Although they’d already established themselves with breezy ballads like “Take It Easy” and “Desperado”, the Eagles were still searching for that elusive No. 1 hit when they recorded their third album, On the Border. On this day (March 1), that finally happened when “Best of My Love” topped the U.S. singles chart. It would also hit No. 1 on both the all-genre Hot 100 and Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart—not bad for a song conceived in a restaurant booth.
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In a 2003 interview with Cameron Crowe, Don Henley said that the Eagles wrote much of “Best Of My Love” while sitting at their favorite booth at Dan Tana’s, a popular Italian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, California. Acclaimed singer-songwriter J.D. Souther wrote the bridge, which Henley called “perfect.”
“Glenn [Frey] found the tune; the tune I think came from a Fred Neil record,” Souther recalled in 2009. He added, “The three of us were writing it and were on deadline to get it finished. I don’t know where we got the inspiration. I can rarely tell you where I get inspiration.” (According to Marc Eliot’s 2004 book To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, Henley’s breakup with former girlfriend Susannah Martin inspired “Best Of My Love.”
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Of “Best Of My Love”, Glenn Frey recalled, “I was playing acoustic guitar one afternoon in Laurel Canyon, and I was trying to figure out a tuning that Joni Mitchell had shown me a couple of days earlier. I got lost and ended up with the guitar tuning for what would later turn out to be ‘The Best of My Love.’”
Released as the third single from 1974’s On the Border, “Best of My Love” gave the Eagles their first-ever Hot 100 chart-topper. And they owe much of its success to Jim Higgs, a radio DJ from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who promoted the song heavily.
Higgs died in 2024. Ten years earlier, the Eagles invited him to their September 2014 show in Grand Rapids, where they personally thanked him backstage.
“We had more or less given up hope for the success of the On the Border album, and we’d begun work on the next album,” Henley told Rolling Stone in 2016. “So, when ‘The Best of My Love’ took off, it was like a resurrection, a miracle. Totally unexpected.”
Featured image by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns)
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