Chapter Nine—The Long Run

The blazing mid-afternoon sun burned through the haze over the New Jersey marshland just a few miles across the Hudson River from New York City. It was especially hot for June 15, the first day of really baking summer heat this season, but the tens of thousands of rock fans who were lazily wending their way toward Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands Sports complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey on this Sunday afternoon were oblivious to the heat. In fact, most of these concert-goers were veterans of the New Jersey beach party scene and dressed for the occasion in cut-off jeans, sandals and t-shirts or halter tops. Cars with four to six people pulled up in the parking lot and the jovial, suntanned occupants would pull their coolers out from the trunk and have a few beers before heading inside the stadium.

The capacity crowd was on hand for Music at the Meadowlands #1, a day-long triple bill headed off by the Eagles and also featuring Heart and the Little River Band. It was the first New York City area appearance for the Eagles since the release in late 1979 of their seventh album, The Long Run, and the band’s legions of fans responded so excitedly that the concert was the most eagerly awaited rock show so far that year.

WNEW-FM, the New York area’s leading rock radio station, had been building up the event for days as they played Eagles songs repeatedly and arranged for on-the-spot coverage from the Meadowlands on the day of the show. For several hours before the concert the station gave traffic reports to concert goers; during the early afternoon as the crowd began filling in the huge bowl shaped stadium, the station interviewed promoter John Scher. The disc jockey called Scher the man responsible for bringing all those people out to the show and Scher immediately corrected him, saying it was the Eagles who were responsible. The weather service had begun to warn of a major thunderstorm for the evening, just about the time the Eagles were due on stage, and someone joked that the rain wouldn’t dare to interfere with Irving Azoff’s biggest New York area exposure for the group. Scher was extremely happy with the progress of the event, however—at ten bucks a ticket, the 100,000 strong audience was generating a million dollar gate for a single show. He joked about how the fans on the floor of the stadium seemed to like what he called "our artificial beach."

Scher had a long history of promoting good Eagles concerts, which is probably one reason why Azoff chose to showcase the group at Giants Stadium instead of the more prestigious Madison Square Garden. Years before Scher had the Eagles warm up for Linda Ronstadt at his comfortable Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, which was an exceptionally fine show, then later he promoted an open air Eagles concert similar to this one at the Meadowlands at Jersey City’s large but uncomfortable and difficult Roosevelt Stadium.

This time Scher had taken every precaution to insure that the crowd enjoyed the show in maximum comfort. He devised an ingenious ticketing system to prevent the unreserved seating procedure on the field level from becoming dangerously overcrowded. Ever since eleven fans were killed outside Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati in December 1979 when thousands tried to crush through a handful of doors in an attempt to get good seats for a show featuring The Who, the policy of "Festival seating" in which the first people inside the arena get the best seats has come under attack, and with the field level at Giants Stadium just an open expanse with no formal seating, there was some concern about the crowd’s safety. Scher resolved this problem by limiting access to the field level. General admission ticket holders who were camped out on the flat green tarpaulin covering the field could venture upstairs to the reserved seating sections in the grandstands but reserved ticket holders were not allowed to walk down on the field level.

Virtually every aspect of Giants Stadium provided the most advanced facilities for the concert. Most of the seats afforded a good view of the stage and many of the fans were obviously enjoying the afternoon sun as they worked on their tans while listening to the music. The backstage facilities were equally impressive as makeshift dressing rooms were set up for the groups in the circular runway surrounding the stadium. The Eagles had a special dressing room set up under a large tent, with Mexican food and tubs of Dos Equis beer. The two-tiered, loge level pressbox is one of the most modern and comfortable facilities of its kind. The press sat in air conditioned splendor, sipping cold

beer and soda as they watched the proceedings from long desks with a good view of the stage. Journalists who preferred a closer view could watch any one of dozens of televisions in the pressbox which carried closed circuit coverage of the event, complete with a special sound mix. The images on the television screens in the pressbox were also reproduced on large closed circuit screens located at the top of each end of the stadium, enabling those fans with poor visibility to follow the action.

The crowd was delighted when the Little River Band began to play at about four o’clock. The sun was still shining brightly and people on the field level danced and merrily threw frisbees back and forth. Meanwhile the Eagles weren’t on the grounds, but back at their hotel waiting for the call to start out for the stadium. If they were nervous it would have been understandable. Not just because of the impending rainstorm, either. The national press, which had grudgingly acknowledged Hotel California to be a classic, had gone back to hating the Eagles upon the release of The Long Run.

