Glenn Frey
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Glenn Frey Biography
Glenn Frey is best known as one of the two most popular and
longest tenured members (along with Don Henley) of the Eagles, and as
an intermittently successful solo artist in the decades since that band
ceased being a full-time working group. Although associated closely
with the Eagles' brand of Southern California-spawned laid-back
country-rock, Frey's origins were a long way away from either the place
or the music that his work came to epitomize. He was born in Detroit in
1948, and grew up in Royal Oak, MI. Music was just one of many
interests that drove him during childhood -- a precocious youth, he was
an avid reader and, despite his relatively small stature, a serious
athlete in elementary and junior high school. He also took piano
lessons from age five -- at the insistence of his parents -- until just
before his teen years. His interests in high school included such
advanced and outre subjects for the time as the writings of
Jack Kerouac and the films and image of actor James Dean, who died when
Frey was seven years old; they reflected a rebellious and aggressive
nature that also manifested itself in an attraction to rock & roll.
The music had come along during Frey's childhood -- he was seven when
Rock Around the Clock shot to number one on the charts, and eight
when Elvis Presley became a national phenomenon. In contrast to his
future bandmate Timothy B. Schmit, Frey was never a would-be folkie,
but jumped right into rock & roll, especially after he saw -- at
age 16 -- how girls reacted to rock stars on stage.
He took up the guitar in earnest after seeing the Beatles perform in
1964, and passed through several amateur and semi-professional
Detroit-based bands in his late teens, including the Mushrooms, who
became a major local attraction on the local television show Robin
Seymour's Swinging Time, and appeared regularly at a teen club called
The Hideout, as well as cutting a single, Such a Lovely Child, for
Hideout Records (produced by a somewhat older, more advanced local
rocker named Bob Seger). The Mushrooms split soon after, and Frey
joined the folk-rock group the Four of Us; he subsequently formed two
more Detroit teen bands, the Subterraneans and the Heavy Metal Kids.
Frey attended college somewhat reluctantly, preferring to devote most
of his energy to playing music, chasing girls, and smoking marijuana --
in the course of his early career, he did manage to sit in on a couple
of sessions with Seger, and at age 19 played acoustic guitar and sang
backup on Ramblin' Gamblin' Man from the latter's Capitol Records
debut in 1968.
Frey eventually decided, however, that Detroit wasn't the place for him
to launch a serious career in rock music and headed west to California.
He was fortunate enough to make contact with John David Souther, a
fellow Detroit transplant who was already a promising practitioner of
what would soon be known as country-rock. He was dating Frey's
girlfriend's sister, and he soon showed Frey how to play and sing
country music, which was increasingly making itself felt in the rock
music coming out of the Golden State. The two tried composing as a
team, even landing a publishing contract that helped keep them going
during those lean late-'60s years, splitting 90 dollars a week between
them -- the publishing deal fell apart through their inability to write
the kind of commercial material that was being sought, but in the
course of writing together, they also developed a coherent sound that
soon became very attractive, and something they could build on. Thus
was born Longbranch Pennywhistle, a country-rock group whose timing was
a little premature on a commercial level but not too soon to be signed
to Amos Records, a small Los Angeles-based label. The group's
self-titled album, which included Doug Kershaw, as well as Ry Cooder
and the renowned L.A. sessionmen James Burton on guitar, Larry Knechtel
on piano, and Joe Osborn on bass, never got the promotion it would have
taken to make it a success. Souther and Frey kept making the rounds of
the folk clubs in the city and the surrounding area, crossing paths
with the likes of Jackson Browne -- then an ex-member of the Nitty
Gritty Dirt Band with some great songs to his credit as a composer --
and Linda Ronstadt. Eventually, Frey, Souther, and Browne ended up
sharing a house together, and the two of them sang on Browne's demo of
Jamaica Say You Will. Browne was already being managed by David
Geffen, who, at Browne's urging, also became Frey's informal music
business advisor. Meanwhile, he and Souther were forced to disband
their own group in order to get out of the contract with Amos Records,
which seemed like a dead end, and both spent a fair amount of time
around The Troubadour, the club that constituted the folk-rock mecca
for the West Coast. Frey wanted to try and form a new group, but was
persuaded instead to consider going on the road backing Linda Ronstadt,
who was about to tour in support of the release of her debut Asylum
Records album, Silk Purse.
Frey also met Don Henley, who was in a band called Shiloh -- which was
also signed to Amos Records and also getting nowhere fast -- and
persuaded him, in the course of their mutual commiserations, to join
the band working behind Ronstadt. The ranks of the band, formed in the
summer of 1971, eventually came to include Frey and Henley, and Randy
Meisner, who'd lately played with Rick Nelson on-stage and on the Rudy
the Fifth album, and ex-Flying Burrito Brothers member Bernie Leadon.
