The Untold Truth Of The Eagles

With all due respect to the fictional "Big Lebowski" who tells a taxi driver that he "hates the f*****g Eagles," the band in question was one of the most successful bands on the music front of the 1970s, '80s and '90s. With five No. 1 singles, six No. 1 albums and over 200 million record sales since the band first formed in 1971, it's easy to see why this musical group's accomplishments deserve attention. Udiscovermusic calls the Eagles an "American rock phenomenon loved the world over."

Britannica confirms that the original members of the Eagles were Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner. Together, the musicians "cultivated country rock," a relatively new sound that soon wove itself into the Americana of American music. Fans everywhere were soon grooving to the easy-going sound of the band, whose songs ranged from romantic ballads to rockin' melodies. Add in the solo careers of Frey, Henley, Meisner and later front men Don Felder and Joe Walsh, and it's no wonder Boomsbeat calls the Eagles "one of the world's best-selling bands in history." And as one might guess, the epic band has a story to tell about their rise to fame. Read on for the untold truth about the Eagles.

Glenn Frey and Don Henley were both signed with Amos Records when they met in 1970 at the Troubadour, a club in LA. They would become the founding members of the Eagles. It's been said that the musicians approached Linda Ronstadt about their music, but the artist herself told the Los Angeles Times that Frey was hired to replace Bernie Leadon, who left her backup band for a brief stint with the Flying Burrito Brothers. In the end, Ronstadt, Frey, and Henley talked Leadon into coming back and added Randy Meisner. 

Ronstadt hired all four musicians for her new backup band, says Rock Roll Road Map, and the group played together for the first time with Ronstadt at Disneyland. The "chemistry was undisputable," and there was no ill will when the fledgling musicians told Ronstadt they wanted to start their own group; in fact, Ronstadt and her manager, John Boylan, were all for it. The boys even recorded with Ronstadt before releasing their first self-titled debut album in 1972. Classic Rock Review called the effort "impressive, diverse, and sonically superior." The Eagles had landed.

"Hotel California" absolutely rocked the music world in 1976. According to The Style Inspiration, the album shot up to No. 1 and went platinum within a week of its release. Two songs, "New Kid in Town" and "Hotel California" (with music written by new band member Don Felder), also went No. 1 on the charts. And the album would eventually sell more than 10 million copies. Felder had originally thought of naming the latter tune "Mexican Reggae," but the final decision was the best one by far.

So where was Hotel California exactly, fans wondered. It took awhile to identify the ethereal looking hotel on the cover, which turned out to be the Beverly Hills Hotel. Photographer David Alexander shot the image atop a cherry picker which, at that angle, made the hotel hard to recognize. Die-hard fans soon identified the building, however, and surprisingly the hotel threatened to sue the band. The suit, however, was unfounded seeing as Alexander took the picture from Sunset Boulevard and not on the hotel's property. Meanwhile, music lovers were going absolutely nuts over the cover song, as well as other tunes like "Victim of Love" and "Life in the Fast Lane." And although health issues forced Randy Meisner to leave the band shortly after their album tour, the Eagles earned their first Grammy Award for "Hotel California" in 1977.

What does a band do when their music has made them a household word and their wildest dreams have come true? To the Eagles, the success of "Hotel California" and "Their Greatest Hits" had to have been overwhelming. Maybe that's why it took $800,000 and three years of recording to produce "The Long Run." It was also their first album with Timothy B. Schmit, who had replaced Randy Meisner for the "Hotel California" tour. Rolling Stone's Timothy White soundly pronounced the album "a chilling and altogether brilliant evocation of Hollywood's nightly Witching Hour."

White had more to say too, noting that although a first listen of "The Long Run" might lead one to believe it was a "modest, flawed project" the new album was anything but, filled with metaphors and hints to the details of living a musician's life. Yet it seemed almost natural that the album immediately shot up to No. 1 and also was destined to go multi-platinum. The Eagles also scored their fourth Grammy Award for the track "Heartache Tonight." It seemed too good to be true, and it turned out it was. Suddenly, the band members found themselves bickering at each other one day over a single word in a song. Trouble was definitely on the horizon.

When the Eagles broke up, Don Henley vehemently declared that the band would reunite "when hell freezes over." He, along with Glen Frey, Randy Meisner, Don Felder, and Joe Walsh set about establishing their own solo careers but barely talked to each other. And then, along came "Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles," a tribute album by country artist Travis Tritt and several other Nashville musicians, in 1993. The effort, which received lukewarm reviews, was meant to raise money for Henley's Walden Woods Project. But it ended up doing much more than that.

In 1994, Tritt quietly asked the Eagles musicians to appear in his video for "Take It Easy." The guys agreed, gathering in the studio together for the first time since the breakup. The resulting video was pretty awesome, set in a back-country bar with the band playing alongside Tritt. They were laughing. They were smiling. They were back. Later that year, the Eagles officially reunited, taping an MTV special and going on tour for the first time since 1980. "For the record, we never broke up," Frey quipped at the band's first live performance that April, "we just took a 14-year vacation."

In 1998, the Eagles achieved the best honor of all when singer Jimmy Buffet inducted the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Their journey to the top, wrote Parke Puterbaugh, began with a group of "wide-eyed innocents with a country-rock pedigree" and evolved into a great band known for their "grandiose, dark-themed albums" documenting world society as it changed. Randy Meisner later recalled how, after he left the band, his requests to sit in with the group now and then went unanswered. "They have to keep their band the way it is," he said.