The making of The Long Run had been an interminable struggle. Once again they were faced with the awesome task of coming up with something outstanding enough to either match their status or, if possible, improve it. The first problem they had to face was the departure of bassist Randy Meisner. During the heady days after the release of Hotel California Glenn Frey had talked about Meisner’s contribution to the band. "Randy has always been the ribbon on our package," he said. "He provides all the bottom and the top, but we have to find the right song for his high voice and that usually means it must be in the ballad category. He delivers on such high intensity too, he even sounds a little like Gene Pitney. Randy gets a standing ovation every time he hits the high note on ‘Take It To the Limit,’ and sometimes the applause goes on for two or three minutes. In the last year and a half Randy has really found himself as a vocalist. ‘Take It To the Limit’ and ‘Too Many Hands’ were sung with so much brilliance on the record that he is a changed singer in the solo vocalist category."

At the same time you could tell that Henley had something else in mind when he continued talking about Meisner in terms of his inability to fit into the group’s hectic social schedule. "He’s kind of a quiet, shy guy with a family," Henley explained, "and he’s also been doing it longer than we have. He doesn’t care about interviews and so forth. As far as he’s concerned he’ll just let me and Glenn shoot off our mouths and make fools of ourselves. He does his job and goes home to Nebraska when it’s done."

As if to confirm Henley’s observations, Frey added philosophically "We’ve come to learn that we are different people. We learned through the experience of this group that you can’t try to change people to the way you want them to be. Randy is a very dedicated musician and when he goes home he gets to work on new ideas for the next album in a little studio he has built."

The next album Meisner would work on wouldn’t be with the Eagles. The softspoken bassist announced his retirement from the band in 1978, putting them immediately into a hole with their plans to begin the next record. It didn’t take them long, however, to figure out a replacement for Meisner. The selection was as simple as it was ironic—once again they raided Poco, taking Meisner’s replacement in that group, Timothy B. Schmit. Although there was some debate about Schmit’s relative merits as opposed to Meisner, the new bassist was a veteran of the pop wars who knew how to handle the pressure of replacing such an important group member (after all, he’d already done it once). The son of an itinerant musician/salesman, Schmit became involved in the music industry after his father settled the family in Sacramento, California. Schmit was in the New Breed, who were best known for their 1964 hit "Green Eyed Woman," and had auditioned for Poco before Meisner joined that group, then left college to replace him after Meisner joined the Eagles.

With the decks cleared for action the Eagles were finally ready to begin work on the Hotel California follow up. If some in the group were concerned about the record, Walsh made up for it with his enthusiasm for the project. "We did work very hard on Hotel California," he said, "but where we worked hardest and longest was in the initial stages of the interface, figuring each other out musically. There were situations where we couldn’t figure out a certain part. It just took a long time because it was the first Eagles album with the new band. Now that we have the chemistry figured out, we can bump right along at a good pace. I am looking forward to the next Eagles album—we all are. One thing—take for example the song ‘Life In the Fast Lane.’ Felder and I had 35 guitar parts that we wanted to try out. It’s hard to know when you’re done. Sometimes you have guitar parts or something that you think you will save until the end, and then when you get there you find out that you don’t need a certain thing. We tried everything out and honed it all down later. It was hard work doing Hotel California, but as I said, since I will know what’s in store for me doing an Eagles album, it’ll be a joy."

Walsh’s observations offer an interesting perspective on the meticulous recording process that goes into the making of Eagles albums, and his faith in the group was further underscored with the conclusion: "A lot of people have a huge record, and you never hear from them again. Maybe a group or act will write one or two valid things and that’s all they had to offer. Following it up is a b----. That’s the Eagles’ secret. They keep slamming away until it’s perfect."

You can almost hear Walsh’s unstated comparison to the James Gang in these remarks. Walsh continued to thrive in the creative and popular atmosphere the Eagles provided. He tried his hand at soundtrack music again, writing one of his toughest songs, "In the City," for the soundtrack of Warriors. The film is about a New York City street gang from Coney Island that has to run the gauntlet from the Bronx through each neighborhood of the city, where rival gangs are out to kill them. When they finally return home to the beach at Coney Island and vindicate themselves, the feeling of elation that takes over at the film’s end is matched by "In the City," which closes out the film.

