Credit: Far Out / Steve Alexander
November 1st, 2026 · 9:30pm GMT
Glenn Frey seemed to have a sneaky suspicion that he was going to be one of the biggest stars in the world before he even made it out of Detroit.
Some of his favourite artists were already showing him the ropes, and by the time that he made it out to Los Angeles, it was like he had finally found his people after spending so much time in the Motor City. He was where he belonged, but it was going to take the right people to help turn him from a fairly decent songwriter into someone worth going back to time and time again.
Because as much as Frey wanted to have a spotlight on him, he was never going to get there on his own. Even when he came face-to-face with people like David Geffen, he was still told that he probably couldn’t handle a solo band on his own, but when you look at the kind of people he surrounded himself with, it wasn’t bad picking to go with Linda Ronstadt and meeting Don Henley along the way.
Even when he and Henley broke off to form Eagles, there were already a lot of friends in their world who were willing to give them a shot. Glyn Johns was ready to record them based on their harmonies alone, and when you look at those early records, getting the chance to work with people like Jackson Browne and JD Souther on their early hits was them getting a firsthand education of what the music business was like.
Browne had already given Frey a secondhand lesson on how to write songs after Frey overheard him playing some of his tunes, but Souther was really his other half in the early days. They were already two halves of the same whole in their duo band Longbranch/Pennywhistle, but at that point, the Eagles were a distant vision. They were only looking to make a couple of decent tunes, but if it weren’t for Frey’s nefarious habits, he probably wouldn’t have run into Souther at all.
You see, Frey always had it in his head that he was going to spend some time in Los Angeles, but after meeting Souther at his girlfriend’s house, he had a quick change of plans. He knew that he had great songs, and despite going out there to buy drugs from Mexico, Frey ended up getting more than he bargained for when he started hearing the kind of material that Souther had been working on.
So many people had tried to make inroads into songwriting before, but the quality of the tunes is what made Frey stick around, saying, “The truth was that I was gonna buy drugs in Mexico and see a girlfriend who’d moved out here with her sister. My parents told me that if I was going to California, they weren’t gonna give me a goddamn dime.
Further reading: From The Vault
Adding, “The first day I got to LA, I saw David Crosby sitting on the steps of the Country Store in Laurel Canyon, wearing the same hat and green leather bat cape he had on for Turn! Turn! Turn! I immediately met JD Souther, and we really hit it off. It was definitely me and him against whatever else was going on.”
And while the band didn’t really go anywhere, it did at least give Frey incentive to go back to Souther every now and again. His name graces many Eagles songwriting credits, and if the band hadn’t kept that great relationship with Souther, they probably wouldn’t have had the same kind of comeback that they had in the 2000s without using the song ‘How Long’ to help establish their sound again.
They always saw Souther as an honorary member of the band, but even though he was content being on his own, it’s not like they ever forgot about him. Because, for all of the drug culture that was going on in California at the time, having that kind of connection with someone could stay with you much longer than any drug high ever could.
