Eagles in full flight

My review published in The Nation on October 19, 2004 , and below that, the concert preview from October 1.

Thirty years on, the quintessential American rock band shows they’re in it for ‘The Long Run’ as they kick off the ‘Farewell I Tour’ with a real beauty in Bangkok.

Between the “Peaceful Easy Feeling” laid down oh so quietly by original band members Don Henley and Glenn Frey to the spirit-jolting guitar raunch of later addition Joe Walsh, Friday night’s Asia-Oceania tour kick-off by the Eagles was a string of superlatives even longer than their 27-song hit parade.
The first night of a double-header at Impact Arena was three hours of high-tech, high-quality fun for a capacity, star-studded crowd that started roaring from the moment the lights went out a half-hour late – seconds after Thaksin Shinawatra and his entourage had grabbed their floor seats – and worked itself up to a deafening crescendo as Henley crooned the final, goosebump-lifting notes of “Desperado” to close the second encore and the show.
Evocatively lit and filmed DVD-style for the jumbo screens, with crane shots and all, it was a glorious night for the band, the crew, the fans and the standard-elevating BEC-Tero Entertainment.
The ecstasy wasn’t seamless, though. There’s no point trivially bemoaning the absence of “Best of My Love”, which the Eagles haven’t played for some time, but the evening’s pacing, for one thing, was bizarre.
Not only was the third tune, the theatrically arranged “Wasted Time”, oddly placed so early on – in an off-kilter, 10-song opening set punctuated with a 15-minute intermission – the stage remained dark for long pauses between each piece as the musicians regrouped, thus chopping up the momentum.
Impact’s acoustics were tested, even with the best sound equipment money can fly in. You could clearly hear every shimmering voice on near-whispered tunes like “Lyin’ Eyes” and “Tequila Sunrise”, but there was always a thudding phantom accompaniment.
And Henley seemed to be struggling throughout. The Eagles are all age 57 or so, but Henley currently seems to have a bit of a Matthew Perry bloat going on and had little energy to spare beyond replicating his share of the hits note-perfect.
He abandoned his drums often, and not just to come out front for a vocal, and where Frey talked to the fans, played some guitar solos and danced a bit, Henley was barely there.
All that was forgiven, of course, by the time he closed the proceedings with a gut-wrenching “Desperado”, and to be sure, his own solo hits “Dirty Laundry” and the operatic “Sunset Grill” were among the night’s other highlights.
Not so “Hotel California”, which despite a lovely Mexican trumpet intro and terrific dual guitar work, received – perhaps inevitably – an anticlimactic rendering.
Following Frey’s dubious defence of the ticket prices the week before (“We’re a legend”) and the band’s ban on cameras, concerns that this would be an Egos, not an Eagles, concert proved unfounded, although their individual hits made up much of Friday’s show.
Henley also had his clever No 1 single “The Boys of Summer” and 1984 solo jump-up “All She Wants to Do is Dance”. Frey mined his own disco phase for “You Belong to the City”, which fortunately Joe Walsh stepped in to save at the end.
Ah, Joe Walsh. Wotta guy. Already a major solo artist before he joined the Eagles in 1975, he was a smart addition, always guaranteed to blast through the laid-back quasi-country with pure, high-volume guitar joy and vocals designed to please.
“In the City” let him state his intentions early on in Friday’s show, and after a jazz-inflected “Sunset Grill” lit the fuse later on, getting a few people on their feet, Walsh put on a hard hat and went to work, getting the rest of the crowd up with “Life’s Been Good”, a rollicking testament to fair destiny that even featured sing-along cue cards on the big screens.
Then Walsh reached all the way back to 1970, when he was still with the James Gang, for “Funk 49”, one of the surprise bests of the night. The black-clad back-up brass - Greg Smith, Bill Armstrong, Chris Mostert and Al Garth (formerly of Loggins & Messina) - were swaying in unison like breeze-licked trees and Walsh and drummer Scott Crago opened up a canyon of rock.
After that, Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” – saved up among the encores – was pure gravy.
Though nothing’s been said thus far in this review about singer-bassist Timothy B Schmit, it was he who generated the evening’s first excitement, eliciting screams with his marvellous falsetto on “I Can’t Tell You Why”. He was utterly charming singing “Love Will Keep Us Alive”, with audience members chipping in on the chorus.
And it was he who ensured the purity of the Eagles’ harmonies throughout the concert, from “Already Gone” to “Take It Easy”.
It was unfortunate, then, that he didn’t get to sing “Take It to the Limit”. He’d likely have done a better job than Frey who, after introducing it (“My wife calls it the ‘credit card song’) as a composition by Randy Meisner – whom Schmit replaced in 1977 – didn’t even try to hit Meisner’s high notes.
(Interestingly, Henley may have done a better job too – apparently he was singing the song on the American tour.)
Has The Nation apologised yet for its front-page caption last Thursday, where someone, clearly not a fan, said the fifth band member, Don Felder, wasn’t present for the Bangkok press conference? There was a good reason for that, of course: Felder left the Eagles three years ago.
No worries, though: his magical guitar phrases are being duplicated to a tee by Stuart Smith, who might as well join the band. As it was, Smith stayed a good few paces away from the fab four, but from stage right engaged in non-stop sonic sensationalism, not only faithfully rereading Felder (even with a double-neck guitar on “Hotel California”) but overtly marching onto axe-hero turf in his own right.
Rounding out the back-up ensemble were keyboardists Mike Thompson and Will Hollis, and together this (mostly) younger eight-man crew - the magnificent brass adding so much muscle and texture – provided the warbling thermals that kept the occasionally winded Eagles aloft - and soaring magnificently – 30 years on.

