I still remember that feeling and I’ve never totally lost it, so you can, I hope, trust me to be even-handed here. That’s because I remember hearing Hotel California, the song, on the radio for the first time in the car with my parents and my dad telling me there was a good guitar solo coming up, and bam! There it was: possibly the most exciting minute or so of music I’d ever heard, aged seven or eight. I get why so many are so strongly anti-Eagles - and sure, they’re the perfect symbol of the gradual reduction in intensity of meaning and feeling in LA music in the second half of the 1970s - but I can’t share the hatred. Nevertheless, I’ve schooled myself in the history of LA rock ‘n’ roll as best I can from books, documentaries and hundreds (or probably thousands) of hours of listening, so I know what these guys are, who they were before they became the Eagles, what dues they paid and a fair bit about how they behaved once they attained success. The Eagles were a familiar presence on my radio, but not an inescapable one. I didn’t grow up hearing them on the radio every single day, so I don’t share the revulsion born of over-familiarity that a lot of US music fans have for the band. I’m British, so while I feel like I’ve got a pretty good idea what place the Eagles hold in American music culture, it’s not my culture. Let’s start with one of the big daddies of classic rock. I’ll be doing one of these posts every couple of weeks or so. I decided I’d listen to some of these records, to hear those songs in their original context, and see what I made of them. Most of these records are such a pervasive part of our culture, and their songs are on the radio so often, I’ve never felt the need to sit down and listen to the albums those songs originally came from. I was a little surprised to look down a list of the biggest-selling albums ever and realise that there was a good number I’d never really heard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |