Park life: Rolling Stones & Eagles at British Summer Time

© Simon Poulter 2022

If there’s one thing about the Rolling Stones that remains unfathomable, it’s not that they’re still going after 60 years - there are plenty of “legacy” acts doing that - or that the loss of three original members hasn’t prevented them continuing. No, it’s that, simply, they can still put on a rock and roll show like nobody else. Literally, no one else.

That might sound hyperbolic (Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine in 1995 that he found the “greatest rock and roll band in the world” epithet “stupid”). But the unassailable truth is that, simply, they still are. In Hyde Park on Saturday - two weeks shy of the 60th anniversary of their debut gig and almost exactly 53 years since they played the same park for free in front of half a million hippies) - the evidence was compelling, from start to flamboyantly pyrotechnic finish.

Picture: Twitter/Rolling Stones

Opening with Street Fighting Man, it was clear that Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood - with a combined age of 231 - were still in the fight (despite the loss last year of drummer Charlie Watts, the band’s sheet anchor). This show, their first of two headline appearances at this year’s British Summer Time events, wasn’t going to be a gentle stroll through wistful recollections of their formative years, but a rollicking, two-hour romp through what the Stones do so well. 

For all their reputation as the ’70s’ louchest band, there was plenty of the intricate beat pop that evolved them from being a purely British blues boom outfit, with sprightly renditions of 19th Nervous Breakdown and She’s A Rainbow, Tumbling Dice and You Can’t Always Get What You Want harking back to their industrious origins, plying the music clubs of London, including that famous first gig at the Marquee on 12 July 1962 (an anniversary Jagger happily reminded Hyde Park of).

With an 80-year-old Paul McCartney headlining on the same evening down at Worthy Farm, Saturday provided a valiant night for the oldies. Twitter, inevitably and depressingly, erupted into a minor culture war, with the knuckleheads calling for a compulsory retirement age for rock stars, and those - like me - simply revelling in the joy of seeing proper legends like Macca and the Stones still able to give electrifying performances, the very thing that founded their existence to begin with.

There was no pretentious, sidelining to focus on obscure album tracks. This was the Rolling Stones everyone assembled wanted: a breathless Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?, Honky Tonk Women, Miss You and Midnight Rambler - one slammer after another. Even the 2020 lockdown single Living In A Ghost Town demonstrated that the Glimmer Twins still have a catchy bit of contemporary rock up their sleeves. But that song, and 1981’s Start Me Up aside, you could easily think that this was the Rolling Stones of 50 years ago, in their Nellcôte swagger, the Stones of Exile On Main Street and Let It Bleed, not a group with three elder gentlemen at their core (and the delightfully, bonkers cackling Richards having turned merrily into rock music’s own Rowley Birkin QC). 

And here is the remarkable thing: plenty of the negative comments about McCartney’s Glastonbury set reflected on his voice struggling a little (give the guy a break - he’s 80!), but Jagger, in particular, parades elastically about the stage no differently now at 78 than he did at 28. Nor has the voice suffered. In fact, musically, this Stones show was technically brilliant, the sound booming out crystal clear over Hyde Park. 

As they reached for the finale, with the obligatory Jumping Jack Flash, a mesmeric Sympathy For The Devil, and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction to end with, you were reminded - for the fifth time in my life - that you had just witnessed something that, as I stated in the opening of this post, literally no-one else can do.

To the following evening, then, and back to Hyde Park for a continuation of the heritage trail with a billing of Robert Plant (with Alison Krauss) opening for the Eagles. Plant has settled nicely into his groove as custodian of a form of Americana that is neither country or ‘world music’, but which evokes an Appalachian vibe log cabins in smokey remote valleys. Well, that’s at least what wafted across the vast open expanse of Hyde Park as Plant appropriately performed on the Great Oak Stage. 

In fact, the Midlander was the only Brit on stage, with a band exclusively drawn from the four corners of the US provinces, providing the early evening crowd with extracts from the Plant/Krauss albums Raising Sand and Raise The Roof (including the Plant/Jimmy Page composition Please Read The Letter and a couple of Everly Brothers covers), as well as richly devoured reinterpretations of Led Zeppelin’s Rock And Roll, When The Levee Breaks and The Battle Of Evermore.

