(Credits: Far Out / Greenwich Entertainment)
Fri 12 December 2025 11:46, UK
Throughout the 1970s, the Eagles were on an upward trajectory no one else could match. Though the rest of the rock scene was about making progressive rock or indulging in their heavy fantasies with metal music, Don Henley and Glenn Frey were content to make breezy music to take their audience away from all the problems in their lives. Although the crowning achievement remains their groundbreaking album Hotel California, Frey sees the band’s best work a bit differently.
When the group were starting work on their debut, they were still relatively wet behind the ears. Using the team of David Geffen at Asylum and superproducer Glyn Johns behind the board, Eagles scored their first notable hits around this time with tracks like ‘Take it Easy’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’. While an excellent start, there was still a lot of work to do.
Though Frey spoke highly of the band’s conceptual second record, Desperado, time was not as kind to the album. Upon release, it became an underwhelming flop, with no one getting the power behind songs like the title track until artists like Linda Ronstadt covered songs from the album years after the fact.
As the band moved into the next few years, acquiring Don Felder for On the Border gave them some chops. Nicknamed ‘Fingers’, Felder could play nearly anything the band threw at him, whether it was shredding over a hard rock song or making a section cry like the lead guitar stabs in ‘Best of My Love’. As the band entered their next phase, though, they struck gold greater than anyone imagined on One of These Nights.
Having been absorbed in the Hollywood scene, half of the album indulged in the darker side of Hollywood more than ever before. From Randy Meisner’s cautionary warning on ‘Too Many Hands’ to the warning in the title track, the band were reminding their audience of the dark side that comes with taking up the life of a musician.
The Eagles and their wagon wheels. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
There were even a handful of songs comprised of lessons the band had learned from years in the game, such as the women who come to the bars for the evening on ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ and the robots who plod away through Tinseltown on ‘The Hollywood Waltz’. Though there had been much to unpack, Frey thought the band had found their calling.
When discussing the album retrospectively, Frey saw the title track as a turning point in the group’s career, recalling in Life in the Fast Lane, “We made a quantum leap with ‘One of These Nights’. It was a breakthrough song. It is my favourite Eagles record. If I had to pick one, it wouldn’t be ‘Hotel California’; It would be ‘One of These Nights’”.
Back in 1975, Frey explained the origin of the song: “It’s like, puttin’ things off… Everybody I’m sure has said, ‘One of these nights I’m gonna…’ Gonna drive back to that restaurant an’ take that waitress in my arms, whatever. Find that girl, make that money, buy that house. Move to that country. Any of that stuff. Everyone’s got his ultimate dream, savin’ it for ‘someday.’ And ‘someday’ is up to you.”
It also represented a time when Fre and Henley really connected as songwriters collaborating. “I’d go over to the piano and say, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ Frey told Tavis Smiley. “I’d play something, and he’d go, ‘Yeah, I like that, I like that.’ Maybe just get up and start singing. That’s the way we wrote ‘One of These Nights.’ I just went over to the piano and I started playing this little minor descending progression, and he comes over and goes, (singing) ‘One of these nights.’ I go, yeah, yeah.”
Although the record was painless at the time, it would not be one the band would survive entirely. Following creative disagreements and begrudgingly going through ‘I Wish You Peace’, Bernie Leadon was sent packing in favour of Joe Walsh for Hotel California. Any one of the Eagles had the potential for bigger dreams, but this was the sound of them starting to spread their wings.
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