So I just finished reading Marc Eliot's book To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles. Which, I guess, is no longer untold, right? Anyhoo, I’ve been meaning to write up some thoughts on the Eagles, but that’s gonna take me a while—at least in part because I need to acquire some actual Eagles albums so I have some idea of what I’m talking about which, yes, will be rather novel for me—so in the meantime, I found this tidbit and wanted to pass it along.
Apparently, the two main songwriters for the Eagles, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, were/are both extremely competitive.
So when some brash young upstart from the east came to their home base of L.A. in 1975 and absolutely blew everyone's minds with a series of phenomenal shows at one of L.A.'s most famous theatres, the Roxy, it really got the two of them going, and the result was far and away their best album, Hotel California, whose second track was, of course, "New Kid in Town."
That brash young upstart from the east who'd dethroned the Eagles as the best and biggest in American rock and roll? The new kid in town was, of course, none other than Bruce Springsteen, promoting his new album, Born to Run.
Interestingly, a few years later, inspired by a brilliant Springsteen performance in London on that same tour, Peter Gabriel would not only quit his band Genesis in order to go solo, he would also sing euphemistically of Springsteen in the magnificent "Solsbury Hill;" in a humorous twist, he refers to Bruce as an eagle.
Here endeth the lesson. For today.
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