Many people, including The Eagles themselves, considered Hotel California to be their peak. Truthfully, it probably is, and that is not a bad thing in the slightest. After all, the album did peak at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and featured classic hits such as “Hotel California”, “Wasted Time”, and “Life In The Fast Lane”. Frankly, every song on the album is a classic, and that is why it is considered one of the greatest of all time.
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The Eagles very well could have ridden off into the sunset with a bag full of money and a legacy completely encased in gold. However, that is not what true artists do. Rather, true artists compete with themselves and try to outperform their former work. Well, that, and some more, is what The Eagles tried to do with their follow-up album, The Long Run. Although that didn’t happended as planned, and Glenn Frey once revealed the dramatic and storybook irony surrounding the follow-up album.
The Eagles Weren’t Practicing What They Were Preaching
When The Eagles were writing and recording The Long Run, the band was not in the best of places. Critics were calling them washed up, and internal band tensions started to rise. Ultimately, following the albums’ release, The Eagles broke up in 1980. However, that was after they went No. 1 with The Long Run on the Billboard 200.
Concerning the bad spot The Eagles were in, Don Henley told Rolling Stone, “Despite the extraordinary success of Hotel California, we were collectively in a pretty dark place during the making of The Long Run.”
“We were beginning to see press articles about how we were passé. Those kinds of jabs were part of the inspiration for the song ‘The Long Run’: ‘Who is gonna make it/We’ll find out in the long run.” “The group was breaking apart, imploding under the pressure of trying to deliver a worthy follow-up to Hotel California, and yet we were writing about longevity, posterity. Turns out we were right. Irony upon irony,” continued Henley.
So, while the lyrics and the title of the album professed a long and fruitful career, that was not the case. Despite the fact that the album was an enormous success, The Eagles just couldn’t do it any longer, and that is why they broke up in 1980 following the release of the album. However, and as you all already probably know, the group did get back together in 1994.
Photo of Eagles Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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