The oldies still pull crowds after 30 years (The Advertiser)

Link: The Advertiser: The oldies still pull crowds after 30 years [20nov04].

A MINI-SKIRTED teen down the front screamed "I love you" when the band came on.

Back in the crowd, her grandparents were feeling groovy, as they used to say in the '70s.

Something's happening here.

The phenomenally successful music of the Eagles has been like a soundtrack to the lives of the baby boomer generation and they're still finding new audiences. But at the band's sell-out third Melbourne concert of the Farewell I tour at the Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday, the audience was mostly boomers.

This long-haul, three-hour concert was a blueprint of what Adelaide can expect when the Eagles land here again, after a nine-year absence, to play the Entertainment Centre on November 29 and 30. The band is as refreshing as ever, free-flowing, laid back, harmonically tight and unpretentious.

This is the rock of ages. This is indestructible songwriting.

When Don Henley croons what has become a country classic, Lyin' Eyes, almost the way he did in 1975, partners in the huge audience of the darkened stadium slyly peep at each other.

You can see them holding hands during Love Will Keep Us Alive. They sway to Desperado and sing along to Tequila Sunrise and young and old alike dance to other old favourites, such as Heartache Tonight. For Hotel California, one of the greatest enigmatic pop songs of all time, everybody stands, the way they do for the Hallelujah chorus in Handel's Messiah.

The Eagles grew out of a Linda Ronstadt backing band in 1972, with soft country rock sounds. This style was hardened with the 1976 addition of Joe Walsh, one of the most flamboyant of the psychedelic rock guitarists, and one of the most endearing clowns in rock music.

The deciduous process continues. The Eagles now include Don Henley and Glenn Frey as original members, with Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmit.

For this long tour of Asia and Australia, these are backed by an eight-piece band, with big, fat sounds led by Greg Smith on baritone sax.

Emerging from this backing band is a star in the making, the unassuming rock guitarist Steuart Smith, whose duet work with Walsh is a treat.

In the growth process, there are new songs, too, ranging from bubblegum pop (No More Cloudy Days) to saccharine Americana (Hole in the World).

But they haven't fallen into the smoke and mirrors traps of the big concert circuit. They don't need to prance about like such other boomer-rockers as Mick Jagger.

Promoter Michael Gudinski said he was concerned about giving value since there has been public disquiet about ticket prices that start at $95 – more than the cost of three CDs.

So it's a long show, no support acts, three hours of more than 30 of the songs that over three decades have made the Eagles one of the richest rock acts in the world. As Glenn Frey said, explaining why he's still playing the oldies: "The longer this goes on, the better these songs sound."

The Eagles phenomenon also can be explained by the fact that the band is not over-exposed. They've made only six studio albums in three decades and have spent more time apart than together.

In the songs, most of which are band-written, Glenn Frey has a sunny Californian sense of melodic hooks and English literature graduate Don Henley is an obsessed perfectionist about polished lyrics.

Their songs are mostly about love and, in contrast to such activists as Bob Dylan in the 1970s, they are not political.

Frey might talk and talk about the virtues of diversity and how "the Republican party in America does not own God" and how "musicians and plumbers and other ordinary people could do a better job of governing countries", but he doesn't clutter his songs with his politics.

The music of the Eagles grew out of a frontier mythology which resonates strongly in Australia. And no song better explains the Eagles ethos than Take It Easy, which has also has a certain resonance here.

The Eagles have been making a DVD at the Melbourne concerts. "We thought this would be a good place to film Farewell I, " said Frey, and the DVD is due for release next September.

Frey also said that the "sort-of" honesty in calling the tour Farewell I, with its implication that there will be another long goodbye, was really just his dig at Cher on her "everlasting" farewell tour.