The Eagles: Hell Is for Heroes
Here each of us is a king in a field of corpses.
– Elias Canetti, ‘Crowds and Power’
I know there must be something better But there’s nowhere else in sight
– Joe Walsh and Barry De Vorzon, “In the City”
Don Henley has the haunted blue eyes of a consumptive Romanian poet who has decided his manhood depends on assassinating Vlad the Impaler. Or maybe it’s just the haunted blue eyes of a Texas Calvinist who hasn’t quite assimilated the California good life – all that hellfire and brimstone he heard as a kid creeping back like stink from a dead rat under the floorboards to reek, “You don’t deserve this massage. The Eagles are about to play in front of 50,000 drunken teenagers in Milwaukee County Stadium for a ridiculous amount of money, therefore God wants you to be in pain from muscle cramps in your back. You are here to suffer.”
Stress, not original sin, however, is Henley’s earthly explanation for his malady as an accupressurist manipulates his spine – a nightly ritual so he can play the drums without wincing. “It’s the price you pay for being sensitive,” says Henley, prostrate and shirtless on a folding table. “You are, of course, going to get the humor in my voice as I said that.”
Glenn Frey pops in the door of the trailer and announces, “I just met two wives of the Milwaukee Brewers. One of them was perfect.”
“Do you wanna die?” asks Henley.
“No, they gave me an autographed baseball,” says Frey, turning it over and mock-reading an inscription: “‘Glenn, he’s out of town until the Yankee series . . . . “‘
A few feet away, Joe Walsh picks at a banquet table piled high with food. “I need some more meatballs,” he remarks to no one in particular. “Get some heartburn for the show. I eat everything twice.”
The mention of heartburn jars loose another dead rat under Henley’s floorboards, and he describes how Life in the Fast Lane ate a hole in his stomach. “I was actually rather proud of getting an ulcer before the age of thirty,” he says.
I tell him I had one before the age of fifteen, and he is quite impressed. We discuss the relative virtues of antacids and speculate about all the horrible things that eating chalk does to your body.
“Who are you guys? The Maalox survivors?” Frey explodes with laughter – no idle figure of speech in Frey’s case. Mere chortles of his have been known to kill water buffalo at 500 yards. “You call this rock & roll?”
Well, yeah I would call it rock & roll. Just don’t ask for a definition. I’ve stabbed it with my steely knives, but I just can’t kill the beast. Another metaphor will have to suffice. We resume our metaphor a half-hour later in the above-described summer tour of 1978.
Our motto is pay now, pay more later,” says Irving Azoff, head of the aptly-named Front Line Management, which handles the Eagles and several other status acts. “Figure out a fair price, add a third, and that’s what we get in our contracts.”
Just this side of dwarfism, Azoff surveys the bustling roadies onstage with the calm eyes of a guiltless man. I ask if the long-overdue Eagles album, late starting and now six months in the womb, is causing problems for their record company, Elektra/Asylum.
“We only hear from them about ten times a month,” he giggles. “When they project a $116 million year because Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles are going to release albums, and then come up $40 million short from not having an Eagles album, they hurt.”
Steve Miller, the opening act, takes the stage to a big ovation from the Milwaukee teenagers. Azoff, behind a stack of speakers, gives them the finger. “Look at that guy,” he spits, indicating Miller’s short hair and conservative dress. “He even looks like an accountant. Undoubtedly the cheapest man in rock & roll. You know he gets all his equipment into one truck?”
“If he’s so horrible,” I ask, “how come you hired him to open for you?”
“He’s the least of the worst,” says Azoff, still angry because Miller cut his set short the previous night. “Some other act, we’d get a hundred bikers in the front row.”
The Eagles take the stage at 9:45 and play two hours of their greatest hits (everything from “Take It Easy” to “Hotel California”), along with four Joe Walsh songs from his period with the James Gang and as a solo artist (“Walk Away,” “Turn to Stone,” “Life’s Been Good” and “Rocky Mountain Way”) and one tune by their new bassist, Timothy B. Schmit, from his days with Poco (“Keep on Tryin”‘).
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