The Eagles were pressed by their record company, Elektra/Asylum, to release some product, and while The Long Run was still only in its initial stages of completion the band provided Elektra/Asylum with two songs for a Christmas release in 1978, "Please Come Home for Christmas" and "Funky New Year." It became the first Christmas single to be charted in the top twenty of the national music charts in two decades. The single was issued in a photo sleeve that presented a humorous view of the group. It was certainly the first Christmas message to celebrate the holiday season with a sunny afternoon sitting by the pool in bathing suits.

These denizens of California were showing the world how folks on the west coast enjoy their Christmas vacations. They’re sitting, deadpan as usual, around the pool having a few tequila sunrises, with a white plastic Christmas tree and a pile of gift-wrapped packages. Henley, Frey and Felder sit at a wrought iron table in the foreground of the picture. Schmit is off to the right and Walsh, in a hilarious retake on the cover of But Seriously, Folks, is grinning as he lounges inside the pool wearing a snorkel.

The A side, "Please Come Home For Christmas," was a medium tempo r&b ballad by Charles Brown and Gene Redd that opened and closed with three sad Christmas melody notes on the piano. Walsh added a series of emotional harmonic fills, and the exquisite backing vocals proved that the Eagles weren’t disabled by having Schmit sing Meisner’s part. "Funky New Year" opens at a mock New Year’s Eve party with people honking horns and someone playing "Auld Lang Syne," then breaks to an excruciatingly slow paced funk vamp about one of the Eagles’ favorite subjects, partying. The song’s hilarious conceit is based around what this guy says when he gets up the next day after a wild party. Henley’s drums are real crisp and Schmit’s popping bass line punches in and out around Walsh and Felder for a surprisingly good sound that compares favorably with "On the Border," which is the closest analogy to the song in their previous work.

In the end The Long Run was almost two years in the making, with that yearning for perfection and fanatic attention to the most microscopic detail. Many of the songs sound so wrought and rewrought that each line, each bar, is a separate song all spliced together later. The record is a classic studio pop/white r&b session recording in the tradition of southern pop in the Classics IV/Atlanta Rhythm Section mold. It’s not so odd for a band

from Los Angeles to sound this way when you consider that it was recorded by Bill Szymczyk, who uses Florida as his base, at Bayshore Recording Studio in Coconut Grove, Florida, the scene of one of the greatest Marx Brothers films, Cocoanuts (1929), a detail Walsh must have especially enjoyed.

What is endemic to the band’s Los Angeles identification is much of the thematic structure of the record, which in some ways is stronger than the celebrated mythos of Hotel California. Like Hotel California, as well as the rest of the albums the Eagles have made, some of the songs on the record deal directly with L.A. lifestyle. The whole notion of "concept albums" is often enough to swamp a record by making it slavishly adhere to some overall image, which often makes the individual songs weaker for their dependence on the superstructure. There’s a big difference, though, between a record in which all the songs need each other’s company to make sense (or not make sense as is often the case), and a record in which several songs illustrate a different facet of life which, when added together, may suggest an overview. The cameo approach is what The Long Run runs on, and the album is a lot stronger for it—in many ways it is the Eagles’ finest record.

The title song, which leads off the album, is a bit of Eagles autobiography from Henley and Frey, with Henley singing it for all he’s worth. The lyric is very well turned, an unaffected but deeply felt love song in which the repentant rocker bemoans his misspent youth and suggests that a woman’s love can redeem him from his past. It’s the kind of thing the Eagles have done frequently, and well, but the melodrama is kept so low here, the yearning for transcendence so deep-rooted, that the song has a thematic focus that compels the listener to believe Henley while he sings it, an amazing trick for a vocalist whose cynicism is such a big part of his self-image.

Walsh plays the slide guitar solo and shapes the opening rhythm track, but his influence here is less pasted on and stylistically obvious than on Hotel California. As Walsh’s playing and approach is more assimilated in the group, The Long Run sounds less like the original Eagles than even Hotel California, and by the same token Walsh plays his style without going back to his past work. The change is very much an improvement for the Eagles, who’ve become a more versatile rock band because of it.

