Original Coverage & Source Attribution: faroutmagazine.co.uk
It is a tale as old as the music industry itself: songwriters emerge penning songs for the everyman, centred on universal, easily relatable experiences, but before long, they end up writing about the apparent perils of their lives as a successful musician. It is a path that the Eagles arrived at rather quickly.
One of the kindest things you can say about the Eagles is that they were excellent at courting the attention of mass, mainstream audiences. Their unique brand of country-slanted soft rock seemed to unite the music-buying public of the United States, both young and old, and thus it is no surprise that they maintain a reputation as one of the greatest commercial successes in music history.
As shown by their discography, though, that rapid rise to stardom did not come without its challenges.
Dealing with success is one aspect of the music industry that nobody can really prepare you for, and the Eagles didn’t handle it particularly well. Each harbouring their own demons and addictions, it wasn’t long before the band members – particularly Glenn Frey and Don Henley – were at each other’s throats, adding another layer of discontent to their existence, which was spurred on all the way by the typical challenges of the music industry.
After all, once you achieve the kind of success boasted by the Eagles, and the music industry gets its claws in, you will inevitably be pushed and pulled every which way to try to replicate that same success. Before long, that eternal struggle made its way into the band’s songwriting, and there are few greater examples than 1974’s ‘Good Day in Hell’.
If, by some miracle, you have managed to have never heard said track before, you can likely gauge its atmosphere from the title alone. It is an ode to unshakeable frustrations, ever-rising tensions, and anger bubbling just underneath the surface, presenting the abstract concept of the music industry as the devil himself.
“‘Good Day in Hell’ was Glenn’s little tribute to Danny Whitten and Gram Parsons,” Henley once told Rolling Stone about the track, name-dropping two key influences on the Eagles, both of whom tragically lost their lives during the early part of the 1970s, within one year of each other.
Further reading: From The Vault
“It’s also another one of our running commentaries on the perils of the music business and the lifestyle that often comes with it,” he added, as if it needed to be explained at all. To be fair to the Eagles, it was that very lifestyle that tore them apart in the end, with tensions reaching breaking point amid substance abuse and sleep deprivation.
Still, it would take another six years after ‘Good Day in Hell’ was released for the Eagles to finally succumb to that mounting pressure. So, perhaps the music industry wasn’t quite as destructive as the band originally suggested, or perhaps they simply became more resilient as the success of their recordings grew. Either way, the perils of the music industry only became more and more prevalent within their songwriting.
‘Life in the Fast Lane’, anyone?
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