That all changed at the Hall of Fame induction, when for the first and only time ever, all seven members of the Eagles, past and present, took the stage for an epic performance. Meisner, along with Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, Don Felder, Joe Walsh, and Timothy B. Schmit came together that night to perform "Hotel California." As one might guess, it went off without a hitch as the musicians played as if they had been one band all along. Of the ever "notoriously protective" Irving Azoff who stood in the wings and watched the show unfold, Henley was thankful and quipped, "He may be Satan, but he's our Satan."

January 18, 2016 was one of the saddest days in music history when the news broke that Glenn Frey had died from a bevy of health problems. The Detroit Free Press lamented that "On stage, he played the charismatic, carefree rock star" even as his health progressively failed. But Frey's passing did not set well with his wife, Cindy, who claimed his doctor failed to care for her husband or even correctly diagnose his health issues. She filed suit against Dr. Steven Itzkowitz and Mount Sinai Hospital in 2018.

The Eagles, meanwhile, were devastated. The Chicago Tribune recounted how Frey had just finished a tour with the band and was spending some family time in Hawaii when he got sick. Back in California, he contracted pneumonia, which contributed to his death. "I don't see how we could go out and play without the guy who started the band," Don Henley said. In February, the band played a tribute to Frey at the Grammy Awards. In attendance, as it happened, was Frey's son Deacon who, a short time later, joined the Eagles in his father's stead. A proud Henley recalled how Deacon was able to "pick up the torch and carry it forward." He tours with the band to this day.

"The Eagles" is one of the simplest, most elegant, and best-known band names in history, but most people have probably been saying and writing it wrong for the better part of 50 years. Steve Martin wrote in his memoir "Born Standing Up" that he was a regular at the Troubadour, the Los Angeles bar and concert venue where musicians like Don Henley and Glenn Frey also spent a lot of time. One night, the latter told Martin that he had come up with a name for his new band. "He said, 'Eagles.' I said, 'You mean, the Eagles.' He said, 'No, Eagles.'" The group's name technically doesn't employ the use of the definite article, the, and is actually just Eagles.

How the musicians decided on that name is also something of a mystery. According to Far Out, early in the band's history, its members took a trip to California's Mojave Desert and ingested a great deal of tequila and peyote, which inspired a spiritual journey like one the Native Americans who once resided in the area might take. Per Time, Glenn Frey said that the name "Eagles" presented itself, as that animal figures prominently in the beliefs and stories of several indigenous communities. Collaborator J.D. Souther holds that Frey actually saw some eagles fly overhead while under the influence and screamed out, "Eagles!"

A band that purportedly enjoyed a "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and which implored listeners to "Take it Easy" often didn't take its own chilled-out messaging to heart. Creative and personal tension among band members was so intense that it nearly led to actual physical fighting, in public and during a big Eagles concert no less.

In July 1980, the band played at a fundraiser in Long Beach, California, for the re-election campaign of California senator Alan Cranston. According to Far Out, Cranston gave a long speech before the Eagles played, thanking the musicians for coming out, to which guitarist Don Felder responded, "You're welcome, Senator. I guess." Bandmate Glenn Frey found Felder's words and tone to be more than a little disrespectful, and told him so, right before the Eagles started their concert. "So now we're onstage, and Felder looks back at me and says, 'Only three more songs till I kick your a**, pal.' And I'm saying, 'Great. I can't wait,'" Frey recalled.

At the end of the set, Felder took out his physical aggression on a guitar, smashing it against a wall and seething at the other Eagles before he left in a limousine. That's the last time the band would play together for more than a decade.

The music of the Eagles looms large in one of the most enduring cult hit movies of all time — but not in a good way. The Coen Brothers' 1998 crime comedy "The Big Lebowski" centers around a zoned-out, perpetually stoned aging hippie-type named Jeffrey Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) who likes his area rug, fuzzy sweaters, and White Russians, but decidedly not the Eagles. In one scene, his well-stated distaste for the band gets him thrown out of a cab. The driver angrily refuses to turn off a radio playing "Peaceful Easy Feeling," and Lebowski explains that he "had a rough night and I hate the f****** Eagles, man."

While they allowed "Peaceful Easy Feeling" to appear on the soundtrack of "The Big Lebowski" and thus be the butt of the joke, the Eagles had mixed feelings about their contribution to movie history. "I remember I ran into Glenn Frey, he gave me some s***," Bridges told Rolling Stone. "I can't remember what he said exactly, but you know, my anus tightened a bit." Eagle Don Henley, however, Bridges told Radio.com (via The Telegraph), didn't mind the cinematic ribbing.

The Eagles made a lot of people a lot of money. The half-dozen or so foundational members of the group sold millions of records both during their 1970s heyday as an active act and consistently since they went their separate ways in 1980. Two of their albums, "Hotel California" and "Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975" are among the bestselling LPs ever, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 26 million and 38 million, respectively. Their 1994 comeback record "Hell Freezes Over" sold 9 million, a second hits collection moved 11 million units, and all of that is money in the bank for the guys who played on those songs, and more for the people who wrote them, like Eagles singer and drummer Don Henley. Post-Eagles, he launched a notable solo career, hitting the top 40 of the Billboard pop chart eight times with hits like "All She Wants to Do Is Dance," "The End of the Innocence," and "The Boys of Summer."

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Henley's net worth is in the neighborhood of $250 million. That makes him far and away the Eagle who soared the highest financially, outranking the late Glenn Frey ($120 million) Joe Walsh ($75 million), Vince Gill ($30 million), Timothy B. Schmit ($25 million), Randy Meisner ($15 million), and Bernie Leadon ($10 million).