Schmit takes the last step toward wiping out Meisner’s shadow from his position in the Eagles with "1 Can’t Tell You Why." The song is amazing, more powerful than Meisner’s tunes if not as commercially accessible. The song opens with an eerie, dirge-like rhythm and the structure is suggested by melodic fragments blocked out by electric piano. The beautifully controlled singing over the quietly surging slow funk rhythm and the harmonically balanced electric guitar fragments are some of the best white r/b moves ever made, reminiscent of the Classics IV landmarks "Stormy" and "Spooky." Walsh’s jazz influenced fills and Frey’s underwater guitar solos carry the song out.

Walsh’s only songwriting contribution to the album is "In the City," the song he wrote with Barry De Vorzon for the Warriors soundtrack. Whereas Walsh used different musicians for the soundtrack version, though, this is an all-Eagles remake, the best illustration available of how much Walsh’s material benefits from having such a tremendous band to play his songs. The tune is crisper, more majestic, with incredibly beautiful harmonies and even a stronger sounding vocal from Walsh himself. The total control the band demonstrated over the material gives Walsh a chance to polish his delivery until he can do it exactly the way he wants. A triumph.

If "The Disco Strangler" isn’t about L.A., and it doesn’t necessarily have to be, it’ll do until something better comes along. It’s the first of several songs on The Long Run that are painfully dissonant, strained cries of torture. Walsh’s twisted rhythm guitar figure winds the unresolved tension of the song against a repeatedly stated heavy metal riff, with Henley croaking out a phenomenal vocal the likes of which he’s never before evinced. His usually cool, unhurried style is pushed so fast he sounds like someone is trying to choke him while he’s singing it. The evil and inexorable "King Of Hollywood" appears on the horizon and gradually looms into the landscape with "Witchy Woman" overtones broken by a spooky, left field vocal bridge set off by a rhythm guitar part. Frey and Henley sing the vocal together, about a sleazy Hollywood producer luring aspiring sex goddesses to his couch yet finding life empty and tedious. The three-guitar attack works well here with Schmit and Henley once again laying down a surprisingly tough and sinewy rhythm bottom. While melodic rhythm guitar overlays weave across the track Frey, Felder and finally Walsh play solo guitar parts that bring the song to a raging, hypnotic finish. Walsh wrings his guitar to a frenzied pitch on the final solo.

Szymczyk’s production touch is in evidence on "Heartache Tonight," the album’s first single. The crunching hand-claps-and-guitar rhythm opening is deliciously infectious and Walsh’s slide guitar, which is the only real solo instrumental voice on the track, gets the most dazzling array of special effects of the outing, real hard rocking fire and icy clarity. It’s Frey’s only solo vocal on the record and he does it right, even building up to a point where he lets out a scream toward the end of the song. J.D. Souther and Bob Seger helped write the song, which strikes an effective balance between the uninhibited joy of partying with friends and the often unhappy results of such merriment. The fact that both extremes are referenced, but the steps between one and the other aren’t, lends an air of terror just outside the limits of comprehension to the song. The most memorable image, though, is the one of greatest joy, when the radio plays "that song" at one point deep in the night. It’s the song all these partygoers have been waiting for, the element of desired spontaneity that is still recognizable, and it blazes the night into the memory. Naturally this song itself is the one they’re referring to (whether they intend it or not), and it adds that extra dimension to the meaning that great songs usually have.

"Those Shoes" is about the woman that "The Disco Strangler" meets when he goes out. Henley on vocal again, and the same hint of fascination mixed with revulsion as he examines a slick hipster whose personality is written in the shoes she wears. Walsh and Felder play dual harmony parts on talk box guitars for an extra-sinister effect and Walsh plays a talk box solo through an echo-plex which is enough to make you forget about the solo on "Rocky Mountain Way."

"Teenage Jail" takes up where "Heartache Tonight" leaves off. Once the kids have finished ruining their lives they can go whole hog and end up in the nightmare depicted here with such brilliance. The song moves slower than a dirge, something only Black Sabbath has been able to pull off before this, and sounds like nothing so much as Cream’s "Pressed Rat and Wart Hog." These guys are sick! When this song was released, as the flip side of "Heartache Tonight," just before the album came out, I heard one disc jockey play it and complain that the record must have been recorded at the wrong speed. Frey and Henley sing, or chant, the vocal in unison, a hymn to self-obliteration. This may be the greatest heavy metal song ever written. Distorto guitars drone out science fiction bad dreams as the vocals scream out that these kids aren’t like their moms and dads, then Felder does a fantastic Eric Clapton imitation guitar solo as the song ends.

