The Eagles

Eagles are an American rock music group that was formed in Los Angeles, California in the early 1970s. With five number one singles and four number one albums, the Eagles were among the most successful recording artists of the 1970s. more...

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At the end of the 20th century, two of their albums, Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 and Hotel California, ranked among the ten best-selling albums according to the Record Industry Association of America. The best-selling studio album Hotel California is rated as the 37th album in the Rolling Stone list The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. They are also the best-selling American band ever (followed by Aerosmith), with Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 being the best selling album in the US to date (at more than 9 million copies sold, and 15 million units sold worldwide, making it the 2nd best selling album of all time after Thriller by Michael Jackson).

They broke up in 1980, were disbanded for 14 years, but reunited and have since toured regularly, making new fans in the process and continuing to record. The Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.

Overview

The Eagles' early music was a hybrid of country and bluegrass instrumentation grafted onto the harmonies of California surfer rock, producing tender ballads and soft top-down country-flavored pop-rock about relationships, cars, and the wandering life. The originators of this genre were gifted singer/songwriters, among them Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, and Warren Zevon.

The Eagles took the singer-songwriter ethos to a group setting with increased emphasis on arrangements and musicianship, and the group's early sound became synonymous with the southern California country rock. On later albums the band dispensed with bluegrass instrumentation and gravitated to a more straight-ahead rock sound.

History

Formation and success

The band formed in 1971 when Linda Ronstadt's then-manager, John Boylan, extracted Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner from their previous affiliations. They were short a drummer until Frey phoned Don Henley, whom he had met at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. The band backed up Ronstadt on a two-month tour, then decided to form their own band, which would become the Eagles.

Their first album, Eagles, was filled with pure, sometimes innocent country rock, and yielded three Top Forty singles. Their second, Desperado, was themed on Old West outlaws and introduced the group's penchant for conceptual songwriting. Those two albums were produced by Glyn Johns, who previously worked with The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and The Who. The band wanted to rock, but Johns tended to extract the lush side of the band's double-edged music.

Read more at Wikipedia.org