Zeus in chaps seeks same

Long Road Out Of Eden
The Eagles
(Eagles Recording Co., 2007)

The Eagles were one jaundiced bunch of muddafuggas. There was something uncomfortable about how they clung to Old Western mythology and beat down New Western excess, when in truth they liked their fast machines as much as anyone and had their share of coked-out, half-forgotten nights on Sunset. They embodied something I call psychological snobbery, which is not the same as intellectual snobbery. You don't have to be intelligent to be psychologically snobby. You just have to believe, even as you're liberating the hooker from the Peruvian Marching Powder that's forced its way onto her bare breasts, that you're secretly above the situation.

You can probably imagine that paradigm takes a certain amount of cynicism, and the Eagles had smarmy scowls to spare. Especially Don Henley, who is just as good a drummer as Meg White, in his moments of curious bile against women ("Witchy Woman"), too-dumb-to-live hedonists ("Life In the Fast Lane"), adolescence ("Teenage Jail"), situations in which he has found his spirit restrained ("Take It To The Limit"), and terrible room service ("Hotel California"). Everything sucked in The Donald's world. He never had solutions for his complaints, but with two copies of his band's greatest-hits album soon to be in the home of every American, perhaps there was no motivation to find any.

The most obnoxious – and in retrospect, hi-hi-hilarious – component of the Eagles mythology was how steeped it was in a machismo that was well on its way out in the 1970s. They were like little Lee Marvins. Squinting at the dusty wind, which pissed 'em off. Characterizing women as either fork-tongued Jezebels or flapping sexual quarries – or at their most complimentary, eternally cranky. Even when Henley went all Walt Whitman in the 80s and took on social topics, he rivaled Sting in his erroneous belief that the more proper nouns or flowery phrases you used in a song, the more virile you were. Sting did have that tantric thing going, but I don't want to envision Henley anywhere near anything resembling a lotus position.

But hell, it worked for America in the 1970s, grouse after grouse, and Long Road Out Of Eden is exactly the kind of music you'd expect from such a fume-breathing band who's been largely dormant for more than a quarter-century. Or at least I expected it: older, wiser, slightly less sexually potent, betraying boredom, and without a single musical idea they haven't ripped off or done before.

Did I mention it's a two-disc set? You weren't going anywhere, were you? Good. Gramps wants to talk about the good ole days when gin was cheap, women didn't talk much, and the rhyming dictionary was kept on a pedestal in the foyer.

Speaking of rhymes, Long Road Out Of Eden is notable for containing at least four of the worst Eagles lyrics ever written. And this from the group who gave the world "Lyin' Eyes." But even that tawdry tale of a gold digger who shanks the pool guy behind her geezer's back pales in badness when compared to this doggerel from "Waiting In The Weeds":

I've been biding time with crows and sparrows
While peacocks prance and strut upon the stage
If finding love is just a dance, proximity and chance
You will excuse me if I skip the masquerade.

Oooooo, snap!

What's bad about that lyric, besides enough bird abuse to send up the flares at PETA's Fowl Branch? You got it – psychological snobbery. Everybody's thought at least once in their lives that love's a waste of time, but when Henley sings those last two lines there, it sounds like Wilford Brimley reciting lines from a script that was actually intended for John Gielgud. Instead of being self-piteous, which would be bad enough, it's haughty awkwardness at its worst. The lines strain so hard to work that you actually feel relieved this guy's going stag. Hopefully he'll just hang out near the punch bowl and not bother anybody.

But I believe Oscar Wilde said it best: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling, but if you play Henley one more time I'm going to puke up this tandoori chicken." Meaning there's more where that came from, and it happens when Henley gets political. Like the title cut, which goes on for 10 minutes, written from the point of view of an American soldier in Some Desert Country you may have heard of. The soldier gets a crystal vision (whoops, wrong band) in the field:

Music blasting from an SUV on a bright and sunny day
Rolling down the interstate in the good ole USA
Having lunch at the Petroleum Club
Smokin' fine cigars and swappin' lies
"Gimme 'nother slice of that barbecued brisket!
Gimme 'nother piece of that pecan pie!"

It's not that I disagree with the song's "message," which I don't. I generally do not disagree with Henley's politics. It's that it's a Message with a capital M. And it's Henley's blueprint when doing this kind of thing – loading up on images that were clichéd even before the conflict started, making no attempt at nuanced argument, and stretching a whole series of flabby spitballs across an epic canvas, in this case represented by the time it takes to crank this song out (with Middle Eastern pipe flourishes in the introduction, just so you know we're not talking about Detroit).