In Plant was another reminder of an undisputed ’70s behemoth still making epic statements, though clearly without the gargantuan bombast of his once former band. His approach with Krauss these days is somewhat understated, that Valhalla scream of his lowered by an octave or two. But it’s worthy music, and in Hyde Park, providing an unspoken bridge to the main draw.

Picture: Twitter/British Summer Time

When they emerged from the LA canyon scene in the early 1970s, the Eagles were part of that city’s  wider collage as rock central. Down on the Sunset Strip, where Zeppelin’s John Bonham rode motorbikes up and down corridors of the ‘Riot House’ hotel (the Hyatt), you had the Troubadour, where future Eagles Glenn Frey, Don Henley and their friend Jackson Brown hung out with The Byrds and Linda Ronstadt, and worked their way into a scene that was, to quote Donny Osmond, a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. But it was London where it all came together: Frey had wanted their debut album to be recorded by Glyn Johns, who’d produced albums for the Rolling Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin, so in the freezing cold of February 1972, the perennial West Coasters set up shop at Olympic Studios in Barnes. It wasn’t, by all accounts, a happy experience, with Johns having one view of the band’s direction, and Frey and Henley having another. And, as Henley will recount to the Hyde Park crowd, Britain was in the midst of a coal strike, so the power to the studio would frequently cut out.

51 years later and the Eagles have been through countless changes of personnel, and have broken up and reformed. Six years ago they lost Frey, leaving the idea of any sort of continuation a little bit moot (rock’s legacy circus is now full of bands missing their original members, to such extent that some resemble Trigger’s Broom). Smartly, though, the Eagles brought in American country legend Vince Gill, who on last night’s evidence, has slotted perfectly into the vocal space vacated by Frey’s tragic death at the age of 67. The core line-up continues to be staffed by Henley, bassist Timothy B. Schmitt and the livewire guitarist Joe Walsh, along with a phalanx of supporting musicians, who last night blew through a 23-song set of their five decades, spanning the countryfied, harmonised vocals of that first album, through to the edgier, bluesy rock hinged on Walsh’s slide guitar.

I saw the Eagles a few years ago at Madison Square Garden in what was a clear attempt to tell the story of their career through each song. There was even a little gentle engagement with the audience. But not here. Instead, it was businesslike, with brief pauses between songs only occasionally broken by one of Henley, Schmitt or Walsh (in his slightly incomprehensible drawl) making proclamations to the crowd. “So, this is British Summer Time,” Henley said at one point. “In case we don’t pass this way again, I want to thank you all for embracing these songs, taking them into your hearts and your homes – we appreciate it,”. Woah - “in case we don’t pass this way again”…?

Picture: Twitter/British Summer Time

If this was, then, to be the last time a British audience experienced this most storied of American megabands, then it certainly got its money’s worth. One Of These Nights, New Kid In Town, Witchy Woman, Take It To The Limit, Lyin’ Eyes, Tequila Sunrise, Best Of My Love, Peaceful Easy Feeling, Take It Easy - they kept on coming. As did the solo hits - Henley’s Boys Of Summer and Walsh’s autobiographical and highly ironic Life’s Been Good. There were more Eagles live highlights - the James Gang cover Funk #49, Heartache Tonight, Life In The Fast Lane, Walsh’s Rocky Mountain Way and Desperado. And, of course, the song probably 90% of the crowd had come for, Hotel California.

Just like the Rolling Stones the night before, it was all technically pristine. Sometimes when you write that about a live performance you make it sound sterile, but while personality-wise the Eagles come across as a little cold, the music was anything but. They can rock out, but it’s with a sense of arch control. Perhaps the one wild card of the night came at the end, with a performance of Already Gone, at which they were joined on stage - bizarrely, now I think of it - by one John McEnroe. Obviously in town for Wimbledon (and to visit his mate Boris Becker in pokey), it was hard to tell what contribution the once Superbrat of tennis made to proceedings, other than to render the audience slightly agog at the somewhat random sight of him mingling with one of rock’s most carefully considered supergroups.

