The Eagles are the worst band ever, I said to my sister on the phone. I’m writing a column about it for the Sunday before they play Greensboro.
“I just got tickets to the Eagles concert in Richmond,” she replied. I should have hung up then.
You want controversy? Forget the Dixie Chicks, who sold out the Coliseum last night despite the carefully-stoked furor over Natalie Maines’ anti-war comments. Mom was right: don’t argue with your sister.
We quickly agreed on the rules of engagement, stipulating that there can be worse bands than the worst band ever. The Eagles are better than, say, those geographic ‘70s bands like Boston and Kansas that they play on my favorite oldies station, Schlock 92. People have to take you seriously, or you can’t contend for the title. If the Eagles were playing the State Fair instead of filling the Greensboro Coliseum at exorbitant prices, they wouldn’t be the worst band ever.
Sarah’s first defense was a strong offense. “How can someone who put speakers in the bathroom to listen to Led Zeppelin in the shower make that kind of judgment?,” she asked.
I was ready for that one. Led Zeppelin is dumb, but it’s gloriously dumb, and dumb is OK when it comes to rock and roll. Smart can be good, too, even when it plays dumb, like the Rolling Stones. But dumb playing smart doesn’t work, and that’s part of what makes the Eagles the worst band ever.
Take the song “Hotel California,” currently number two behind “Stairway to Heaven” on Hell’s Top Forty. Take that whole record. People talk about “Hotel California” as deep-thinking social commentary, when it’s really a chronicle of jerks with bad haircuts doing too much cocaine.
When the Eagles aren’t straining for depth, their lyrics are just abysmal. You can find full moons, hot fevers, and wicked winds in a single line of “One of These Nights.” Don’t even get me started on “Witchy Woman.” Even the nasty little twist in the last verse of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” can’t save much of their catalog from the Lite FM Hall of Bad Poetry.
Their music, meanwhile, is an unfulfilled promise. Early in their career, the Eagles took something good -- country rock -- and sucked the life out of it, coated it in plastic and pinned it to the studio wall like a dead butterfly. Things got worse as they got more famous. At least Hotel California was ambitious; by The Long Run, they weren’t even trying anymore.
Then there are personnel issues. Don Henley makes me want to put a shopping mall on Walden Pond. The Eagles should be scorned merely for spawning Glenn Frey’s solo career and Glenn Frey’s acting career. Joe Walsh is a mitigating factor, but they never let him do much.
My sister took it all in. She promised to call me back after the show in Richmond. And when she did, she was happy and confident. The concert had been great. “I was with a bunch of other old people trying to act like teenagers,” she said. “But we all knew it and we didn’t care.”
Then she went for the kill. “When I was fourteen I heard “James Dean” on the jukebox at the pool,” she said. “I started listening to the Eagles. It wasn’t like the crap kids listened to. I liked the country rock flavor. I thought, this is cool and fun. I don’t know that I really listened to the words that much. I don’t think I pretended it was deep and meaningful, it just made me feel good.”
I was in trouble. Suddenly I could see my sister at fourteen, and picture the white wall by the pool, and remember those first tastes of freedom and all the good and bad things that flowed from them and took us eventually to the carpool line in Richmond and an office in downtown Greensboro with our youth far behind us. It was a Proustian moment, and the mediocre soundtrack was not an issue.
Sarah was dancing and I was a humbug, or worse, a rock critic. The joke was on me. Recognizing the palpable stupidity of “James Dean” and the mediocrity of the band that won’t die couldn’t save me now. Why wouldn’t she pay a small fortune to let a bunch of superannuated millionaires transport her to the past?
“By the way,” Sarah added, “Joe Walsh rocked.”
