The Eagles - The Long Run (1979)

When you look at what was at the top of the Billboard singles chart in the first week of January 1970 and the last week of December 1979, you can summarize the lightweight pop that dominated AM hit radio in the 1970s, as the first and last number-one singles of the decade were, respectively, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" by B.J. Thomas and "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes.  This is an inaccurate summary of the seventies, of course, as it was a decade defined by music so much better than that, but looking at what topped the Billboard album chart at the beginning and the end of the 1970s was actually not only more accurate but rather sobering; the first number-one album of the seventies was the Beatles' Abbey Road and the last one was The Long Run by the Eagles (which sat atop the Billboard album chart for nine weeks).

When you mark the seventies this way, the conclusion is all too obvious; after ten incredible years of producing numerous classic records, rock and roll was exhausted and in need of new blood.  Because despite its commercial success, The Long Run was not a great record from the Eagles.  Indeed, it may have been the primary cause of their following hiatus.  Hotel California may have been the Sgt. Pepper of the seventies, but The Long Run is certainly no Abbey Road.

The Eagles labored for over a year on The Long Run, consciously trying to match the artistic success of Hotel California without working up enough energy to come up with enough material worthy of  a follow-up to such a monumental album.  As a result, it's underthought and overproduced.  The band sounds tired throughout the record, and a good deal of the music sounds forced.  Drummer Don Henley has delivered better vocals on previous Eagles LPs, and guitarist Glenn Frey seems to sing lyrics without giving them much thought - which makes sense, seeing as some of these songs weren't given much thought when they were written.  Power-pop rockers like "Heartache Tonight" and "Teenage Jail" try too hard to sound tough, while nods to contemporary sounds such as the ineffectual "The Disco Strangler" and the embarrassingly stiff "King of Hollywood" (an attempted satire of predatory producers looking for, ahem, personal favors from budding starlets) have little spark to them.  You've heard all of these ideas before, done better.  And by folks other than the Eagles.  But in 1979, the Southern California blend of country music and straight rock that the Eagles had pioneered wasn't as relevant as it had once been, so the band focused on a more urban sound while trying not to give into the trendiness of disco and  disco-flavored rock.  One can respect the Eagles for trying to go in a different direction, but on The Long Run the band sounds more reactive than proactive, throwing in any old trick they think will work.  Why else would "In the City," a sharp rocker originally recorded solo by lead guitarist Joe Walsh for the movie The Warriors, end up being covered by the full band for this album? 

Not everything on the Long Run was unsuccessful, though.  "Those Shoes," a biting satire on the singles-bar scene, sounds like it could have been on Hotel California, and the wistful ballad "I Can't Tell You Why" - marking new bassist Timothy B. Schmit's vocal debut on an Eagles record - continued the Eagles' knack for delivering emotional love songs.  And "The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks," inspired by National Lampoon's Animal House - the Citizen Kane of frat-boy movies - is funnier than the movie itself.  But the band's overall lack of originality and inspiration is quite obvious, especially in the opening and closing songs.  Despite the wry irony of the title song espousing the Eagles' longevity on the verge of the Eagles' breakup - and that wonderful line "All the debutantes in Houston, baby, couldn't hold a candle to you" - "The Long Run" borrows so much from the melody of Otis Clay's 1972 soul song "Trying To Live My Life Without You" that the song's message of the endurance of the Eagles' music does not ring true.  How can you defend yourself as an artist when you're ripping off another artist, and an obscure black artist at that?  "The Sad Café," which ends the LP, is a confession from the band that the musical culture from whence they came has passed, as if, in the long run, they weren't going to make it at all.  

The Eagles had already secured themselves longevity with their earlier work, but like most seventies bands, they found themselves worn out at the end of that decade without much to say.  In that respect, The Long Run was appropriate - a mainstream rock album issued in the aftermath of a severe downturn for a record industry too reliant on veteran performers and done in by its own excesses without much of clue as to how to carry on in the 1980s, a decade that would see the record business recover but would see rock, a once-great genre, begin a long, painful decline as style would become more important than substance.  Right before the start of what Glenn Frey would call the Eagles' "fourteen-year vacation," the Eagles had again defined the times - only now for all the wrong reasons. 

(Yes, I'm back with record reviews! For awhile, anyway.)