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Musicians Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit refusing to take it easy
By Malcolm X Abram
Beacon Journal music writer
POSTED: 11:44 a.m. EDT, Mar 18, 2009
The Eagles aren't known for their humor, but their tour titles reveal a sly wit.
The final tour of the band's initial run back in 1980 was called The Long Run.
They didn't tour again until 1994 when Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit and Don Felder gathered together for the ironic Hell Freezes Over tour. Since then, the band has given subsequent tours tongue-in-cheek names such as Farewell I and Assisted Living (which will make a stop at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena on Tuesday) — all nods to members' statuses as rock 'n' roll graybeards and also to the trend of veteran bands re-forming for one last triumphant go round that seemingly never ends.
Up until the current tour, the band — now down to Frey, 60, and 61-year-olds Henley, Walsh and Schmit (Don Felder was fired in 2001) plus a 13-piece backing band featuring a full horn section and three keyboardists — has been riding the baby-boomer nostalgia train straight to the bank.
It was among the first to push concert ticket prices beyond $100. The brazen act of supply-and-demand economics drew the ire of some fans and pundits, but ultimately raked in truckloads of cash and set the new standard for superstar artists.
Now the band is touring behind its first album of new tunes in nearly 30 years, Long Road Out of Eden, a double-disc, 20-track collection of new songs sold exclusively through Wal-Mart — where the bulk of its classic rock and country rock audience shops — and the band's Web site (http://www.eaglesband.com).
The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts with little help from radio, and has sold more than 7 million units (each disc of a double album is counted separately) plus more than 3 million worldwide, pushing its total past the 10 million mark, the third time the band has achieved that impressive feat. (Hotel California and the Eagles' two greatest-hits albums each sold more than 10 million.)
In 2007 on CNN, Henley declared that Long Road Out of Eden ''is probably the last Eagles album that we'll ever make,'' citing parenting, members' pending solo work and the fact that the album allowed songwriters to get ''a lot of things off our chest'' as primary reasons that recording another album was not a priority.
Besides, in spite of the album's impressive sales, many fans are perfectly content to hear the songs they grew up listening to played expertly by a group of well-rehearsed musicians.
Live, the Eagles members are known for their ability and dedication to not simply playing their songs but also for expertly re-creating the records onstage night after night and making it look and sound easy.
Henley and Frey, co-pilots of the band they refer to as ''the Mothership,'' are NOTORIOUS for their exacting demands that musicians sublimate their own creativity in the name of the song and that they stay within the lines of the recording, i.e., no jamming or spontaneous musical filigree.
For much of its initial run, the band performed alone onstage, but for its 1980 tour, the Eagles hired Joe Vitale, an old buddy of Joe Walsh. A native of Canton, the drummer/ keyboardist toured with the band on what would be its final tour before its ''14-year break.''
In his book, Backstage Pass, Vitale recalls several stories from the tour such as the night he and another crew member made Glenn Frey officially ''Italian,'' completing the transformation with a snappy suit and a bad Italian-American accent. Vitale also experienced firsthand the attention to detail Frey and Henley demanded of the band.
Vitale recalled a night early on in the tour when he was drumming on the song Those Shoes, and he momentarily got lost in the music and played a syncopated fill that caused the guitar players to turn around and smile knowingly at him.
After the show, Vitale was called to Henley's hotel room where the singer opened his door just far enough to look Vitale in the eye.
''You know that fill you played tonight during Those Shoes?'' Henley asked Vitale, who was expecting a compliment on his rhythmic acumen.
''Don't do that again,'' Henley said quietly before closing the door.
Vitale did not.
''I stepped out of the arrangement for a second and [Henley] just reminded me that's not the way we do things,'' Vitale said recently from his home in Jackson Township. ''We [the Eagles] like to keep it down to the signature licks and notes from the record and I've grown to respect that because they really, really care about the listener.
''But, man, I tell you, it was a funky fill. It was a good one,'' he said laughing.
Vitale appeared on the 1980 Eagles Live album and has played and recorded with Joe Walsh, co-writer of Rocky Mountain Way and is a sideman with Crosby, Stills and Nash. He said he is impressed by how hard the band worked and still works on living up to its own high standard.
''They are just an amazing band, and they sound as good now as they did when I was with them and you can't say that about too many bands at our age,'' he said chuckling.
''One of the reasons is that from the time they get up in the morning of a show day they are real focused on the show and they make sure they get plenty of rest and it's just really important business to them and I think that sets them apart from a lot of bands.
''Them guys are real serious about what they do, it's real business to them,'' he continued. ''Of course, it's just as much fun. You can prepare all day and still have a great time that night, but I've seen a lot of bands that take a lot of stuff for granted and figure we're big iconic rock stars and whatever we do is going to be great.
''I've played with bands that didn't get a sound check and I've heard members go, 'Listen we're the so-and-so and they'll love everything we do.'
''That's a wrong attitude and the Eagles have a really great attitude,'' he said. ''One of the things that Glenn Frey says and he's been saying since I was with them and he still says it now, is 'You're paying, we're playing' and it's a business to them in that sense but it's still very artistic.''
Vitale admits that during the course of a long tour, playing the same song the same way every night can get a bit old, and as a musician, he is keen to hear a band musically mix it up a little.
''It's always fun, but it gets to be routine,'' he said. ''But it's not routine for the people who pay a lot of money for tickets and they want to see you onstage having fun and enjoying yourself as much as they are enjoying themselves.
''But Don Henley and Glenn [Frey] are both real concerned about wanting the people to get their money's worth and that's what a professional entertainer is,'' he said. ''No matter what, the audience comes first and you're not going to go off and just start jamming.''
The band's current set list for its nearly three-hour show features nine songs from Long Road Out of Eden as well as a slew of Eagles classics such as Hotel California and Heartache Tonight and a smattering of solo work including the James Gang's Funk #49, Walsh's Life's Been Good and Henley's Boys of Summer.
Unsurprisingly, the tour has been receiving positive notices particularly for longtime guitarist Stuart Smith, who co-wrote a couple of songs on the new album and has been widely praised for his deft touch on the fretboard.
These days, going to see the Eagles is like sitting down to a big plate of musical comfort food. There are no surprise ingredients, no deviation from the established recipe, and you know exactly how it's going to taste from the first bite to the last.
And at the end of the meal, you'll leave satisfied with a familiar and peaceful easy feelin'.
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758.
Details
- What: The Eagles
- When: 8 p.m. Tuesday
- Where: Quicken Loans Arena, 1 Center Court, Cleveland
- Tickets: $68, $103, $146, $190
- Information: http://www.ticketmaster.com, 330-945-9400
The Eagles aren't known for their humor, but their tour titles reveal a sly wit.
The final tour of the band's initial run back in 1980 was called The Long Run.
They didn't tour again until 1994 when Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit and Don Felder gathered together for the ironic Hell Freezes Over tour. Since then, the band has given subsequent tours tongue-in-cheek names such as Farewell I and Assisted Living (which will make a stop at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena on Tuesday) — all nods to members' statuses as rock 'n' roll graybeards and also to the trend of veteran bands re-forming for one last triumphant go round that seemingly never ends.
Up until the current tour, the band — now down to Frey, 60, and 61-year-olds Henley, Walsh and Schmit (Don Felder was fired in 2001) plus a 13-piece backing band featuring a full horn section and three keyboardists — has been riding the baby-boomer nostalgia train straight to the bank.
It was among the first to push concert ticket prices beyond $100. The brazen act of supply-and-demand economics drew the ire of some fans and pundits, but ultimately raked in truckloads of cash and set the new standard for superstar artists.
Now the band is touring behind its first album of new tunes in nearly 30 years, Long Road Out of Eden, a double-disc, 20-track collection of new songs sold exclusively through Wal-Mart — where the bulk of its classic rock and country rock audience shops — and the band's Web site (http://www.eaglesband.com).
The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts with little help from radio, and has sold more than 7 million units (each disc of a double album is counted separately) plus more than 3 million worldwide, pushing its total past the 10 million mark, the third time the band has achieved that impressive feat. (Hotel California and the Eagles' two greatest-hits albums each sold more than 10 million.)
In 2007 on CNN, Henley declared that Long Road Out of Eden ''is probably the last Eagles album that we'll ever make,'' citing parenting, members' pending solo work and the fact that the album allowed songwriters to get ''a lot of things off our chest'' as primary reasons that recording another album was not a priority.
Besides, in spite of the album's impressive sales, many fans are perfectly content to hear the songs they grew up listening to played expertly by a group of well-rehearsed musicians.
Live, the Eagles members are known for their ability and dedication to not simply playing their songs but also for expertly re-creating the records onstage night after night and making it look and sound easy.
Henley and Frey, co-pilots of the band they refer to as ''the Mothership,'' are NOTORIOUS for their exacting demands that musicians sublimate their own creativity in the name of the song and that they stay within the lines of the recording, i.e., no jamming or spontaneous musical filigree.
For much of its initial run, the band performed alone onstage, but for its 1980 tour, the Eagles hired Joe Vitale, an old buddy of Joe Walsh. A native of Canton, the drummer/ keyboardist toured with the band on what would be its final tour before its ''14-year break.''
In his book, Backstage Pass, Vitale recalls several stories from the tour such as the night he and another crew member made Glenn Frey officially ''Italian,'' completing the transformation with a snappy suit and a bad Italian-American accent. Vitale also experienced firsthand the attention to detail Frey and Henley demanded of the band.
Vitale recalled a night early on in the tour when he was drumming on the song Those Shoes, and he momentarily got lost in the music and played a syncopated fill that caused the guitar players to turn around and smile knowingly at him.
After the show, Vitale was called to Henley's hotel room where the singer opened his door just far enough to look Vitale in the eye.
''You know that fill you played tonight during Those Shoes?'' Henley asked Vitale, who was expecting a compliment on his rhythmic acumen.
''Don't do that again,'' Henley said quietly before closing the door.
Vitale did not.
