R.I.P. Glenn Frey

Dadgum, man.  I know that people talk about the start of a new year being a time for people to die, as those who have been hanging on to make it one more year let go (or whatever). But this last month has been brutal.  Scott Weiland.  David Bowie.  Natalie Cole.  Lemmy. Some dude that was married to Celine Dion.  Hans Gruber/Professor Snape.  And now add Glenn Frey to the list.  This sucks.

The Eagles are a funny band to love, in that I felt like they were pretty universally loved when I was a kid.  I definitely owned the two greatest hits discs and wore those suckers out. I don't recall anyone disliking them back in the day, but I still jammed them even up into high school.  Then I blame the Big Lebowski for a sharp decline in the universal love.  Every hip kid who memorized all of the lines from that flick kept quoting the words that got The Dude ejected from that taxi.

Funny scene.  But screw that.  If you really go dig back into their music, they have some freaking great tunes.  My favorite is easy.  "Seven Bridges Road" is the good stuff.  My cooler-than-he-should-have-been church choir director in high school put me in as part of a a capella quartet that sang that tune and I haven't been able to shake it since.  

Freaking gorgeous.  You can trace a bunch of my pleasure center tunes from that exact track - Fleet Foxes, Nickel Creek, pretty much anything acoustic and with tight harmonies. That song is fantastic.

I fully get that some of the Eagles' songs aren't something I want to go back to (looking at you, "Sad Cafe" and "The Best of My Love"), but their combination of rock and country back in the day was mostly kick ass.  So long as they stayed away from seventies schmaltz, then they could jam.  I still love "Take It Easy" and its great storytelling, "Desperado," (which I used as my audition song for Little Shop of Horrors in college.  Try to unpack that one for me) or "Peaceful Easy Feeling."  And the rest of the world agreed - Wikipedia says "They are the fifth-highest-selling music act and the highest-selling American band in U.S. history."

So, I know that everyone is following up their Bowie sadness with a mild and tempered dose of being bummed about Glenn Frey, but I choose this moment to declare my support for the Eagles.  Screw you, The Dude. R.I.P. "Smuggler's Blues."