How Can There Be New Eagles Music If You Can't Let Go Of Their Past?

I can't imagine the pressure of being Don Henley and Glen Frey! Hollywood documentaries featured at Sundance, endless tour schedules to greeting fans at an overpriced Los Angeles restaurant; the question always appears on the menu, "When will there be fresh music from the Eagles?" Wait! Wait! I can't go on. I laugh like a wild animal when Classic Rock fans put the need for more Eagles speed into their unwritten chapters. A feast of brilliantly designed pieces could be laid before a fan and without a doubt human nature or just flat out typically boring Americana points the lover of music right back to that Greatest Hits collection. How are we supposed to get into the future if 99.8% of our time is stuck in music's unforgiving trap? The best news: The Eagles aren't taking a tour bus into retirement. Classic Rock Magazine was there when Don Henley and Glenn Frey set about authorizing the new documentary ‘History of the Eagles,’ they took the unusual step of securing an Oscar-winning filmmaker to produce — because, as Frey put it in a recent interview with the New York Times, “Our management sent me what they thought were some of the best music documentaries that had been done. And I wasn’t crazy about any of it.” If that makes it sound like the longtime partners think they deserve a better rock doc than everyone else, well…maybe they do, but at least they didn’t stop director Alison Ellwood from digging up the unvarnished truth about the band’s often contentious history. “We encouraged them to speak to everybody,” insisted Henley. “Including ex-members of the band, who don’t necessarily have warm and fuzzy feelings toward us.” One of the most notorious episodes in Eagles lore concerns the infamous 1980 show that ended with Frey and guitarist Don Felder duking it out. Asked about it now, Frey sounds considerably mellower, saying, “Let’s put it this way: I’m glad I’ve had a second chance. I could have handled some things a lot better. We put the band back together in 1994 and I played music with Don Felder for six years. So I feel like that’s water under the bridge.” Questioned about a new album, both Eagles played coy. “It’s not like we don’t see each other,” shrugged a typically taciturn Henley, while Frey proved a little more expansive on the topic. “The Eagles are a working band,” he explained. “Some years we play a lot of shows, some years we play a dozen shows. We do one year at a time, we think that’s a good way to do it. The band’s going to start thinking about coming back together, and talk about whether everybody wants to uproot themselves from their lives and try to make a record, with all that involves. It’s a shared thing, the leadership. Don and I take turns driving the bus, depending on who’s around.”