Screen cap of the Glenn Frey tribute
As one might expect, the death of Glenn Frey spelled the end of The Eagles, as his longtime artistic and songwriting partner Don Henley confirmed yesterday (3/10) in a Transatlantic phone chat with BBC Radio 2 DJ Simon Mayo.
“I don’t think you’ll see us performing again,” says Henley, who confirms that the Frey tribute that had him and Eagles Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmidt and former Eagle Bernie Leadon performing “Take It Easy” with Jackson Browne at the Grammy Awards show on February 16th “was the final farewell. I think that was probably it. I think it was an appropriate farewell.”
Doing it was “very difficult and very emotional. We actually almost didn’t do it. But the Grammy people were very insistent so we decided we would do it, and Jackson was the appropriate person to sing the song, because as most people know, Jackson started the song… and Glenn helped him finish it many many years ago, back in the early ’70s. So he was the perfect person to come sing the song in tribute. I thought it went pretty well. We were very emotional but we did it.”
As one might expect, the death of Frey has “been a great loss for a lot of us and we’re still trying to cope with it.”
It was recently announced that Henley will be playing Hyde Park in London on July 2 with Carole King (see our news item here). As he told Mayo, “I’m always glad to come to the U.K. The Eagles were there back in June 2014, we played the 02. And I brought my family over and we has a wonderful vacation and went out to my ancestral counties of Somerset and Dorset and drove around in a vehicle for a while and looked at the old sod. So I’m looking forward to coming over there again and playing Hyde Park with my old friend Carole King. I’ve been friends with Carole since 1974 and am delighted that her career is still going so strongly.”
Since King will be playing her landmark 1970 album Tapestry in full at the Hyde Park concert, Mayo asked Henley if he ever might ever do a similar show. “In the Eagles in the ’70s we played Desperado from top to bottom,” he recalls. “Sadly enough, we had been thinking about maybe doing a tour this summer playing Hotel California from top to bottom but obviously that’s not going to happen now.”
He also reports that “I’m already thinking about the new record and it’s going to be very different from the Cass County album. I’m going to go back to… in the 1960s and early ’70s I listened to a lot of rhythm and blues and Southern soul music. I’m a big fan of soul music – Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, things like that. So I may go in that direction. I’m not sure yet.”
Meanwhile, as reported here today, Henley has a special resort weekend fan experience and show coming up from April 30 to May 2.
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2 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationI think Don has it right, as sad as it is to hear it’s quite appropriate that they have decided to call it over I know for myself, if I was a part of the band even a year later it would still be hard to go out there and not have someone like Glenn not there