This had been the weekend that sparked the perennial debate over ‘how old is too old’?. As someone nearing his 56th year, I’m of the “age is just a number” fraternity. Yes, it’s sad to see your musical heroes getting old (my review of Phil Collins’ last hurrah with Genesis back in February will serve testament to that), but I can genuinely say that between the Rolling Stones (and Macca at Glasto) on Saturday night, and Robert Plant and the Eagles last night, the law of diminishing returns was proven wrong. My motivation for buying the Stones tickets to begin with was that no one can tell how long they’ll go on for (age and diminishing health didn’t defeat the blues greats like BB King and John Lee Hooker towards their ends). And as Don Henley appeared to confirm, there was every chance that this would be the last time the Eagles would play the very city where their recorded career began. Take It To The Limit (one last time) may have been the most fitting sentiment of the entire weekend.

When the mountains and canyons started to tremble and shake

Spent my days with a woman unkind

Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine.

Made up my mind to make a new start.

Going to California with an aching in my heart,

Someone told me there's a girl out there,

With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.

Took my chances on a big jet plane

Never let them tell you that they're all the same.

The sea was red and the sky was grey,

Wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today.

The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake

As the children of the sun began to awake.

Led Zeppelin, Going To California

Has anyone ever asked you what period of history, if time travel was possible, you would want to visit? No, me neither. But if they did, my Tardis fantasy would be to return to the year of my birth, 1967. Not for that event, which would be just weird (“Paging Dr. Freud!”), but to a bucolic corner of California where a particular sub-culture of the free spirit flourished in the Summer Of Love. 

My interest was piqued when Barney Hoskyns, ertswhile rock scribe and founder of the Rock's Lost Pages website, brought out his wonderful (and lengthily titled) 2005 tome Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The LA. It not only captured a remarkable time, but also a remarkable place - the seismic valleys of the Hollywood Hills, and the incredible body of music that nestled within amid a haze of drugs, bed-hopping and hippyish idealism. Covering the denim-clad years that were the first nine of my own existence, Hoskyns charted the fortunes of, frankly, an incredible group of musicians living, mainly, in and around Laurel Canyon, a semi-rustic community barely a ten-minute detour from the gaudiness of Sunset Boulevard. 

With Mulholland Drive running through it, the canyon has always attracted Hollywood royalty, seeking escape from the bright lights of Tinseltown, but in the period in question it became the epicentre of artistic idealism, exemplified by the presence of Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Steven Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne (who shared a house with Glenn Frey, with the two of them writing early song for the Eagles, like Taking It Easy). Another figure in this internecine cauldron was Linda Ronstadt, who would run into the likes of Frey and Don Henley ‘down the hill’ at West Hollywood's Troubador, a legendary venue that played a huge part in the careers of Mitchell and Taylor (with whom she had a relationship, as did Crosby), the Eagles themselves and sometime member JD Souther, The Byrds, Elton John and Carole King. Another figure inextricably linked to this web was David Geffen, a prominent figure in Hoskyns’ book for his own colourful life, as well as the ambition that made him one of the most powerful figures in showbusiness.

Five years prior to Hoskyns’ book, Cameron Crowe stepped back into the same place and time with his semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, recalling his own experiences as a teenaged Rolling Stone writer, mixing with the likes of Poco, the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin and [again] the Eagles during their wildest period of LA hell-raising. This was clearly a time of arch decadence and louche behaviour, but it should never be forgotten that there was also some sweet, sweet music that came out of it. 

Which brings me to a new film (well, a new film in the UK), that celebrates the countrified rock (or folkified pop - take your pick) that poured out of LA’s canyons from the mid-60s onwards, becoming known, invariably, as ‘the California Sound’. Echo In The Canyon, directed by former music journalist and record executive Andrew Slater, captures the fertility of both the time and a locale that intoxified so many rock luminaries, many of whom came to stay and enjoy Laurel Canyon’s various pleasures.

The film features interviews with the late Tom Petty (in his last filmed interview), Brian Wilson, Eric Clapton and Graham Nash, all of whom fell under the canyon’s spell (a “legendary paradise,” - Petty, a “heavenly place,” - Clapton). Crucially, it examines the "avalanche" of music that poured down the mountainsides from the likes of Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas And The Papas and the various bands and artists they were associated with. "The music that came out of the Laurel Canyon scene was inspiring to my generation of songwriters," says Jakob Dylan - Bob’s son and both the film’s anchor and executive producer. "The best test of songwriting is that it transcends its moment in time," Dylan explains, "and there is no doubt that the songs we explore in this film are as powerful today as they were in 1965."

