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Summary
Summary
The Eagles came together in Los Angeles in 1972, a time when everyone was hungry for a different kind of music. With hits like Lyin' Eyes and Peaceful Easy Feeling the Eagles created some of the most popular music of the time - just as they were setting new standards for decadence, egomania, drug use and intra band strife. Drawing on interviews with people including band members, their friends, ex-wives and ex-lovers, handlers, roadies and hangers-on, Marc Eliot reveals what life was really like inside this hugely popular but deeply troubled group. The book follows The Eagles from their early, idealistic days as Linda Ronstadt's backup band to their self immolation amid multi-million dollar law suits, Lear jet courtships and debilitating cocaine habits - with a coda on their Hell Freezes Over tour, the comeback that made them the top grossing live act of 1995 and 1996. This is the story about a band that embodied the excesses of the 1970s and provided, in Hotel California, a song for the decade's soundtrack.
Author Notes
Marc Eliot is a New York Times bestselling author and American biographer. He has written over a dozen books on the media and popular culture including the biographies of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Walt Disney and Bruce Springsteen, and Clint Eastwood. His writing has also appeared in several publications including L.A. Weekly and California Magazine.
Eliot lives in New York and Los Angeles.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Veteran rock writer Eliot (Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen) refuses to take it easy on the most commercially successful supergroup of the 1970s in this unauthorized, warts-and-all biography. As dons of the so-called Avocado Mafia, a loose association of singers and songwriters who first came together in Southern California in the late 1960s, the Eagles are, for Eliot, representative figures in a fascinating pop-culture drama. In tough, sometimes lyrical prose, Eliot shows how Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon and Randy MeisnerÄthe original members of the groupÄbecame the top-selling and most influential rock band of the Me Decade by combining laid-back attitude with self-consciously eclectic musicianship. Nor did it hurt the group's quest for fame, Eliot makes clear, to have brilliant business and PR men such as David Geffen and Irving Azoff on the side of the Eagles from the beginning. Eliot's a savvy enough storyteller not to let in-depth analysis of the aural and business dimensions of the Eagles' saga get in the way of good dish: the book brims with anecdotes about the band's now-legendary hotel-room demolition sessions, prodigious substance abuse and tireless womanizing. Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and David Crosby join more incongruous notables such as James Cagney, Kenny Rogers and Ronald Reagan's politically contrary daughter, Patti Davis, to make Eliot's account even more engaging. If the writing's purple at times, it's only because the band members' colorful excesses demand such treatment. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A comprehensive, sternly opinionated chronicle of the band that embodied with fabulous commercial success the sensibility of Los Angeles in the 1970s. Eliot (Walt Disney, 1993, etc.) interviewed ex-Eagles as well as many friends and business associates, and with resigned distaste these sources attest to the pile-up of personal conflicts, pharmaceutical excess, and cutthroat business shenanigans that gradually took shape beneath the bands lilting parade of hits until, on their 1976 concept album, Hotel California, they nakedly trumpeted their bitter, burnt-out, coked-up disillusionment itself as their aesthetic driving force. The four original Eagles converged on L.A. from the Midwest and Texas in the late 60s, struggling until they came together to back up Linda Ronstadt. Eliot gives a sharp overview of how the Eagles, Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne struck gold via Asylum Records founder David Geffen. The Eagles were, Eliot contends, as much a business proposition by Geffen as a musical venture. Singer/drummer Don Henley concurs: Money was a much saner goal than adoration . . . [I]f Im gonna blow my brains out for five years, I want something to show for it. Geffen, scary mogul Irving Azoff, and Henley all provide alarming insights here into how the music business operates. The band roster changed several times, but the members became progressively more populartheir greatest-hits collection is one of the two top-selling albums of all timeuntil melodramatic squabbles among all the members, but especially between Henley and co-leader Glenn Frey, dissolved the band in 1980. While Eliots a fan, his judgments on individual songs and events are often acerbic. With the Eagles now middle-aged and detoxed, their recent reunion tour, he writes, was like watching a nineties production of Beatlemania performed by the Beatles themselves. If you can take the pervasive atmosphere of cynical, calculating hedonismthat is, if youre an Eagles fanyou couldnt ask for a truer portrait. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Booklist Review
MOR rockers the Eagles have had well-publicized leadership battles, romantic entanglements, and legal problems during a hugely successful career. Purveying every player's perspective, Eliot lays out all the complications, rehashing such things as the internal battles that pitted Don Henley against Glenn Frey (until Frey retreated in a cocaine haze) and the contretemps between Henley and Joe Walsh. It is nice to have all the recriminations recorded in one place--for research purposes, y'know. And it is also nice to note how the likes of peripatetic management suit Irving Azoff, skyrocketing deal maker David Geffen, and many another glitzy denizen of the 1970s pop music fun house meddled with the band. As important for chronicling how the pop music world changed from the hollowly idealistic 1960s to the openly crass 1980s as for chronicling one of the commercially biggest pop bands ever, the book is, however, a work of nostalgia more than of insight into a vital creative force in popular music. --Mike Tribby
Library Journal Review
Considering Eliot's previous controversial biographies, including Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince (LJ 5/1/93) and Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen (LJ 8/92), it's not surprising that ex-Eagle Don Henley tried to halt publication of this well-researched study of America's biggest band of the 1970s. The artist and the author eventually reached a truce, with the reticent Henley sitting for interviews, and this may explain why some unsavory details (such as Henley's 1980 drug bust) are lightly glossed over. Eliot gives little insight into what made the band tick, but he does provide an excellent contextualization of the early 1970s L.A. rock scene, and he offers fascinating character studies of Eagle compadres Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and J.D. Souther, as well as music biz barons David Geffen and Irving Azoff. The generous appendix includes extensive notes and a detailed discography. Recommended for popular music collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/98.]ÄLloyd Jansen, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
