“You have three chances to guess the musician,” my dad called out from behind our car’s steering wheel. This was our special game. We were driving through the canyons of Los Angeles in the summer, the car’s black leather burning my back, the sun making my shoulders more freckled than they would’ve been had I not grown up there. All I had to do was listen. Captivated by the easy sound, I stared out the window as the palm trees of exaggerated fantasy passed in the periphery, but it wasn’t long before I ran out of guesses. Soon thereafter, it was revealed to me that the song was “Take It Easy” by the Eagles. Glenn Frey was lead singer. Later, my dad took a detour, stopping to point out a studio apartment where Frey and Jackson Browne, his collaborator and songwriter, lived when they first moved to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s before rising to fame.
Los Angeles has long been hailed as a land of sunlit grandeur and disillusioned fantasies for creative forces hoping to catch their break. But for Frey, the founding member of the Eagles who died on Jan. 18, his dreams became a reality that he fully embraced within his catalogue. If the Beach Boys pioneered the distinctive sound of California in the ‘60s with “California Girls” and “Surfin’ USA,” it was clear that by the mid-1970s, the musical baton of Southern California songs had been passed to the Eagles — and Frey was the visionary.
Hotel California, the Eagles’ most famous album/title track and greatest commercial victory, has an album cover that illustrates this 1970s California fantasy — silhouettes of palm trees are pitted against a golden glow, and a tequila sunrise invites listeners to embrace the easy life of L.A. where energy is manifested through the “warm smell of colitas” and “pink champagne on ice.” Since its release, “Hotel California” has had unrelenting success among not only Californians, but also people who wish they were Californians. Whether the song is played on the radio, used as background noise at birthday parties and kickbacks or learned by kids picking up a guitar for the first time, it’s clearly inescapable and timeless.
With hit singles including “New Kid in Town,” “Lyin’ Eyes” and “Life in the Fast Lane,” the country-rock sound of the Eagles’ has long been pigeonholed to embody the hunky-dory narrative of what it means to be young and cool in California.But to solely remember Frey in terms of sun-kissed fantasy would be belittling to his talent as a musician, as well as his complexity as a human being. When the Eagles broke up in the 1980s, Frey still dedicated himself to the craft by charting a solo career with songs such as “The One You Love,” “The Heat is On” and “You Belong in the City.” Although his solo albums never reached the same heights and popularity, they offer a glimpse into who Frey was as a person. In 1988, at the age of 40, he released Soul Searchin’, an album that, while musically rudimentary, explores complexthemes of alienation and unrequited lovewith lyrics that serve as a potent reminder of the relationship between fame and universality. In “Can’t Put Out This Fire” he sings, “People leave, but love still hangs around/Memories refuse to go away/They follow you and haunt you night and day.”
Beneath the aura of the Eagles, Frey had to wrestle with the very things that make us most human: heartbreak, memories and existential crises. This is a large testament to Glenn Frey’s ability to pioneer songs that endure.
Growing up now, the culture of the 1970s and the music scene that echoed it seem impregnable, like an idyllic dream that blanketed everyone in golden hues, a past that we can never repeat. But for those fully immersed in it, the death of Frey seems to be emblematic of a larger picture — one that I may not fully understand first-hand but can appreciate second handedly from the backseat. As the sun set over the Los Angeles skyline, Frey’s voice brought comfort to the car: “Take it easy. Don’t let the sound of your own wheels make you crazy.”
And so we drove on.
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