week. It kindled an interest in music that his mother, Hughlene, would nurture as he grew older. She, with his father CJ’s approval, bought him his first drum set as a teenager. It was a pivotal moment that helped launch an award-winning musical career for Henley. Like Frey, Henley was inspired by The Beatles, and especially by John Lennon.
Elvis and The Beatles inspired legions of fans across the world and helped launch a multitude of musical careers, including that of young Randy Meisner, who saw Elvis perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show as an 12-year old; three years later he was playing bass for a local band in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and credits that moment he saw Elvis on his black and white television set as the moment he knew he would be in music.
Far away from Nebraska, in the southwestern-most tip of the country, was a curly-haired teenager whose family bounced around the country like a ping-pong ball in the 1960s and 1970s. That teenager, Bernie Leadon, found inspiration in a quaint little guitar shop in San Diego, the Blue Guitar, where key components of California’s folk and bluegrass movement of the late 1960s emerged. He developed strong friendships there with Larry Murray, Ed Douglas, Kenny Wertz and future Byrd Chris Hillman and learned to play guitar, banjo and mandolin – skills that would serve him well in the years to come and make him a valuable original member of the Eagles. And while Leadon’s love for country and bluegrass music was critical to his origin story, he, like the other Eagles, also had an affinity for British music, particularly The Beatles and George Harrison. He even bought a Gretsch Tennesseean guitar, the same model Harrison played.
Joe Walsh had similar affections for John, Paul, George and Ringo. His life in music started with playing the oboe in high school in New Jersey, but he was forever changed when he saw The Beatles play live at Shea Stadium in 1965. He was stunned by the screaming girls and the music, which was so different than what he was accustomed to then. He dropped the oboe, picked up a guitar and found a band.
Nearly 1,000 miles south in Gainesville, Florida, another hot-shot guitar player named Don Felder had his interest in music piqued when his father bought him his first guitar. He liked The Beatles’ cool presence, but his musical inspirations were driven more by Elvis and rhythm and blues’ resident guitar legend, B.B. King. Felder connected with and was also inspired by a parade of some of Florida’s soon-to-be prominent musical royalty, including the Allman Brothers, Duane and Gregg, and his one-time guitar studen t Tom Petty. Also there was future Eagle Leadon, who became friends with Felder when his aerospace engineer father moved his family to Florida.
The only Eagle who was actually born and bred in California, Timothy B. Schmit, arrived at music with a folk influence, and drew inspiration from artists like the Kingston Trio’s Nick Reynolds and, like the other Eagles, was amazed by The Beatles. He saw the band perform live twice in San Francisco, which was impressive given their short touring life as a band. He was in attendance in San Francisco at Candlestick Park when the group performed their final concert in the United States.
These inspirations were the drivers for a disparate set of fledgling musical careers for the four original Eagles. It all came together one day in Disneyland on a stage backing up a fast-rising country-rock singer named Linda Ronstadt. Their collective backgrounds laid the foundation for one of America’s signature rock bands.
The stories that follow help describe the people and organizations that helped inspire and give the band’s career gravity, and provided the building blocks for Eagles, before they were a band.
Billboard magazine is widely recognized as the industry standard for measuring record sales and the popularity of music played on “mechanicals” (jukeboxes and other music playing devices), phonographs, radio, tape decks, CDs, and now streaming devices. It got its start in 1894 as the Billboard Advertiser, and billed itself as “The World’s Foremost Amusement Weekly.” It was the go-to monthly black-and-white periodical for the advertising and bill posting industry, which itself evolved into billboards.
The publication turned its focus to recording and playback devices as those machines gained popularity in the early 1900s. Over the years The Billboard pages would cover vaudeville, minstrel shows, motion pictures, radio, and recorded music. It eventually backed away from motion picture coverage because Variety had become the industry Goliath. Billboard, however, would rule the music industry roost. In 1936, it launched its “hit parade” feature, which shone a spotlight on the most popular records being played. That feature evolved into the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and the Billboard 200 chart, which tracks album sales. Casey Kasem’s syndicated American Top 40 radio show would base its weekly rankings on Billboard’s Hot 100 charts.
Billboard would be challenged over the years by publications like The Cash Box, Record World, and New Musical Express, but would outlast them all despite staring down bankruptcy several times. 1
1 [1178] Kazenoff, I. (March 1, 1998). Trivia Sign Language, AdAge
[1179] Traube, L. (May 25, 1946). The Billboard Presents ..., Billboard
The long-playing record, or LP, changed the recorded sounds industry when The Columbia Company perfected the technology in the late 1930s. Up until then, sounds were captured on cylinders and were limited to two-to-three-minute recordings.