From there it’s directly into the Beatles’ white album circa "Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me And My Monkey" and "Birthday," as "The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks" celebrates some unspecified partying skein where the beer ran with the vomit on the floor and the local daughters went off with the band. A total throw-away, the song is nonetheless meticulously crafted and added a vocal chorus led by Jimmy Buffett, another member of the Eagles’ circle of friends known for some pretty gonzo partying. But the truly great thing about this tune is the way Szymczyk gets the phased guitar/underwater piano textures so close to the sound of the Beatles’ white album.

Henley’s sincere voice is back for the album finale, "The Sad Cafe," which is another introspective look back on the group’s career, in this case a tribute to the early days at the Troubadour when Henley and Frey met each other when they were both down on their luck and figured they’d never make it. The funny thing is, now that they have made it, they look back on the nights when they made their plans, sadly wishing they could have turned their dreams and ideals to reality. Now they have to laugh a little at their own naiveté, and as David Sanborn plays the alto saxophone part that ends the song and the record the curtain goes down on a fine consideration of the ups and downs of making the big time. The Eagles may be narcissists, but at least they recognize what they’re looking at.

The Long Run wasn’t even in the record shops by the time the assembled rock press went for them, knives sharpened in a gleeful attempt to kill the beast. Greil Marcus, who’d waxed rapturous at Hotel California, rediscovered the Eagles in a piece for the Village Voice as excellent skeet for an afternoon’s target practice. In the two years since Hotel California had been released, American rock critics had discovered punk rock and hailed it as the most important rock music being made at the time. The Eagles represented all the careful production values and corporate record industry marketing strategy that punk rock claimed to be replacing with more elemental rock values. Marcus took the opportunity to make the Eagles accountable for their slickness. In the process Marcus quoted from Charles M. Young’s Rolling Stone cover story, which Young had spent two years hanging out with the band to compile. Young’s treatment of the band was in-depth and, in a way, fairly sympathetic, but ended up painting the Eagles as boorish, conceited pigs who didn’t like punk rock. Marcus quoted Young quoting Don Henley who apparently likened himself to God, an uncomfortable allusion that Henley later became incensed about.

For a band with such a large popularity base they have little to prove, it seems odd that negative criticisms would rankle them very deeply, but the Eagles in general and Henley in particular take all criticisms very hard. Henley flipped when he saw the notices for The Long Run. Marcus had accused Henley in his Voice piece of being a paranoid, which was not an especially astonishing revelation, but Henley went well out of his way to make it look like Marcus was understating the case when he began an irate letter writing campaign to defend his honor. Henley filled most of one of the letters column in Rolling Stone with his criticisms of Young’s article and a review of J.D. Souther’s album You’re Only Lonely by Rolling Stone record reviews editor Paul Nelson. "It seems," he wrote to Young, "that you would have better things to do with your time than following a ‘California’ rock band around for a year and a half and then writing an essay on their digestive tracks." His remarks to Nelson were even more bitter and vicious. The letter, which is longer than the one written to Young, offers a series of crude insults aimed at Nelson’s qualifications to do his job, accuses Nelson of vindictiveness, then claims that Souther "is practically the only American artist who is carrying on the musical traditions of Tex-Mex and Rockabilly." Nelson’s editorial reply makes Henley seem especially foolish and cranky without even trying. The whole exchange only served to draw well established battle lines even more strongly and further obscured the Eagles’ music itself in a debate about personality. Henley had some legitimate beefs but ended up sabotaging

his own position by acting out of bitterness, not sense, and only embarrassed himself and his band. Joe Walsh gracefully diffused some of that embarrassment by writing a humorous letter to Rolling Stone several weeks later.

Meanwhile the band announced plans for a series of performances in the U.S. and elsewhere. The tour began in Japan in September, 1979, moved from there to Hawaii and continued on to the east coast of the U.S. After doing a series of northeast dates the band took a breather before doing a southern tour, then after another respite played out west. These shows were better received in the local press, with the exception of Boston, than the national press, but the dedication of the fans provided the band with a morale boost.

"Heartache Tonight" became a gold single and "The Long Run" was released as the album’s second single.

On December 17, 1979 tickets went on sale for "The Eagles Come Home," a trio of concerts at the Los Angeles Forum, and 2500 fans showed up to buy tickets for the first hometown shows since. 1976. The concerts were a tremendous success, with special guest, rock legend Roy Orbison, opening the shows and a host of celebrities on hand including Rod Stewart, Ray Bradbury, Debbie Harry, Donna Summer, Neil Young, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. Joining the Eagles on stage for cameo musical appearances were Elton John, who played on "Oh Carol," Jackson Browne for "Take It Easy," and John Belushi and Dan Akroyd, aka the Blues Brothers, who danced through "The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks."

