Eagles
Take It Easy

The four musicians of the original Eagles came from different corners of the United States and met at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, immediately starting to play together, at first to accompany the young and promising singer Linda Ronstadt and then to continue on their own. In those early days and with plenty of free time, they sometimes loved to jump in the middle of the night onto the battered jeep of one of them, guitarist Bernie Leadon, to arrive at dawn near Palm Springs, at the foot of the San Jacinto range and a stone's throw from the Joshua Tree desert, and to observe the magnificent panorama while talking about the present and the future, rolling thick joints in peace and downing some beers.

On one of those occasions, they brought along a photographer, because they had to create the cover for their debut album… and so this must be one of the many, haphazard snapshots from that session: there they are on the cover of their first career single, hair blowing in the wind and looking high, staring at who knows what, sprawled among the rocks of that semi-Californian desert, full of talent and ambition but still unknown and broke.

And they were immediately very good at working together! However, they also had strange and fanciful ideas: the established producer Glyn Johns, entrusted with launching their discography, understood everything and pushed for ballads, for choruses full of harmonies, for acoustic guitars, for alternating lead vocals. They, on the other hand, saw themselves, and would always want to see themselves, as a pure and hard rock’n’roll band, but wrongly so: their great success came essentially thanks to the ballads… and then to make rock, you need, for example, an adequate drummer, and Don Henley, among his many merits, certainly never had this gift: precise and meticulous executor, but too rigid, zero swing, and even insufficient energy to achieve a minimum authentic rock groove.

“Take It Easy” is their first absolutely excellent song, placed as the lead-off track of the debut album and by far its best episode. The group leader Glen Frey composed it together with his neighbor Jackson Browne, who had come to live right above him in a public housing complex in Los Angeles. The handsome Browne had just broken up with Nico (the one from Velvet Underground) and, having moved from New York to the bustling City of Angels in the early seventies, had women problems (too many… seven, as revealed by the lyrics of the song in question).

His new neighbor and friend Frey dived headfirst into this situation and spontaneously added the image of himself stopped at a crossroads in a town in Arizona, seeing a stunner approaching at the wheel of a convertible Ford and deciding to waste no time picking her up. It was the verse (the third, and penultimate) that the song needed to make it less pensive and reflective, as per Jackson's typical style. The most striking result is that for several years now in Winslow, Arizona, a town without art or part like so many others on Route 66, passing one of its downtown intersections, you can admire a life-sized bronze statue of a guy watching the traffic, on the sidewalk and leaning against a lamppost!

To gauge the value, quality, and magic of the Eagles, one need only compare this recording with Jackson Browne’s version of the same song, which emerged a few months later, opening his second album “For Everyman”: music and lyrics are identical, the arrangement isn’t bad with that undulating steel guitar surrounding the baritone and intimate emission of the singer-songwriter, but the general delivery certainly makes one regret the brilliance and cheerfulness of the Eagles' sparkling performance.

The very dynamic and darting way of organizing the harmonies, with those sudden insertions in the middle of phrases (only the Easy at the end in the many repetitions of the title, for example), the excellence of at least three of the four vocal timbres (in order of importance: the dark baritenor of drummer Don Henley, the full and very clear tenor of bassist Randy Meissner, the dandyish baritone of guitarist Glenn Frey and the other sweeter and more restrained baritone of Bernie Leadon), the silvery interweaving of the chiming electric instruments with the clattering acoustics, Leadon’s excellent little country rock solo on his faithful Telecaster, clean and extremely singable… Everything conspires for the discreet, but far from epic, thematic content of the song to receive such a qualitative, choral, and fresh treatment that elevates it to a little 'Made in USA' anthem, also reinvigorating the meaning of the carefree yet joyous and pleasant lyrics, sunny and rolling.

P.S.: the B-side of the 45 “Get You In The Mood” is unreleased on album: a rock blues penned by Glenn Frey rendered "Californian style," that is, round and sly. It’s a decent track and nothing more, nonetheless superior to a couple of filler episodes in the first album.