How Joni Mitchell (And Uninterested Women) Helped The Eagles Land Their First No. 1 Hit, in a Roundabout Way

I’m not going to say that women are solely responsible for The Eagles’ success. But they’ve certainly helped over the years. From Linda Ronstadt serving as the driving impetus behind the founding members playing together to the women who helped inspire their first No. 1 hit, “Best Of My Love”, the West Coast soft-rock band has plenty of women to thank, including Joni Mitchell. 

As Glenn Frey explained in a conversation with Cameron Crowe, he wrote the track accidentally in Laurel Canyon one afternoon. “I was trying to figure out a tuning that Joni Mitchell had shown me,” he recalled. “I got lost. [But I] ended up with the guitar tuning for what would later turn out to be ‘Best Of My Love’.” 

By that point, Mitchell’s reputation for eccentric tunings preceded her. Ironically, these tunings were necessary modifications to make the chord shapes more accessible after polio affected her hand’s mobility. In doing so, she created a new system of playing that even people with full mobility struggled to keep up with. 

And according to Don Henley, who offered his own insight into “Best Of My Love”, Mitchell wasn’t the only woman who helped form the song.

Joni Mitchell and Uninterested Women in General Helped Shape “Best Of My Love”

During the same conversation with Cameron Crowe, Don Henley revealed that the lyrics to “Best Of My Love” formed while he and J.D. Souther were sitting in one of their usual spots at Dan Tana’s, an Italian restaurant in West Hollywood. “That was the period when there were all these great-looking girls who didn’t really want to have anything to do with us,” he remembered.

Henley admitted that The Eagles were especially rough around the edges during this time. “We wanted the girls to like us, but we had all the immature emotions that young men have,” he said. And like most emotionally immature men, they had an affinity for women who didn’t like them back. Even when other women showed interest in them, Henley said they “brushed them off.”

These kinds of encounters with women at Dan Tana’s (and elsewhere) also helped inspire a line to the title track of the album they put out the previous year, Desperado. “We knew ourselves even then,” Henley said. (Referring to the line that says, “You only want the ones that you can’t get.”) The drummer added, “Shaw was right. Youth is wasted on the young.”

And while that might be true, that’s not to say these interactions were all bad. The combination of lyrical inspiration from women giving the young men the cold shoulder and musical inspiration from Joni Mitchell helped bring “Best Of My Love” to its full potential. The song was the third single from On The Border and the band’s first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

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