The Eagles reciprocated the Blues Brothers’ guest spot after a show at Chicago Stadium. John Belushi and Dan Akroyd were in Chicago at the time working on the Blues Brothers movie and invited the Eagles to an all-night jam at their Blues Bar. With Joe Walsh, Don Felder and Jackson Browne playing guitars, Belushi and Joe Vitale switching off on drums, and Akroyd on harp, the band played oldies like "Jailhouse Rock," "Personality," "You Send Me" and Belushi’s trademark Joe Cocker impersonation on the Beatles’ "A Little Help From My Friends."

The 1980s began with the Eagles on the top of the charts. The Long Run was a certified platinum record, and had been #1 on the record charts for thirteen straight weeks, when the decade turned, making it the biggest selling record of 1979. At that point The Long Run had reportedly sold five million units and spurred enough interest in the group to place the Greatest Hits album and Hotel California back into the top 100. Even though the criticisms may rankle, the satisfaction of continued acceptance by the fans had to provide the band with a happy outlook.

* ** *

As Heart finished their set on the big Meadowlands stage, the Eagles arrived at the stadium in unspectacular fashion, cruising up to their backstage tent in a couple of unassuming late model cars. For Joe Walsh, whose family still lives nearby in New Jersey, the show was a very real homecoming as many of his relatives were on hand to wish him well and milled around in the Eagles dressing room offering congratulations and generally enjoying the scene.

Outside, however, things weren’t looking so good. The sky had darkened after Heart’s set and the wind had picked up, bringing what looked and smelled like a certain rainstorm. Glenn Frey paced nervously along the runway between the Eagles’ dressing room and the stage entrance, frowning at the dark clouds. The band waited to see if it would rain quickly and blow over, but the sky continued to threaten. They decided to go ahead and try to get the show in.

As the band members took their places on the darkened stage a swelling roar started to come up from the crowd, that great moment when the audience senses that the main event is at hand.

The first sounds to come from the stage were the echoing chicken scratches of Walsh’s echo-plex as he tested the effect out softly, but in the huge, darkened stadium, with tiny raindrops adding to the tension, the force of those sounds was electrifying and set the crowd on edge. It sounded as if Walsh was about to play "Asshton Park," the great echo-plex instrumental from James Gang Rides Again. Instead, Walsh began to play the eerie opening guitar section to "Hotel California," but changing it, stretching it like taffy during his solo spot until it sounded more like the intro to Barnstorm than "Hotel California." The moment was Walsh’s own, the crowd was absolutely hushed as he played his way through it, then roared the recognition when the others kicked in and the song hit full steam.

Every time the Eagles play "Hotel California" live they use it at the opening of the set, as a kind of signature and the song provides a neat capsulizatjon of their values, It’s weird, almost, to see the four guitarists standing in a line at the front of the stage, wringing out the molten gold guitar lines while Henley, hidden behind his drum kit, does all the singing, giving the tune an extra ghostly twist as the disembodied voice floats out over the audience, until the rest of them sing on the chorus. "Hotel California" is a lot better live than on the record, which gives only half the song as it fades out on the dual guitar break. Here Walsh and Felder take the song away after coming out of the dual passage and the crowd senses that they’ve embarked on new terrain, standing during Walsh’s solo to the end.

This is such a Walsh-attuned audience that when the lanky blond guitarist stepped to the front of the stage for a two measure guitar fill on the second song, "Already Gone," the crowd gave him a standing ovation. Frey greets New Jersey after the tune is over and announces "Joe Walsh is gonna sing a song now," which elicits another roar of approval from the audience as the band begins to play "In the City." This version was even better than the one on The Long Run, with Walsh crashing out the chords, singing especially well and getting tremendous backing vocals. Schmit’s bass playing on "In the City" provided a solid, pounding foundation for the song.