Other phrases in "Long Road Out Of Eden" include "pilgrims and prodigals," "cell phones chiming a tune," "riding the road to Utopia," "weaving through the wreckage and the cultural junk," "loaded on propaganda," "behold the bitten apple," and most improbably, "met the Ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way." This is typical of protest music's most glaring failure. You may like to have your slogans sung, but if you're going to tell me something heavy-handed that I'll end up agreeing with you on anyway, I'd rather just read the pamphlet, thanks.

And then there's the cautionary Henley, the one that scoffs at people whose lives are, in his psychologically snobbish estimation, moving too fast for his speed. Rose-smellin' is at hay-fever pitch in "Busy Being Fabulous" (woman has high-profile career, Henley unhappy) and "Fast Company" (company moves at accelerated speed, Henley dismissive). Henley sings the latter in falsetto -- I can't imagine what his intended effect was, but on the bright side I'm no longer constipated.

"Frail Grasp on the Big Picture" and "Business As Usual" are also bad, bad, bad lyrics, but I have to move on. Google 'em. Well, here's one line from the latter to send you off before we change the subject: "It's a soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking, soul-sucking world." Yes, each and every "soul-sucking" is reprinted on the lyric sheet, which is the best thing about this album, because it's in a tasteful font.

As you can tell, I've spent a lot of time bashing on Don Henley – hey, it's not my fault he didn't listen to Mojo Nixon – because it's his voice and songs that dominate the Eagles universe. There are three other full-time Eagles on Long Road: Glenn Frey, Timothy B. Schmit, and Joe Walsh.

Walsh is the only Eagle who's ever been in a great band (James Gang), he's their best instrumentalist, and he's the only one who ever had a consistent string of excellent albums (his '70s solo work). Frey is the best-looking Eagle and has the best voice, and he was usually the one who repped the band's romantic swagger and ennui. Frey sang the only Eagles song that was truly brilliant: "New Kid In Town." It was about a guy with romantic swagger and ennui. Frey was also the dude who sang the bit about "seven women on my mind." Schmit is more or less a temp who got hired for the Eagles' last real album, The Long Run, and got on permanent after the band's surprise hit single "I Can't Tell You Why," which he sang.

Their songs here sound like other Eagles songs. Schmit's "I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore" sounds like they just cut-and-pasted the parts of "I Can't Tell You Why" that worked. "How Long" – which was actually a concert staple of the Eagles, dating back to their old days – sounds just like "Take It Easy." Walsh, the most untroubled of the group, turns in the best song on here, "Guilty of the Crime." I suppose I don't have to inform you that said crime is "lovin' you baby." Frey's songs cover all the bases, from soft-rock to rock so soft it's practically a sponge. But ruffling feathers was never Frey's ambition, and I'm certainly not going to begrudge him whatever solace he's found in new age music.

In fact, Frey turns out the album's second best song, and its most moving: "It's Your World Now," the final song on the album. (Yep, I actually made it through the whole album.) It's telling that "It's Your World Now" is also the one song on the album almost entirely fashioned from artifice and simulation. There's a recurring fake mariachi-trumpet motif, a gentle Tex-Mex gait helped along by an accordion. Neither of those instruments are to be found on many older Eagles songs; they were too busy trying to rock or to folk. But strangely enough, it's the only moment on the whole set that feels unaffected. Frey breaks out of the Eagles myth and structuralism, sings purty, and fades out the album (and presumably the Eagles' recorded career) on a wistful, almost Nilsson-esque moment.

And "It's Your World Now" inspires the feeling that the Eagles' New West myth might've gotten more mileage had they just been a little more playful in their time. Like their friend Warren Zevon, who let himself go writing the most hilarious songs in SoCal this side of Randy Newman, and whose recklessness conveyed twelve times the danger of any of Henley's bummer morality tales.

But I guess the warm smell of colitas got all up in their craniums, because the Eagles bet the house on ponderous bigness on Hotel California and The Long Run, and Long Road Out of Eden keeps the flame flickerin', man. And it's as big, as spacious, as cavernous, and as ultimately empty-feeling as the Wal-Mart it came in.

(Bonus! Check this entry's first comment for the original introduction to this piece, which was cut for length. No, really.)