Do these two ’70s behemoths have anything left to say to us?
Classic rock radio destroyed a lot of bands through sheer overexposure. That’s not their fault. But it leads to an interesting test of critical analysis. Do I hate Queen and The Eagles with a white-hot passion because they limply exploited the hard rock form and punched way above their weight class? Or am I just sick of them? And if it’s the latter, can I go back into their discographies and find anything new they can say? Why would that be worth my time?
Queen and The Eagles are part of the tapestry of growing up. They have sentimental value. But it’s impossible for them not to be attached to us somehow since classic rock radio played them into the ground, dug them up, and then buried them again. Odds are in their favor that at least one of their songs complemented a key moment or two in our adolescence.
Classic rock radio filled our backyards, garages, and accompanied us as we drove anywhere, thousands upon thousands of hours of guitars and drums selling an attitude, a way of life, a sound that linked us together – buffeted by gruff DJs who helped us get through endless afternoons of heat, dust, and aimless wanderings. As time went on, the playlists on our favorite stations got depressingly constricted and funneled, cynically playing off our need for comfort, until only a few songs and bands remained. We didn’t want change, I guess.
In the end, we burned out on a lot of the bands – especially Queen and The Eagles.
Queen: Anemic lightweights, but we love Freddie
In Queen’s case, we have four amazing musicians and a classic front man who has reached an almost mythical status. Everybody loves Freddie Mercury, as they should. But Queen always seemed like a lightweight alternative to much heavier fair, steeped in cheesy seventies glam, quadruple-tracked harmonies, and, in the case of a song like “You’re My Best Friend,” sounds and sentiments that made me retch on a primal level. One note of the gurgle synth thing in that song sends me over the edge in the grocery store, raging against cracker-thin pabulum, saccharine nonsense, and a middle-of-the-road point of view that took the balls right out of classic rock radio.
The revisionism started after Freddie died, and suddenly Queen became a bastion for hard rock glory, popping up on best lists of this or that on the strength of Freddie’s pure charisma alone (he did kill it at Live Aid). They weren’t in those conversations when we were growing up, not even once. It’s not that we can’t rediscover their music, re-assess it and give them their due as we frantically pluck moments out of the past – but, fair or not, Queen proves to me the limits of that kind of thinking: Not everything still has use or can speak to us across time. We’re limiting ourselves if we think so.
Queen coats me fully in the murky dust of the seventies without offering any lasting feeling other than vague disappointment and failed potential. They don’t say anything; they don’t inspire anything. They just sit there with the same emotional beats and sounds on every song – limp, anemic, and something resembling resignation.
Still, “Bohemian Rhapsody” stands as an inspiring, ingenious track that got an unexpected second life when Wayne’s World paid homage in the early nineties. It’s Queen’s best song by a mile, crystallizing all their weirdness into a suite that holds together thanks to tons of hooks and Freddie’s expressive conviction. The stunning title track for Innuendo (1992), the only Queen album I ever owned, shows a band finally putting away their childish simplicities and feeble mixes for something more thunderous and profound. Deep tracks on Queen’s interminable series of records in the seventies show these hints of promise, but they vanish into the wind as quickly as they arrive, suffocated by Queen’s usual bag of tricks: Novelty vocals, kitsch, and pastiche – just another hard rock band strutting in poor imitation of much better groups.
The Eagles: What can we say beyond what The Dude knows?
The Eagles carved out a snide, country-rock California vibe that turned out to be a slightly more palatable soundtrack to the wonders of chilling out around the pool on lazy Sunday afternoons. A terrific singles band, the Eagles cultivated a warm studio sound hampered slightly – and eventually turning mushy – by a drum-bass combo that may be the least energized rhythm section in the history of rock. The common perception is that the Eagles only really caught fire as a rock and roll band when firebrand guitarist Joe Walsh joined the fold – and it’s true. But Hotel California (1977), as good as it is, still sounds like clipped, pandering shit, and only the title track, Walsh’s “Pretty Maids all in a Row,” and Frey’s dreamy “New Kid in Town” perfectly hit that deadened, backroom seventies sleaze thing to perfection.
The Good Things: Cultural Decay and Late Nights
Henley’s voice is a wonder, though, on the title track, which I always let play all the way through to the end no matter where I hear it. The dual guitar solo (from Walsh and Don Felder, who may be the only two members of the group to come out of this whole thing unscathed) deserves its legendary status; it’s as good as advertised, more lyrical and thrilling than nearly anything else in the band’s catalog.
Henley and Frey never wrote a better set of lyrics, finally achieving the artistic statement they’d always strived for in their towering tear down of Western cultural decay. The song reminds me of late nights, driving home from somewhere with the window rolled down, smoking a cigarette and trying to figure out the right questions to ask myself about what the hell I thought I was doing. There’s the old bakery, there’s that one church, there’s that one place we used to play as kids, all these landmarks turning into distorted blobs in the rearview mirror as I slowly head home on wet streets.
“Hotel California” and the iconography/controversy around it still has the power to transform and transcend, overplayed as it is, because the lyrics give us a thrilling peak at how the other half lives and seem to suggest a harrowing price for our souls no matter which terrifying route we take. The rise and fall of the piece, complete with stinging asides and slight modulations each go-around of verse/chorus, shows great insight in how to dramatically construct songs around limited chord changes, the solo suggesting deliverance or at least a realization about the futility of struggle. It will set you free.
Cowboy-nightclub-renegade posers or not, the Eagles rode their soft rock charms to more album sales than nearly anyone else in history, but they’re a band that seems uncomfortably symbolic of a stuck place, a place we both long for and feel trapped by, a place that won’t leave us alone. Queen and the Eagles make me sad in their unmovable state, their satisfaction with being inert. “Life in the Fast Lane”? We never got out of second gear. To fully live, to fully move on and find anything that will make me happy, I have to let them both go.