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Sun 23 November 2025 20:35, UK
Before the Eagles had even started, Don Henley always had a vision for the group. Although they may have been able to sell out different shows whenever they played live, Henley knew it was all about the power of the songs, finding that perfect marriage of lyrics and melody to create magic in the studio. While Henley may have overseen the main ideas behind every Eagles project, he admitted that one of his contemporaries wasn’t a fan of one of their biggest bombs.
As the band first got their feet wet in the California rock scene, no one had to worry about their credentials. Bringing together the biggest fixtures of the country-rock scene, Henley and guitarist Glenn Frey would become the two co-captains of the group, constantly pushing each other to find more songs or to write their original material.
Although Henley would claim that his time as a songwriter began with the single ‘Witchy Woman’, Frey would be responsible for the lion’s share of the hits from this era, singing the Jack Tempchin-penned ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ and helping songwriter Jackson Browne finish off the lyrics to the song ‘Take It Easy’.
By the time they had turned in their road miles on their first tour, Henley had the idea of making a concept album centred around different gunslingers from history entitled Desperado. Since the band already had a country twang to many of their songs, it only made sense for them to adopt a country persona for the rest, with Henley and Frey collaborating on some of their first co-writes like ‘Tequila Sunrise’.
Around the time that the band had started looking at conceptual pieces, Steely Dan were also finishing up their first records. Being more at home in the studio than on the road, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would be responsible for pushing the boundaries for what could be done on tape, making songs that pushed the genre forward sonically and musically on The Royal Scam and Aja.
Although Fagen would claim to have a professional relationship with the Eagles, he did make a few tongue-in-cheek jabs at them in song. Despite throwing in lines about hating the group in a handful of Steely Dan songs, Henley remembered a conversation with Fagen when he slagged off Desperado.
When discussing that period of the band’s career, Henley remembers Fagen being candid about his distaste for the gunslinger personas that they wanted to be, recalling in The Very Best of the Eagles, “I guess we had that in mind, and so the theme turned decidedly Western. You know, mythical, majestic images of the great American Southwest… or as Donald Fagen later called it, ‘cowboy dream crap’ [laughs]. Anyway, it was a time of great openness and camaraderie”.
While the accompanying album would be one of the first major bombs for the Eagles, they continued to hone their craft on their subsequent efforts, culminating in the biggest album of their career on Hotel California, in which the title track refers to Steely Dan. Although ‘The Dan’ may taken a few cheap shots at the Eagles in the past, don’t expect them to heap praise on the country-and-western leanings of their musical contemporaries.
So why were these two bands talking about each other?
It was Steely Dan who made the first blow, referencing the Eagles directly on the song ‘Everything You Did’ from their 1976 record The Royal Scam. Whether “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbours are listening” is truly an insult or not is up to the listener’s interpretation, but the song itself is a pretty severe indictment about a less-than-loyal lover.
“Apparently, Walter Becker’s girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time,” Glenn Frey is quoted as saying in Gavin Edwards’ Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed. “I think it drove him nuts. So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day, and that was the genesis of the line.”
So the anger definitely isn’t directed towards the Eagles, but the association probably isn’t a celebratory one, either. In any case, there didn’t appear to be any ill will.
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