The documentary, which has finally appeared theatrically in the UK, two years after I first came across its US release, also includes interviews with Stills and Crosby, ex-Mama-and-Papa Michelle Phillips, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and even Ringo Starr, who became enamoured by the canyon scene’s romanticism himself. Indeed, critics have claimed that the film spends too much time in the company of the Beatle and Beach Boy Wilson, under-representing many of the names and actual residents of the LA canyons that contributed to the richness of its musical and artistic output. But, in fairness, it only takes the canyon story up until the year in which I popped into the world. In the process, it also revisits the richness of canyon’s musical output, with new recordings of Pete Seeger’s The Bells of Rhymney by Beck, Norah Jones’ interpretation of The Association’s Never My Love, Stephen Stills and Eric Clapton covering Buffalo Springfield’s Questions, and a couple from Canyonite, Neil Young. 

Plenty of distinct geographies have been responsible for musical genres - from New York to Liverpool, Nashville to Manchester - but there was something about Laurel Canyon and the bungalows and hippyish spirit that fermented there which led to some of the most interesting fusion of folk, rock and pop the 1960s and 1970s produced. And Echo In The Canyon captures it all, in highly entertaining form.

Takin' it easier - Glenn Frey: 1948-2016

© Simon Poulter 2013

There's a common misconception amongst us Brits that our American cousins are bereft of irony. Not so. Jesse Hughes and Josh Homme's creation of the Eagles Of Death Metal proves otherwise.

As at least one legend has it, the Californian band that met the spotlight in the grimmest of circumstances last November arrived at their moniker after Hughes and Homme saw a man in a London bar dancing to The Scorpions' Wind of Change. The man explained that he was frugging to death metal. "No it's not," Homme is said to have replied. "This is like the Eagles of death metal."

That Homme entertained a play on words around one of America's most revered, representative and also sneered-at rock bands demonstrates a delightful, if unexpected, degree of chutzpah. 

To some, the 'original' Eagles are a brand of corporate rock and roll, as familiar as Starbucks or as predictable as a Ford car. Punk, which was very angry about many things, had bands like the Eagles in its sights for this very reason, as well as the post-hippie prevelence for chambray shirts, denim and centre-parted hair.

It should also be noted that punk really erupted in 1976, the year that the Eagles released their biggest selling album, Hotel California, the title track of which remains today their most defining, and itself was a somewhat punkish rejection of the plastic facade that was LA life back then.

Even now, the Eagles generate caustic derision from those of a reactionary bent, agitated by their gentle, unprepossesing country rock and the "peaceful, easy feeling" of their soft harmonies and readiness for narcoleptic FM radio. This, they say, is music "only unadventurous Americans could like".

However, the unexpected death yesterday of the Eagles founder member Glenn Frey triggers reconsideration of one of the most extroardinary periods in the storied history of California's musical timeline.

Whenever I've been asked to name a period that I would have most liked to have lived in, it is never Shakespeare's England (plague, smallpox and syphillis...?), Dickens' London or The Beatles' Liverpool, but the canyons in the Hollwood Hills in the late 1960s. For then, as Barney Hopkins' essential read Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters And Cocaine Cowboys In The L.A. Canyons 1967-1976 details, you had the confluence of rock, country and folk in Laurel Canyon or Malibu Canyon, with the likes of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Doors and Joni Mitchell hanging out, creating beautiful things.

LA was an incredible hotbed of music, the southern Californian sunshine fertilising what had become a giant campus for songwriters and session players, where everyone knew everyone everyone - CSN&Y, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, Randy Newman, Warren Zeavon and J D Souther. 

Drawn to this world was Detroit-born Frey, who wound up sharing an apartment with Jackson Browne and Souther (forming the syllable-tastic Longbranch Pennywhistle), and moving into a music scene that gravitated around Ronstadt (already working with Don Henley) and West Hollywood's Troubadour club on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Out of this musical minestrone soup came captivating combinations, with one band in particular emerging at its fulcrum: legendary guitar and banjo player Bernie Leadon from the Burritos, bassist Randy Meisner from Poco, seasoned lead guitarist Don Felder, Henley - the boy from a 'one stop light' Texan town - and Frey. 

