Credits: Sports and Music Photographer via Flickr
Thu 23 April 2026 2:00, UK
Don Henley didn’t want to settle for being in another decent rock and roll band when the Eagles started.
He wanted the chance to take their brand of rock and roll to the top of the charts and stay there for the rest of their lives, and since Eagles’ greatest hits records are still selling in droves, it’s not like he and Glenn Frey didn’t achieve everything they set out to do back in the day. They had become one of the biggest bands in the world, but that didn’t mean they got respected in the same way that their contemporaries did.
I mean, for one thing, the band’s songs weren’t exactly competing with the hard rockers of the world. Bands like Led Zeppelin were being treated like outlaws of rock and roll history, and even though they weren’t the greatest hit with the critics, either, most of the rock and roll faithful would have gladly taken the riffs of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ over having to deal with a bunch of country rockers working their way through ‘Desperado’.
But what Henley was doing was a lot closer to heartland rock years before that genre even had a name. His slice-of-life stories and tales of American folklore were emerging just around the same time that people like Tom Petty were coming on the scene, but it looked like every single music snob was convinced that the future of rock and roll lay in people like Bruce Springsteen instead of the California rockers.
And it’s not like they didn’t have a good reason to think that, either. ‘The Boss’ was quickly becoming one of the biggest names in the world thanks to Born to Run, and while it took him years to break out of the ‘new Bob Dylan’ mould, you could tell that he was in it for all the right reasons. He was telling stories of people that his audience seemed to know personally, but compared to Eagles, Henley felt that what he was doing was a lot more rootsy than what his Jersey counterpart was doing.
Henley knew he and Frey had a good thing going, and he wasn’t going to admit that ‘The Boss’ was better than them, saying, “People talk about Jackson [Browne’s] lyrics, but they don’t seem to talk about ours. It’s not that they don’t look at us as good songwriters, but they just seem to emphasise the ones that were hits rather than the ones that weren’t. I think our songs have more to do with the streets than Bruce Springsteen’s.”
Granted, it’s not like Henley doesn’t have a small point. A lot of the hatred or indifference towards Eagles usually came from their biggest hits, but even when they were at the height of their fame, those songs didn’t tell the full story. ‘The Last Resort’ is one of the finest lyrics that Henley ever wrote at the tail end of Hotel California, and when he ventured into his solo career, he was still concerned with making songs about the everyman, even going so far as to venture into Springsteen’s territory on ‘New York Minute’.
And it’s not like Frey couldn’t get a few jabs in when he wanted to, either. There was never any concrete feud between Eagles and Springsteen, but considering how much buzz ‘The Boss’ was getting around that time, Frey couldn’t see why Bob Seger wasn’t doing just as well on the charts as Springsteen was, with Frey saying that he had a lot more to do with what everyday Americans were going through.
It’s really up to the fans to decide whether or not Henley is right about being better than Springsteen, but it was never about any sense of competition. Every songwriter wants to make the best tunes that they can, and it’s up to them to work their way into fans’ hearts by telling the stories that they grew up living.
