Credit: Far Out / Universal Music Archive / Showtime / The Eagles
November 3rd, 2026 · 9:00pm GMT
In May 1976, the Eagles listened to Steely Dan’s new record, taken aback by the direct dig at the group. Luckily for them, they were in the perfect position to strike back.
The 1970s were an extravagantly successful decade for both the Eagles and Steely Dan, two bands that sat at the top of the charts many times in their formative years, and were both set on opposite coasts of the US: West and East.
In many ways, the two groups couldn’t help but establish a sort of rivalry between them, with their musical influences being similar, yet providing different aesthetics of the rock genre, with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s East Coast group leaning more into their jazz influences, while Glenn Frey and his fellow bandmates delved into the more commercial side of modern rock music.
Fagen and Becker were not fans of the latter’s musical direction, with Becker becoming so annoyed at his girlfriend’s infatuation with the Eagles that he couldn’t help but write a direct dig at the group in one of the songs from their newest record at the time, The Royal Scam. After a heated argument with his partner, Fagen produced the line: “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbours are listening”.
Frey confirmed the story, saying that Becker’s girlfriend’s constant playing of Eagles records was “driving him nuts”.
And so there sat the Eagles, in Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles, listening to Fagen and Becker’s record for the first time, utterly bemused when they heard the lyrics. A perfect place to write a direct reply. But this would become so much bigger than a dig back, as the album they recorded became the best-selling rock record of all time, with the title track ‘Hotel California’ being the golden star of those recording sessions.
“Stab it with their steely knives,” goes a part of the song, Frey explaining: “We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, so ‘Dan’ got changed to ‘knives’, which is still, you know, a penile metaphor.”
Further reading: From The Vault
The record won two Grammy Awards in the year of its release, taking both ‘Record of the Year’ for the title track and ‘Best Arrangement for Voices’ for the track ‘New Kid In Town’, as well as topping the charts for eight weeks, becoming certified platinum within a week.
Though Steely Dan never responded again within their music, they subsequently produced what is considered their greatest album by many, Aja, which became the group’s most commercially successful release and won a Grammy for ‘Best Engineered Recording’ in 1978.
Aja is widely cited as one of the most important releases in the development of the yacht rock genre, tying blues and soul music to jazz, funk, and R&B in a smooth sailing manner. However, its subtle complexity pretty much defies classification.
While the two bands paved two separate ways of building a repertoire of high-quality rock music, both have equally left a lasting legacy in modern music, with their influence felt all the way, throughout the 1980s up to today.