Two of these nights

The Eagles say hello to Thailand with a ‘farewell tour’ double-header jammed with 30 years of hits.

The promoters may not like us trumpeting this, but the Eagles’ “Farewell I” tour – which brings the California-based legends to Impact Arena on October 15 and 16 – is not their farewell tour at all.
So if you miss them here this year, there may be another chance someday. Maybe.
“We just thought it was hilarious,” singer-guitarist Glenn Frey told Malaysia’s Star newspaper last month, explaining the joke.
“We don’t know how long we’re going to continue – we sort of take it year by year – but God, in case this is supposed to end, we decided we should call it ‘Farewell I’ and then if we change our minds, we’ll do ‘Farewell II’.”
The aforementioned God knows that superstars love their “farewell” tours. Elton John and David Bowie are still performing decades after theirs. Cher just wound up hers – maybe. Dylan hedges his bets with a “Neverending Tour”.
“I’ve learned with this band to never say never,” says Frey. “There never ceases to be certain surprises in the lifespan of this strange bird.”
And a lifespan it has almost been for fans who’ve known the band since 1971 and followed them as they accrued so many classic songs since then that the shows on this tour are veritable wall-to-wall hits.
The band arrives in Bangkok – their first time here – after a lengthy trek around North America and a few days in the studio.
From Thailand they’re off to Hong Kong and Singapore, then a tour of Australia, where several of the concerts sold out almost as soon as they were announced.
“Farewell I” gets them back home just in time to bring in the new year with their families.
If the Eagles stick to their tour set list from America, we can expect to hear them and their eight-piece backing band (including guitarist Stuart Smith, who replicates all the Don Felder solos) build momentum with “Take It Easy”, “Best of My Love”, “New Kid in Town”, “Life in the Fast Lane” and “Heartache Tonight”.
Then “One of These Nights” might turn up the intensity and Don Henley could offer his own hits “Boys of Summer”, “All She Wants to Do is Dance” and “Dirty Laundry”, Frey his “You Belong to the City” and Joe Walsh his “Rocky Mountain Way”, “Life’s Been Good” and “In the City”.
Next, we’re apt to hear the early Eagles hit “Already Gone”, followed by a short intermission and a set of semi-acoustic songs, including “Tequila Sunrise” and “Love Will Keep Us Alive”.
Odds are we’ll hear “Desperado” and “Hotel California” among the encores.
Anything new at all?
If you bought last year’s “The Complete Greatest Hits”, you’ll have heard “Hole in the World”, the only fruit so far from an album recording session that was originally scheduled for September 10, 2001.
The “strange bird” was temporarily grounded by history.
“So we took a couple of days off, just because no one really felt like anything that we were doing was very important,” Frey told the Star.
“And then when we came back, one of the first tracks that we cut was ‘Hole in the World’, and that song is sort of a lament about the sad fact that we can’t seem to get along.”
With that kind of enforced chill as a backdrop, some of the band members have been outspoken lately about the US presidential election. On the road when the vote goes down on November 2, they’re casting absentee ballots – for John Kerry.
Henley reportedly took some stick from a California audience recently for politicking between songs, but Frey is adamant about their being adamant.
“George W Bush has polarised our country with his outrageous behaviour in domestic and foreign policy, so everybody’s got an opinion now.
“The people in power in our country own all the television stations and radio stations and we, as artists, just have our little PA systems. So if Linda Ronstadt wants to … dedicate ‘Desperado’ to Michael Moore, I think she’s got every right to do it, and if people in the audience don’t want to hear it, they can get up and walk out.”