The band played "King of Hollywood," with Walsh once again providing the most outrageous guitar fireworks, then "Sad Cafe" as the light mist stopped and the night became clear. Then Schmit took the spotlight for "I Can’t Tell You Why," with Felder playing the featured solo spot at the end. Walsh’s Barnstorm sidekick Joe Vitale had been touring with the Eagles for a number of months, playing flute on the Barnstorm stuff and

even adding a second drum kit at times to fill out the sound. Vitale played a saxophone part along with the piano intro to "Desperado," one of the earlier Eagles songs that has survived through the personnel changes, and the crowd was delighted to hear the old favorite.

At this point Walsh and Felder connected the plastic hoses used to operate to talk box guitar effect to their mouths and started to play the spongy, textured funk opening to "Those Shoes," playing another unison passage like the one in "Hotel California" during the song before Walsh took it away with a great talk box/echo-plex solo.

When the crunching rhythm to "Heartache Tonight" came coursing out through the PA system people jumped to their feet and clapped along, dancing around in the pleasant summer night as Frey played slide guitar solo and Walsh crashed out the rhythm figure. Vitale played the flute opening to a long, sinuous "Turn To Stone," then the band played a spirited version of "The Long Run," complete with another sax solo, to the delight of

the crowd. After it ended, Schmit introduced Walsh by saying "He’s running for president."

Since 1976 the Eagles had been supporting California governor Jerry Brown’s campaign for the presidency, doing occasional benefits for Brown and talking him up in interviews.

By the 1980 campaign the Eagles decided to look around for another candidate to back. At one point they seemed interested in supporting Ted Kennedy. "We did a little comparative political shopping," Felder noted. The band even showed up at Kennedy’s Washington office to discuss his stand on the nuclear energy issue, but finally decided that Kennedy wasn’t to their liking and once again endorsed Brown’s campaign after the California governor, whose romance with Linda Ronstadt had become well known by this time, went well out of his way to win their support by visiting the band on the road in the middle of one of their tours.

"The media’s so cynical," Henley said after making his 1980 Brown support official. "It just doesn’t believe anyone has good intentions. I have nothing to gain from this except I plan to have children and grandchildren, and I would like them to have a nice world to live in." Yet by the end of Brown’s campaign, when it was obvious that he had very little chance of winning the nomination, he would show up at a planned benefit and not even be allowed to make a statement from the stage.

Joe Walsh started joking about running for president himself, which seems like his own way of trying to take the edge off the band coming out too strongly in support of any political candidate. Since it was done as a joke, and one which Walsh is fairly able to carry off, promising free gas for everyone if he’s elected and inspiring the slogan "We need a good guitarist in the White House," Walsh can undercut the over-serious attitude the band can sometimes take.

On this night, however, with all the attention focused on him and members of his family in the audience, Walsh seemed embarrassed by the joke. "I’m gonna be president someday," he drawled sheepishly, "and if I’m president, we all are." Then, mocking himself, he said "Right, Joe," and shook his head. After a pause he said, more loudly Happy Father’s Day! This one’s for my father," nd proceeded into "Life’s Been Good."

As usual, this proved to be one of the high points f the concert. Guitars cut in and out in silly frenzy, the rhythm synthesizer sequence kept the dancing bodies in suspended animation and Walsh did his best spastic dance, throwing his hands up into the air and waving them around when he sang "Everybody say I’m cool." After Walsh closed out the song with a guitar solo he led the band through a souped-up version of "Life In the Fast Lane." When it came time for Walsh’s solo spot at the song’s climax Frey yelled "Step on it, Joe" and he whipped into an inspired Jeff Beck-style raveup. The audience was going berserk at this point and screamed for more Walsh soloing as the tune ends.

Still a little sheepish, Walsh stepped up to the microphone and said "I dedicate this next song to everybody who never had a song dedicated to them." The song was "Rocky Mountain Way" and Walsh changed a few of the details, calling it "New York/New Jersey way" and changing the words in one of the verses to "Bases are loaded Khomeini’s at bat." Walsh rang bent notes all over the place in this one, used his jet plane slide-down-the-strings effect at the end of his solo and played both voice box and straight signal solos before bringing the song, and the set, to a close.

After several minutes of ovation the band returned once more to a darkened stage and foghorn sounds came from the PA system. The song turned out to be a surprise oldie, "Sea Cruise," with Frey singing the lead vocal. Then came a spectacular, rave-up version of "Take It Easy," the hardest rocking performance of this tune the band had ever done. Frey sings, Walsh takes a solo, then spotlights flash over the crowd and a cheer goes up, Walsh plays another solo with Felder chording behind him, they play a unison lead, then Walsh Solos again before the two guitars lock in rapid fire exchange to the end. Once again the band waves to the crowd and runs from the stage, leaving a freeze frame shot of themselves standing at the end of the stage on the giant closed circuit screens as the Meadowlands rocks with the applause of the audience in Giants Stadium.

