(Credits: Far Out / Greenwich Entertainment)
Wed 10 December 2025 18:30, UK
There have been endless ink and pixels spilt over the dissolution of the Eagles that there’s no real point rehashing it here.
Suffice to say that the band didn’t have the highest opinion of each other by the time they called it a day back in the early 1980s, and it wasn’t a mistake that their official comeback was entitled Hell Freezes Over. It truly felt like they needed a small miracle to get all of them back together onstage, but even when they tried it off and on on various occasions, Glenn Frey was the first one to say that he wasn’t exactly itching to cash a paycheck when he got back together.
But the reality is that not many people had time to forget about Eagles, either. Around the time that they broke up, the format of classic rock radio slowly started to take over stations, which meant that people still got to listen to tunes like ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Desperado’ despite the band being gone. Even if they had themselves to compete with on the charts, though, Frey was more than happy to do whatever he felt like during his solo career.
His debut solo album, No Fun Aloud, pissed Don Henley off enough to hit the ground running with his own solo material, but even if they got a few songs out of their system, that wasn’t enough. Technical whiz Steve Wozniak was already willing to pay the band an unthinkable amount of money to reform for the famous US Festival, but the minute that they turned it down and Henley started having hits like ‘The Boys of Summer’, it was clear that everyone had slowly begun moving on from it.
Frey simply had more fun working on his own, and when listening to some of his later material, it didn’t exactly fit in with Eagles’ style anyway. An album like The Allnighter did have some decent tunes on it, but whereas a song like ‘Smuggler’s Blues’ may have potentially fit on an album like The Long Run, his interest in genres like soul music was never going to satisfy those who wanted to hear the classics from them whenever they played.
By the time the 1980s ended, things at least looked promising. Henley had taken his solo career as far as he wanted, and Frey didn’t have the same kind of fire that he had in the beginning of his career, so maybe it was time to get the band back together. But whereas Hell Freezes Over worked like a charm, the initial attempt in 1992 only reminded Frey of the awful times that they had together.
Even though he and Henley had been the co-captains of the group throughout their career, he felt that Timothy B Schmit was the only reason for him to even entertain the idea, saying, “I looked into it but it just wasn’t going to be any fun. I don’t want to get into personalities, but they’re not fun guys. With the exemption of Timothy Schmit, who’s a sweetheart, the rest of them, I just don’t think they’re fun guys.”
In all fairness, Schmit was one of the most easygoing members of the group when he joined, and getting back together would have pulled him out of playing with Warren Zevon and Jimmy Buffett, but Frey needed more than one person. It still felt negative at that point, and it was about time that people reminded him about how good the good times were when he first started making music with them.
So when Henley got Travis Tritt to record a music video for ‘Take It Easy’ with all the members, Frey finally got the drive that he needed to bring the band back together. There was no way they were going to go on tour without him, but even if Henley and Don Felder may have taken some getting used to, Schmit was always going to fit like a glove no matter what song he was playing.
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