Eagles

Ronstadt's band

The Eagles began in early 1971, when Linda Ronstadt and her manager John Boylan recruited Glenn Frey and Don Henley for her band. Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon also joined her summer tour. Frey and Henley decided to start a band of their own, and Frey later credited Ronstadt with suggesting Leadon. The four played behind her live only once, at a July concert at Disneyland, but all of them appear on her self-titled 1972 album. In September 1971 they signed to Asylum Records, the new label of David Geffen, who sent them to Aspen, Colorado to develop as a band. Their first show, that October, was billed as Teen King and the Emergencies. Accounts of how they chose their real name differ, but one version places it on a peyote and tequila outing in the Mojave Desert.

They recorded their debut in London in February 1972 with the producer Glyn Johns, who had at first turned the job down. Eagles came out on 1 June 1972 and produced three Top 40 singles, the first of them Take It Easy, written by Jackson Browne and Frey.

From Desperado to Hotel California

Desperado (1973) took Old West outlaws as its theme and was the record on which Frey and Henley began writing together, eight of its eleven songs. It reached only 41 on the Billboard 200, and its title song was never a single. For On the Border (1974) the band moved toward hard rock and turned from Johns to Bill Szymczyk, and in January 1974 Don Felder was invited to join as a fifth member. "Best of My Love" reached number one in the United States on 1 March 1975, the first of five chart-toppers.

One of These Nights (1975) became their first number-one album and included One of These Nights and Lyin' Eyes. Leadon, unhappy with the move from country toward rock, left in December 1975 and was replaced by Joe Walsh. In February 1976 Asylum issued Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), the first album the RIAA certified Platinum. Hotel California followed on 8 December 1976, with Walsh and Szymczyk, and its title song, Hotel California, topped the singles chart in May 1977. The album won two Grammys and lost the Album of the Year award to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours.

Break-up and return

After eleven months of touring, Meisner left following the 1977 tour, with his last show in East Troy, Wisconsin on 3 September 1977. Timothy B. Schmit replaced him. The Long Run appeared on 24 September 1979, and the band broke up in 1980 after a charged show in Long Beach, California on 31 July. Eagles Live, released in November 1980, was mixed on opposite coasts. Frey, Henley, Walsh, Felder and Schmit all went on to solo careers.

Travis Tritt's video for Take It Easy, made for a 1993 tribute album, brought the five Long Run-era members together, and about two months after the filming Frey and Henley agreed to a reunion. At their first show, in April 1994, Frey said they had never broken up, just taken a 14-year vacation. The live and studio album Hell Freezes Over debuted at number one. In 1998 the Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and all seven past and present members played Take It Easy and Hotel California at the ceremony. Felder was fired on 6 February 2001, and the lawsuits that followed were settled out of court in 2007. That October the band released Long Road Out of Eden, their first album of new material since 1979.

The long goodbye

A career-spanning documentary, History of the Eagles, appeared in 2013, with a tour that ran until July 2015 and brought Leadon back on stage. Frey died on 18 January 2016, aged 67. The band continued in 2017 with his son Deacon Frey and the country singer Vince Gill sharing his parts. In September and October 2019 they played Hotel California in full at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, and in July 2023 they announced a farewell tour, The Long Goodbye, starting on 7 September 2023 at Madison Square Garden. Meisner died on 26 July 2023, at 77. A residency at Sphere in the Las Vegas Valley began in September 2024.