"You must be some bunch of music lovers," Frey said to the crowd when the band returned for yet another encore. The wrenching opening chords to "All Night Long" blast out while a dozen searchlights shoot up into the sky outside the stadium. Frey and Felder block out the chords, Walsh plays the rhythm figure then plays the solo after what sounds like the last chorus, but the band picks it back up again after a masterfully tense false-ending. Frey, Felder and Walsh all solo again before the song finally ends. At the pitch the crowd was at at that point, the show could have gone on for hours so the Eagles cooled the fans out with one last song, "For all of you," said Henley, who had come out front stage to sing "Best of My Love."

While the crowd continued to voice its appreciation the band sprinted off stage and into their two cars parked right at the bottom of the stage stairs, then sped off with a police escort to the helicopter field a few hundred yards away. As they took off in the helicopter for Manhattan the Eagles could still see the crowd giving them that thunderous standing ovation.

Soon after the Meadowlands show, word began to filter out of the Eagles’ organization that a live album would be compiled from the tour. The Long Run had precipitated a tour which began in September ‘79 at Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium and ended with three nights in late July at the Santa Monica Civic Arena in the Los Angeles area, and a July 31 benefit concert at the Long Beach Arena to support the Senatorial campaign of Alan Cranston. At those final four concerts the Eagles opened each show with a five song acoustic set keyed around four songs that the band had never played in person up until that point. From Desperado they culled "Saturday Night" and from One Of These Nights, "After the Thrill Is Gone." Hotel California’s "Pretty Maids All In A Row," which had been featured in previous shows on the tour, was also included.

The other two songs in the acoustic set had never been recorded by the Eagles. Steve Young’s "Seven Bridges Road" proved to be one of the acoustic set’s highlights, while Timothy B. Schmit brought Poco’s "Keep On Tryin’" into the band’s repertoire. All four final shows were recorded for potential inclusion on a double live album—the band played twenty-three songs each of those last nights—and Glenn Frey was reportedly thinking about doing another "live" session in front of a studio audience to record some new material.

When the record, Eagles Live, was finally released in November, there were no new Eagle songs. The entire album had been recorded at various Los Angeles-area concerts, ten tunes from the final four shows at the Santa Monica Civic and Long Beach Arena, and four songs from a 1976 concert at the Los Angeles Forum.

The record included a number of guest appearances: Joe Vitale on keyboards, drums and percussion; J.D. Souther on vocals and acoustic guitar, Phil Kenzie on saxophone, Vince Melamed on electric piano, Jage Jackson on rhythm guitar and percussion; and the Monstertones, alias the Eagles road crew, on backing vocals.

The record clearly shows Walsh’s immense contribution to the band, especially on the longer, set-opening version of "Hotel California" and Walsh’s solo specialties, "Life’s Been Good" and "All Night Long." His solo at the end of "Life’s Been Good" is one of the best he’s ever recorded, an eerie, dissonant sequence of notes that seems to climb sideways against the rest of the song. Three of the four sides of Eagles Live mix hard rockers with ballads, but side three is totally devoted to the softer side of the Eagles, mixing "Seven Bridges Road" from the 1980 acoustic set with four numbers from the ‘76 tour—"Wasted Time," "Take It To the Limit," "Doolin-Dalton (Reprise II)" and "Desperado." On "Wasted Time," "Doolin-Dalton" and "Take It To the Limit" the band is accompanied by a 35-piece Philharmonic orchestra, and "Take It To the Limit" features ex-Eagle Randy Meisner on vocals in his last official recording with the band.

Even as the live album was climbing the charts the Eagles began making preparations for their next record. "There’s about another album’s worth of material," notes Don Folder, "that is about half to three-quarters finished, left over, since we started out this last time to do a double album. We’ve got enough basic tracks with arrangements, overdubs and stuff that we could finish those songs in, say, six months. There are a lot of options. We’re also thinking about starting fresh since I have some ideas and so do Glenn and Henley."

As for Walsh, there’s an ongoing project he’s been working on with Who bassist John Entwistle, and eventually another solo album as well. Altogether it seems like the ‘80s will hear quite a lot from the Eagles.

The End