Credit: Far Out / Steve Alexander
Fri 15 May 2026 18:00, UK
There’s no doubt that Glenn Frey was practically born to lead Eagles.
Even though Don Henley was the one with the golden voice that could deliver anything that was thrown at him, Frey was his partner in crime every step of the way when it came to getting just the right turn of phrase or that one magical chord that tied a song up perfectly whenever they played. And to think that the whole thing started off, but Frey wanted to score some drugs right before he landed in the City of Angels.
Granted, are we all just going to sit here and claim that every single member of the Los Angeles scene was a clean-living, fun-loving musician back in the day? This was right after the days of the Grateful Dead talking about tuning in and dropping out, and while that might have certainly been enticing for Frey growing up in Detroit, he already had more than a few times where he was held back from chasing his dreams.
Getting Bob Seger on his team was certainly a plus, but there was a lot more going on in the background that his mother didn’t approve of. He was far too young to be living a life as a rock and roll star in her mind, and when he was found smoking pot with some of his bandmates right before going on tour with Seger, it only took her a few phone calls to call the whole thing off. So if he was making a name for himself, he would have to do so on his own.
But when he first landed in Los Angeles, his initial plan was to pick up some drugs by crossing the border, which didn’t exactly sit well with his parents, saying, “Well, the truth was that I was gonna buy drugs in Mexico and see a girlfriend who’d moved out here with her sister. My parents told me that if I was going to California, they weren’t gonna give me a goddamn dime. They would send me five or 10 bucks in every letter: ‘Buy yourself a nice breakfast and a pack of cigarettes.’”
The important part of the story is the person that his girlfriend’s sister was seeing: JD Souther. Here was someone who knew the LA scene like the back of his hand, and when listening to the handful of tunes that Frey had been kicking around, Souther was impressed enough to start a band with his new friend that they dubbed Longbranch/Pennywhistle. The whole thing wasn’t professional in the slightest, but after a few years making a name for himself as a rhythm guitarist, Frey got the attention of Linda Ronstadt’s band when he tried out.
And since Henley was a member of the group as well, it didn’t take them long to start wondering what they could sound like on their own. There were already a bunch of country-rock bands taking over the charts, and if Frey wanted to go down in rock history, he didn’t want to be known as a sideman who sang a handful of tunes on the side while Ronstadt dominated every single live performance.
Further reading: From The Vault
That said, that didn’t mean that the drugs ever stopped flowing when Eagles formed. They knew the standard they had set for themselves, and even though Henley was more than happy to be the responsible one in the band, a lot of the tours during the One of These Nights album cycle was often dominated by them getting as debaucherous as possible and seeing who could function after a few too many nights of hitting the bottle too hard.
Drugs may have been what fried them in the end after making The Long Run, but Frey wasn’t going to hide from his past. He knew what he had done, and he was going to do everything he could to focus on the music for the rest of his life after he realised that there was life after death on Hell Freezes Over.
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