By the early 1920s, Western Electric had perfected a method of synchronizing sound to movies using 16-inch platter discs of hard shellac. By the late 1920s, that technique had further improved with the 78 RPM. In September 1931 a new Columbia design packed an entire symphony or opera, up to 24 minutes of sound, into the same size disc as the existing short-playing records of the day. These short-plays cost buyers 75 cents in 1926, but after the innovation the cost of an entire 24-minute disc was just $1.24. What’s more, it allowed listeners to dispense with “albums,” which were large sleeve books of discs that were gathered in a bound set of folders. The industry kept the “album” naming convention even after the practical use of the physical albums disappeared.
By 1948, Columbia had refined its design even more, offering 12-inch discs with 260 grooves per side and a sapphire needle (rather than the steel needles used up until then) to extract the sound. The new design allowed the packing of 45 minutes of recorded music on a single disc. It was a game changer. Listeners no longer had to replace a disc after 10 minutes of listening. A disc could play continuously; the new designs for record players even knew when the disc was over and could automatically flip to the other side. 1
1 [1427] Goodman, J. (July 4, 1948). Capsule Disc Will prove Boon to Lazy, Salt Lake Tribune
[1428] Tucker, G. (March 17, 1949). Disk Gets Us in an Old Groove Once More, Salem Statesman-Journal
When Joe Walsh and Don Felder unleashed their dueling guitars at the end of “Hotel California,” they may not have been thinking about how that performance was made possible when the album was released in 1976.
Walsh played the classic song with his Fender Telecaster and Felder matched his licks with his Gibson EDS-1275 double neck on the history-making song. It was historic, but the song, and perhaps popular music, may have turned out differently if not for Adolph Rickenbacker, John Dopyera, and George Beauchamp, who created the first cast aluminum electric guitar in 1931 and, in the process, built the foundation for rock music.
Beauchamp was a vaudeville performer who played violin and acoustic guitar. Often playing alongside an orchestra, he was looking for a way to have his music rise above the pit. He met with Dopyera, a violin-maker and after a few attempts, finally got an early version of the guitar working. Rickenbacker was a production engineer and machinist who had a shop nearby in Santa Anna, California. When Dopyera went solo, Rickenbacker and Beauchamp began working on their version, and by the summer of 1932, they had developed the A25 Hawaiian, an aluminum-bodied guitar with string-driven electro-magnetic pickups that became known by most as the Ro-Pat-In Fry-Pan.
Rickenbacker continued evolving his designs that included wooden solid-body designs, but the business model changed when he sold the business to F.C. Hall in 1953. Hall, who owned Radio-Tel, refocused the business away from steel guitars and instead on standard electric and acoustic guitars with “through the neck” construction. These evolved Rickenbackers soon became the favorites of rock and roll heavyweights, including Roger McGuinn, Graham Nash, Pete Townshend, John Lennon, George Harrison, Steve Van Zandt, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Eagles Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh owned them as well. 1
1 [1421] Worrell, B. (November 23, 2015). The Gear of the Eagles Guitarists, Reverb
[1422] (January 24, 2006). The Earliest Days of the Electric Guitar, Retrieved from http://www.rickenbacker.com/history_early.asp
Billboard magazine has been considered to be the bellwether for tracking the popularity of recorded music since the early 1930s, but a publishing industry newcomer, The Cash Box, became a credible competitor in July 1942 when it published its first issue.
The subscription-based magazine started out as a weekly classified ad for the coin-operated game industry, which was surging at that time. Like Billboard, The Cash Box expanded its field of business in the mid-to-late 1940s when jukeboxes became the rage in post-World War II America.
Recording companies flocked to the magazine and used it as a barometer for their industry. Soon, ad sales from those music companies was driving revenue and the coin-operated industry began to fade from its core business, although it never did disappear completely.
In its heyday, Cash Box’s charts were relied upon by music industry insiders as reliably as Billboard’s. Later renamed simply Cashbox, the magazine fell on hard times in the mid-1990s and published its last issue in November 1996. It was resurrected by new owner Bruce Elrod in 2006 as an online magazine and began charting singles again in roots music, bluegrass, bluegrass gospel, beach music, roadhouse blues and boogie, country Christian, and southern gospel.