This could be heaven or this could be hell

As far as people in Thailand are concerned, the litmus test to determine whether you like the Eagles or not seems to be “Hotel California”. For many, the 1977 hit single represents the band’s creative zenith, all tripping guitar duels and lost-in-the-desert lyrics, a Pynchonesque paean to Los Angeles.
And certainly its 1994 semi-acoustic polishing gave it an endearing new strut.
For others, though, the song speaks too loudly of too many nights in too many bars.
Its popularity long ago added it to the repertoires of the Kingdom’s legion of struggling guitar heroes – and who could resist the singer’s plaintive “some dance to remember, some dance to forget”?
But so many times it seemed like every band in every pub in every corner of the land was playing that song. Every night.
It would be amusing to check how many of those singers actually get the words right all the way through, like: “Her mind is Tiffany twisted, she’s got the Mercedes bends …”
Interestingly, Chiang Mai’s own Joe Cummings, the travel writer who made this Planet far less Lonely for millions, waded into the song with both feet and a backpack a few years ago when he decided to probe the rumour that “Hotel California” had been written at and about an inn by that name in Mexico’s Baja California region, which he’d frequented himself.
Calling the two-storey hotel in Todos Santos “Baja’s headquarters of hip”, Cummings says he got hold of Don Henley’s fax number, posed the question and received this unequivocal reply:
“Neither myself nor anyone in the Eagles has ever had any association, either business or pleasure, with the Hotel California in Todos Santos.”
So much for claims by the hotel’s managers that Henley had once been part-owner, or that he’d holed up there to write the song.
In the liner notes to “The Complete Greatest Hits”, Henley and Glenn Frey chuck the apocryphal nonsense in the bin as they recall the song’s origins as a Don Felder instrumental demo they called “Mexican Reggae”.
Frey recalls a consciously “outside-the-box” studio process that melded “songs from the dark side – the Eagles take a look at the seamy underbelly of LA – the flip side of fame and failure, love and money.
“ ‘They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast’ was a little Post-It back to Steely Dan,” Frey says. “Apparently, Walter Becker’s girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time. I think it drove him nuts.
“So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day, and that was the genesis of the line, ‘turn up the Eagles, the neighbours are listening’ in ‘Everything You Did’, from Steely Dan’s ‘The Royal Scam’ album.
“We wanted to write a song just like it was a movie,” Frey continues. “This guy is driving across the desert and stops in … It becomes Fellini-esque.”
Henley claims a passion for hotels, and “there are all the great movies and plays in which hotels figure prominently, not only as a structure, but as a dramatic device.
“There are plays like Neil Simon’s ‘Plaza Suite’ and ‘California Suite’, which Glenn and I went to see while writing the song. We saw it as homework or research.”
Henley and Frey sitting in a theatre watching a bourgeois farce. Hardly the stuff of legends, but “you can check out anytime you like”.