This original line-up (i.e. before Leadon, Meisner and Felder left and Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit came in) set about their self-titled debut album, though recording took place a long way from LA's blue-eyed beaches, but at London's Olympic Studios under then producer-du-jour Glyn Johns. 

The album process may not have been a happy one for band or producer, but it did at least put them on the map, thanks in no small part to Browne and Frey's domestic arrangement also producing the quintessential Eagles song, Take It Easy, a song that became something of a metaphor for the band's musical outlook, with it's memorable line - represented in the photograph at the top of this page from my Route 66 adventure in 2013 - "Well, I'm a standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin' down to take a look at me."

Seeing the Eagles for myself, finally, at Madison Square Garden a few months after my Winslow visit, on a tour in which the reformed line-up of Frey, Leadon, Henley, Schmitt and Walsh ran through the band's musical history as part homespun fireside chat, part concert, one thing was clear: for all of Henley's higher profile as an 80s solo star, and Walsh's deserved reputation as one of rock's greatest guitarists, Frey was the architect of the Eagles' broader spectrum.

His voice, heard on Take It Easy and thus the first voice on the first track on the first album by the Eagles, has often been overlooked for its role in shaping the Eagles' sound, as an instrument in its own right. But there it was, 41 years after the world first heard "Well, I'm running down the road tryin' to loosen my load", stronger than ever, and as sublime as ever.

© Simon Poulter 2013

What wasn't quite certain, that November evening in New York, was just how much true love remained across that stage. Until the Eagles re-emerged with the Hell Freezes Over album as part of the unplugged trend, their tenure as one of the biggest bands in the 1970s extended almost exclusively within that term - releasing just six albums between their 1972 debut and their breakup release, The Long Run in 1979.

"It had stopped being fun," Frey told The Independent in 1992. "We no longer trusted each others' instincts," adding that being in a band of competitive talents with all the tour distractions that the era offered up exposed themselves to each other. 

"Like, how we each reacted to the pressure, and how it was hard to cope with it rationally because we'd been living this lifestyle of limos, private jets, first-class hotels and people doing what you told them to. Plus, both Henley and I had developed drug habits, which didn't help matters."

The Eagles' breakup saw all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, enter the 1980s with new solo careers. Henley, like that other drumming singer Phil Collins, joined the realms of MTV-saturated AOR. 

As has often been remarked, actors want to be rock stars (Bruce Willis, Don Johnson) and rock stars have a habit of wanting to become actors (Lennon, Jagger, Bowie, Sting, Collins). And so Frey enjoyed his own place in the zeitgeist, contributing The Heat Is On to the Beverley Hills Cop soundtrack, and having his song Smuggler's Blues turned into an episode of Miami Vice, in which he starred. He also turned up in episodes of Wiseguy (a seminal series for its time) and, later, Jerry Maguire. These, though, can be regarded as distractions.

In the 80s and 90s Frey produced a handful of spotty albums - No Fun Aloud, The Allnighter, Soul Searchin' and Strange Weather, to varying degrees of reception, but nothing ever to scale the same heights as the Eagles in their prime. Their inevitable thaw, and the return to touring wasn't intended to replensish the coffers, but perhaps, vicariously through the encouragement of promoters, it replenished the relationship that remained at the band's core.

Frey and Henley were, though, never the Eagles' Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, or Becker and Fagen. For a start, theirs wasn't a songwriting partnership. One would often sing on songs written by the other in conjunction with other members of the band, but only occasionally would they co-create.

It was their drive that fuelled the original seven-year blizzard of soft-rock - Frey's upper Midwest hardiness and Henley's Texan bluntness leading to both the fabled creative tension as well as the greatest creativity. "I love him and love the records he makes – he's a craftsman – but most of the time I don't like him!" Frey said of Henley in The Independent interview. 

The sentiment was - respectfully, but somewhat tartly - reciprocated by Henley in his statement following Frey's death: "He was like a brother to me; we were family, and like most families, there was some dysfunction. But, the bond we forged 45 years ago was never broken, even during the 14 years that the Eagles were dissolved."

Now, sadly, it has, as rock music mourns the loss of yet another of its sons, one who may not have been one of its biggest points of influence, but certainly remains one of its biggest in terms of legacy.