Within a short time, however, they'd made plans to separate themselves
from Ronstadt and go off on their own. After a cold audition -- with no
advance demo tape -- in front of Geffen, they had a manager and, after
getting Frey out of his contract with Amos Records, they went to
Colorado for some time off. There they worked out who they were and
what their sound would be, picked up their first producer, Glyn Johns,
took on the name the Eagles, and were signed to Geffen's newly formed
Asylum Records.
Although all four members of the Eagles composed songs and sang, Frey
and Henley quickly emerged as the two with the most commercial musical
ears, Frey as co-author (with Jackson Browne) and lead singer on their
first single, Take It Easy, which reached number 12 on the charts in
the summer of 1972, and Henley as co-author (with Leadon) of Witchy
Woman, which got to number nine that fall. Although the group had
succeeded in attracting generally favorable press attention and
reasonably good sales, with one Top Ten single and a debut album that
peaked at number 22 in a seven-week run on the charts, Frey and Henley
between them decided that this was not enough, and that their next
album would have to be something more than just a body of good tunes
and a couple of AM-friendly cuts -- between them, they turned what
became Desperado into a very ambitious (for the time) thematic-based
concept album, which was something relatively unusual in country-rock.
Frey and Henley also co-wrote the title track, which was perhaps the
finest album track in the group's history (although it's arguable that
every track on Desperado that didn't make it onto a 45 fits into that
category). Although the concept caught Leadon and Meisner by surprise,
especially as songwriters, they quickly came aboard and Desperado ended
up being one of the finest records ever to come out of the '70s
country-rock scene.
And it was a measure of the unity that the band still felt at this time
that, when Desperado stalled on the charts just outside of the Top 40
and neither of its two singles did better than number 59 -- mostly
owing to disorganization of Asylum Records at the time, which was being
sold and merged with Elektra Records -- all of the members took this as
a professional affront. Frey's singing also improved markedly between
the first two albums, and he was now effectively, with Henley, the one
of two co-equal focal points in the band. By the time of their third
album, a fifth Eagle had joined in the guise of Don Felder, whose
guitar sound toughened up the band's overall sound, and especially
their harder rock & roll side. By the time he joined, for the On
the Border album, which marked a commercial comeback, peaking at number
17, the band had split into two divisions, with Frey and Henley more or
less the stable core, while Leadon -- who wasn't entirely happy over
Felder's guitar being added to their sound, when he wanted to play more
straight-ahead electric guitar -- and Meisner seemed to be part of a
less cohesive unit just outside of that core. By the time they toured
in support of their fourth album, One of These Nights, Leadon was on
his way out, to be replaced by Joe Walsh, and Meisner followed out the
door on the Hotel California tour. By that time, Frey and Henley (in
coordination with their manager, Irving Azoff, a protégé of Geffen's
who'd taken the latter's place when he became too wired up in running
his record label), as co-authors of the string of hit singles that
included One of These Nights, Lyin' Eyes, Take It to the Limit,
Hotel California, New Kid in Town, Life in the Fast Lane, The
Long Run, I Can't Tell You Why, and Heartache Tonight, and one or
the other of them on lead vocals for all but two of those songs, were
more or less running things. Walsh, Felder, and new member Timothy B.
Schmit stayed along for the ride that continued through 1982, when Frey
and Henley, in conjunction with the others -- all of whom were now set
up financially better than they ever could have dreamed, following a
string of arena- and stadium-scale tours, hit singles, and three more
multi-million-selling albums -- put the group on hiatus. What's more,
the Eagles' catalog continued to sell for decades after, on LP and CD,
in multiple editions of the latter.
Frey began a solo career in 1982 with No Fun Aloud, notching a pair of
Top 40 hits with I Found Somebody and The One You Love. He also
embarked on an unexpected acting career in the wake of 1984's The
Allnighter, which spawned the hit Smuggler's Blues, a song that
subsequently inspired an episode of the hit TV series Miami Vice on
which Frey guest starred; his acting work later continued in an
extended guest role on the acclaimed Wiseguy as well as a starring turn
in 1993's South of Sunset, which as a result of its premiere episode's
6.1 Nielsen rating -- believed to be the lowest fall debut in major
network history -- was canceled after only one episode.
Frey's solo musical career reached its peak in 1985 with the Top Ten
smash The Heat Is On, a single from the soundtrack to the Eddie
Murphy comedy Beverly Hills Cop. Frey's contribution to the Miami Vice
soundtrack, You Belong to the City, was also a blockbuster, narrowly
missing the top of the charts. However, his next solo LP, Soul
Searchin', did not follow until 1988, notching only one Top 40 entry,
True Love ; Strange Weather, issued four years later, missed the
charts altogether. After issuing Glenn Frey Live in 1993, he joined the
reunited Eagles on their phenomenally successful Hell Freezes Over
tour, with a live album of the same name reaching number one a year
later. Since then, his releases have consisted of compilations of
earlier solo work. In the late '90s, Frey co-founded his own label,
Mission Records, with attorney Peter Lopez. ~ Bruce Eder & Jason
Ankeny, All Music Guide
Written by Bruce Eder & Jason Ankeny