By 1969, San Diego-based singer and songwriter Jack Tempchin was making his way around the Southern California music scene, often playing local coffee shops. After a gig a El Centro one night, Tempchin met a waitress he liked, and when they didn’t hook up that night, he tried sleeping on the venue floor but instead began writing “Peaceful Easy Feeling” on the back of one of his paper flyers, designed by his friend.
For years, he worked on his song “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” finishing it in various spots around San Diego, and finished it while waiting for his order, a Polish Dog, at the Der Wienerschnitzel restaurant, where, decades later, a plaque would be placed to honor the songwriting event. After most of the coffee shops he played at started closing down, Tempchin made his way up north to Los Angeles in 1972, where he connected with Glenn Frey, J.D. Souther, and Jackson Browne.
In Los Angeles, Tempchin still had the song he started writing three years earlier about a night in the late ’60s that never happened. Over time, the song evolved from the waitress to other women who inspired the songwriter along the way, including one with striking earrings at a street fair, prompting the opening lines.
I like the way your sparkling earrings lay
Against your skin, it’s so brown
And I wanna sleep with you in the desert tonight
With a billion stars all around
‘Cause I gotta peaceful easy feeling
And I know you won’t let me down
‘Cause I’m already standing
On the ground
And I found out a long time ago
What a woman can do to your soul
Ah, but she can’t take you anyway
You don’t already know how to go
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“I liked it, but it was just my new song,” said Tempchin of his song. “I didn’t think it was going to be a hit. I didn’t think it had a hook. It’s not a love song exactly. The guy’s going, “Hey, either way it’s going to be fine. I heard Don Henley sing for the first time, and it was by far the best thing I had ever heard.”
‘The Eagles’
When Frey first heard “Peaceful Easy Feeling” at his then-neighbor Browne’s apartment in Echo Park, the Eagles had only been together for a little over a week. Before then, the Eagles played as Linda Ronstadt’s backing band on tour in 1971 before breaking off and getting signed to David Geffen’s Asylum Records.
“He said he had a new band that had only been together for eight days,” recalled Tempchin, who was staying at Browne and Souther’s apartment at the time. “He wanted to know if I’d mind if they worked it up.” The song ended up the the Eagles’ 1972 self-titled debut with Frey on vocals.
After their debut hit “Take It Easy,” a co-write with Browne, and Don Henley and Bernie Leadon’s “Witchy Woman,” which fared even better on the charts, hitting No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, “Peaceful Easy Feeling” was the band’s third single to chart at No. 22.
At one point early on, Frey had tired of the song, but eventually came back around to it. During the band’s Hotel California tour, Randy Meisner suggested pulling out the band’s hit “Take It to the Limit” from the Eagles’ set, but Frey put the song in perspective. “I called him up and I said, ‘Do you think I like singing ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ every night?” recalled Frey in the 2013 Eagles documentary History of the Eagles. “I’m tired of those songs. But there’s people in the audience who’ve been waiting years to see us do those songs.’”
The song remained on the Eagles’ setlists in the decades to follow and grew on Frey. “Compared to the original recording, it’s evolved through live performances to where it’s a bit of a different animal now,” Frey told director Cameron Crowe in 2003. “‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ had a happy, country-rock quality but a bittersweet irony about it that I thought was really great. I still love that song. Love singing it.”
Tempchin’s Final Song with Frey and “Peaceful Easy Feeling Day”
Tempchin continued collaborating with the Eagles, co-writing the band’s hit “Already Gone” from the band’s third album, On the Border (1974). He also co-wrote Frey’s 1985 solo hit “You Belong to the City,” which became a hit on the TV crime drama Miami Vice. By the ’90s, Tempchin contributed to the Eagles’ “The Girl From Yesterday,” co-written with Frey and featured on their 1994 live album Hell Freezes Over, and “Somebody” from the Eagles’ final album with Frey, Long Road Out of Eden in 2007.
Following Frey’s death in 2016, Tempchin came across a batch of demos he recorded with Frey during the early 1990s, including one of the last songs they wrote together, “One More Time With Feeling.” Tempchin finally released the song on his 2019 album of the same name.
On December 1, 2012, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders commemorated the 40th anniversary of his first song with the Eagles by declaring “Peaceful Easy Feeling Day” in the city. In celebration, the Wienerschnitzel restaurant, where Tempchin finished the song, dedicated a table and a plaque to the songwriter.
“The mayor declared ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ Day here two years ago,” said Tempchin in 2015. “So, they brought me back to the place and presented me with a solid gold wiener. Lots of people have Grammys. But they don’t have a solid gold wiener.”
Photo: Glenn Frey, 1970 (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
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