''I stepped out of the arrangement for a second and [Henley] just reminded me that's not the way we do things,'' Vitale said recently from his home in Jackson Township. ''We [the Eagles] like to keep it down to the signature licks and notes from the record and I've grown to respect that because they really, really care about the listener.
''But, man, I tell you, it was a funky fill. It was a good one,'' he said laughing.
Vitale appeared on the 1980 Eagles Live album and has played and recorded with Joe Walsh, co-writer of Rocky Mountain Way and is a sideman with Crosby, Stills and Nash. He said he is impressed by how hard the band worked and still works on living up to its own high standard.
''They are just an amazing band, and they sound as good now as they did when I was with them and you can't say that about too many bands at our age,'' he said chuckling.
''One of the reasons is that from the time they get up in the morning of a show day they are real focused on the show and they make sure they get plenty of rest and it's just really important business to them and I think that sets them apart from a lot of bands.
''Them guys are real serious about what they do, it's real business to them,'' he continued. ''Of course, it's just as much fun. You can prepare all day and still have a great time that night, but I've seen a lot of bands that take a lot of stuff for granted and figure we're big iconic rock stars and whatever we do is going to be great.
''I've played with bands that didn't get a sound check and I've heard members go, 'Listen we're the so-and-so and they'll love everything we do.'
''That's a wrong attitude and the Eagles have a really great attitude,'' he said. ''One of the things that Glenn Frey says and he's been saying since I was with them and he still says it now, is 'You're paying, we're playing' and it's a business to them in that sense but it's still very artistic.''
Vitale admits that during the course of a long tour, playing the same song the same way every night can get a bit old, and as a musician, he is keen to hear a band musically mix it up a little.
''It's always fun, but it gets to be routine,'' he said. ''But it's not routine for the people who pay a lot of money for tickets and they want to see you onstage having fun and enjoying yourself as much as they are enjoying themselves.
''But Don Henley and Glenn [Frey] are both real concerned about wanting the people to get their money's worth and that's what a professional entertainer is,'' he said. ''No matter what, the audience comes first and you're not going to go off and just start jamming.''
The band's current set list for its nearly three-hour show features nine songs from Long Road Out of Eden as well as a slew of Eagles classics such as Hotel California and Heartache Tonight and a smattering of solo work including the James Gang's Funk #49, Walsh's Life's Been Good and Henley's Boys of Summer.
Unsurprisingly, the tour has been receiving positive notices particularly for longtime guitarist Stuart Smith, who co-wrote a couple of songs on the new album and has been widely praised for his deft touch on the fretboard.
These days, going to see the Eagles is like sitting down to a big plate of musical comfort food. There are no surprise ingredients, no deviation from the established recipe, and you know exactly how it's going to taste from the first bite to the last.
And at the end of the meal, you'll leave satisfied with a familiar and peaceful easy feelin'.
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758.
Details
- What: The Eagles
- When: 8 p.m. Tuesday
- Where: Quicken Loans Arena, 1 Center Court, Cleveland
- Tickets: $68, $103, $146, $190
- Information: http://www.ticketmaster.com, 330-945-9400
Comments
Click here to post your comments
Old Faithful, WY
Posted 12:05 PM, 03/18/2009
"bring out your dead!"
they should just charge people to come and listen to a cd over the sound system. that is all they do anyways. play the old crap note for note.
why didn't people listen to mojo nixon? "don henley must die!"
Ravenna, OH
Posted 12:08 PM, 03/18/2009
Another "We Ran Out of Money" Tour.
Stow, OH
Posted 12:56 PM, 03/18/2009
Trust me , when you are getting royalty checks for some 300 songs you have written that still get lots of air play you are not hurting for money.
Wichita, KS
Posted 11:54 PM, 03/18/2009
It's actually just called the "Long Road Out Of Eden" tour. "Assisted Living" is a joke Frey makes near the beginning of each show.
Akron, Oh
Posted 12:01 PM, 03/19/2009
Wow, some fellas on this forum whine worse than my girlfriends. Either you like the Eagles (I do!) or you don't-- quit your hater nitpicking...'no girl, my lord! in a flat bed ford, will slow down to take a look at you'
Canton, OH
Posted 10:49 PM, 03/21/2009
I'll be there. . .The Eagles are American Music Icons. . .Countrifried Rock that is good for the soul. Brilliant harmonies . . . Good lyrics. .Add Some Music To Your Day. . with apologies to Brian Wilson. .
Wahoo, NE
Posted 03:27 PM, 03/23/2009
I SEEN THE EAGELS LAST NOVEMBER THEY PUT ON A GREAT SHOW LIKE THEY HAVE IN THE PASS. PEOPLE AND YOU KNOW WHO YOUR ARE. IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE EAGLES WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE WEB SITE GET THE HELL OUT AND STAY OUT. AND WILDFLOWER IS RIGHT, DO YOUR NITPICKING ELSE WHERE AND GROW UP.....
Canton, OH
Posted 11:14 AM, 03/27/2009
WHATTA SHOW !!!! Where was the review ???????
