Credit: Far Out / The Eagles / Neil Young
October 25th, 2026 · 6:15pm GMT
Glenn Frey never apologised for the work that he did with Don Henley in the Eagles.
He knew that there were so many people who didn’t want anything to do with their more straightforward country rock by any stretch, but there was so much more that he could do when he started focusing on getting the right songs than trying to be trendy. He wanted to be accepted as a songwriter before anything else, and it’s not like the public didn’t understand what he was going for whenever he made music.
Even though the Eagles were defunct for a good decade before their reunion, the rest of the world never forgot about them. Classic rock radio has kept its music alive for decades since that tragic night in Long Beach, and if you tune in to any of those soft rock stations today, you have a 50% chance of hearing Frey’s voice singing tunes like ‘Take It Easy’ or ‘Heartache Tonight’ at least once during your day.
But not going away was also one of the biggest problems. Some of their harshest critics tended to be their fellow musicians, and it didn’t take long before the next generation started to have their say as well. Frey already resented people like New York Dolls for making tunes that sounded a little too nasty, but when he began his solo career, he seemed to at least fit in with the neon colours of MTV.
He wasn’t going to learn dance steps or anything, but playing the sauce soundtrack wizard behind tunes like ‘The Heat is On’ was a decent costume for him to inhabit. Starring in Miami Vice probably didn’t hurt endearing him to the public, either, but after becoming the face of what a corporate rock and roll star was supposed to be, he was guaranteed to be in that massive percentage of musicians Neil Young wanted to take a few swipes at.
‘Uncle Neil’ had been more than happy to do away with the MTV generation, and even if he did need to play along after a while on albums like Landing on Water, ‘This Note’s For You’ brought him back to what he did best: poking fun at the corporate machine. He knew that the commercialisation of rock and roll was everything that he hated about the genre, but Frey was less than impressed listening to Young singling out people like him when he eventually started making Pepsi commercials.
Young may have been within his rights to yell at his colleagues, but Frey was willing to trade a few barbs back as well, saying, “If Neil Young doesn’t like me doing Pepsi commercials, I trade insults at 40 paces. When has integrity ever been synonymous with rock’n’roll? I don’t know what’s worse — releasing 17 albums that sound like demos and taking the public’s money for that or me taking a million dollars from Pepsi. Right, Neil? You haven’t made a decent record since Harvest, Neil… I just don’t think he should set himself up as rock’n’roll’s conscience.”
Further reading: From The Vault
That might be a fairly accurate cheap shot, but ‘This Note’s For You’ is actually a lot more accurate of where the next generation was going. This kind of attitude endeared Young to the next generation, and seeing how he had his second wind when grunge rockers co-opted him as one of their own, Young seemed to have a lot more cultural relevance than Frey, getting Eagles back together for a tour of their old classics.
So while Young can have more than a few records that don’t hit as well as they used to back in the days of Harvest, he also didn’t want to find himself playing the same songs like Frey was doing every night during the Hell Freezes Over. He was the consummate artist, and he was going to do everything he could to show people why he was one of the godfathers of the genre.
