It’s mid-1979, and the Eagles are ready to kill each other.

The band is trying to finish up their sixth studio album, but it seems like everything is going wrong. The album was intended to be a double album when recordings began in 1978, but no one in the band could write enough songs to make it happen. Instead, the group, featuring Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Don Felder and new member Timothy B. Schmit, are the midst of what will be an 18-month process to write and record 10 songs.

When you’ve been together nearly every day for almost 10 years, the relationship between members can get a little worn. There’s a lot of give and take with everyone involved, a lot like in a marriage. The biggest difference for the band is the need to keep five people happy instead of only two.

Some claim there are still hurt feelings between guitarist Don Felder and other members stemming from 1976’s Hotel California album. Felder lay claim to the vocals of “Victim of Love”, which features his opening riff and most of his writing. Although the band let Felder attempt his version of the song, it wasn’t working to the satisfaction of the other members. They asked manager Irving Azoff to take Felder to dinner and out of the studio, which allowed Don Henley to record the vocals that eventually went on the song.

Eventually, the band put aside the problems and finished The Long Run album for a September 24, 1979 release. A good bit of the reviews matched that of AllMusic critic William Ruhlmann, who said, “Amazingly, The Long Run reportedly was planned as a double album before being truncated to a single disc. If these were the keepers, what could the rejects have sounded like?” The negative feedback was certainly an unwelcomed find for the Eagles, but it paled in comparison to what was to come.

An incident dubbed “The Long Night at Wrong Beach” in July 1980 was the beginning of the end for the Eagles. Felder enraged guitarist and vocalist Glenn Frey when he made a sarcastic comment to the wife of California senator Alan Cranston, for whom the Eagles were playing a benefit for his reelection. Frey heard Felder, walked around the corner and chunked a beer bottle at the wall, providing a glimpse of what was to come.

The show that night featured Frey and Felder threatening each other between each song, as can be seen here. The Eagles soon broke up despite having a contractual obligation with Elektra Records to make a live album. The band somehow pieced together Eagles Live while not on speaking terms and living in different parts of the country. From that point until 1994’s reunion album Hell Freezes Over, the Eagles were done.

I want to focus on The Long Run, the last album before the breakup. Although the critics and writers turned their thumbs down at its tracks, it’s hard to see why 26 years later.

Found here: Dad’s collection
Format: LP Record
Price: N/A

Tracks

Side 1
The Long Run
I Can’t Tell You Why
In the City
The Disco Strangler
King of Hollywood

Side 2
Heartache Tonight
Those Shoes
Teenage Jail
The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks
The Sad Café

Best Song: “Heartache Tonight”. Don Henley was the de facto lead singer for the Eagles, but Glenn Frey showed his worth with his singing on this track. The song, which was written by Henley, Frey, Bob Seger and J.D. Souther, was the first track on the second side of the album. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 10, 1979 to give the Eagles its fifth and final chart-topping single.

The song’s opening is reminiscent of “Seven Bridges Road” in the way the voices blend together. “Heartache Tonight” proved to be a popular pick by other musicians and drew covers from Conway Twitty, John Anderson and Michael Bublé. With all due respect to those artists, none come close to the original version.

With other songs like “I Can’t Tell You Why”, “In the City”, and “The Long Run”, it’s hard to definitively say which song tops them all. It’s just incredibly hard to argue against this one.

Best Line: “After ‘while nothin’ was pretty/After ‘while everything got lost/Still, his Jacuzzi runneth over/Still he just couldn’t get off.”

This line comes from the final verse of “King of Hollywood”. The song talks about the way Hollywood chews up and spits out actresses.

What makes this song so entertaining is it doesn’t establish the message by word play or indirectly pointing things out; it flat-out says it through lines like, “Come sit down here beside me, honey/Let’s have a little heart to heart/Now look at me and tell me, darlin’/How badly do you want this part?”

It’s a middle finger to the kings of Hollywood who could make and break careers at their own discretion. This track reminds me a little of Queen’s “Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)” in the regard it voices the frustration of a system that undervalues the stars. While the Queen song is sang from direct experience, the Eagles’ track more or less shines a light on something fans may not have known about.

Look It Up: “Those Shoes”. From the opening drum and guitar on, this song is so much fun to listen to. The track is about a young woman at a bar who is being hit on by several men. It captures the common mindset of women and men in bars: “You just want someone to talk to/They just want to get their hands on you.”

“Those Shoes” features everything that makes the Eagles one of my favorite bands: it has Don Henley singing, a loud drum beat, a talk box guitar and a Joe Walsh solo. Can you really ask for more?

If you’re a Beastie Boys fan, you may recognize the opening I mentioned; it was sampled in the song “High Plains Drifter”.

Rating: 9.5/10. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around why this album was not well received, and I really have nothing more than a theory. A lot of the Eagles early work bordered on country, like “Desperado”, “Take it Easy” and “Lyin’ Eyes”. It’s hard to place any of the songs from this album in the country genre, outside maybe “The Long Run”. Instead, the Eagles’ last album displays how much rock the band could create.

An album like “The Long Run” is why song downloads are so dangerous for a listener’s enjoyment. “The Long Run” had three singles: “Heartache Tonight”, “The Long Run”, and “I Can’t Tell You Why”. Although those three songs are great, there are seven other songs worth listening to. Today, if you know the one or two songs you like, you buy those and leave the rest behind. It’s not like when LPs, 8-tracks or cassettes were the go-to for music because you still had the chance to listen and decide if some of the less-heralded tracks were worth your time.

Hotel California was the Eagles most popular work, but it doesn’t have the same value to me. Task me with listening to only one album of any artist for one week, and I will pick “The Long Run” every time.