Glenn Frey “Strange Weather”
There once was a kid from the Detroit suburbs. He was smart and talented. Did well in school. Played some piano and guitar. After school he played music with his friends in the garage. On weekends and in the summers, he would caddie at the local country club. As he got older, he drank and smoked some weed. He liked to have a good time. Things came pretty easily to him -- school, girls, music. People liked this kid. The kid knew he was good, but he was also driven to succeed. By the end of high school, he was the head caddie at the country club. His bands won some battle of the bands contests. They even had a song played on local radio. In college, he interned for a local golf clothing company. They made golf pants that breathe well and look good. He had a 4.0 all through his years at Michigan State. He studied, but not too hard. After college, he got offered a job in the executive program at the golf sportswear company. He was an up and comer. He still loved Rock and Roll. But he had to make a choice between a life in business and a life in music. The kid chose business. He still kept a band on the side. But he was a natural at work. He was likable and smart but he could be strong and forceful as well. He rose through the ranks. He helped the company grow internationally. He moved the company’s headquarters to the Bay area. By the time he was forty, he was the company’s CEO. He was a happily married man with three kids of his own. He and his wife hosted fundraisers for their Democratic state senator. He played golf twice a week. Every year, he played in a celebrity pro-am tournament. He even played with Arnold Palmer once. But, privately, he still loved music. He had a great stereo system at home and in his car. He had a band with some friends that played out at wine bars once a month. For special occasions, they’d even play a wedding — 60s Soul covers and some stuff back from his Detroit roots. The kid mostly sang and played guitar. The crowds, tipsy on Chablis and Johnny Walker, loved it. They couldn’t believe that this guy -- once a kid but now a highly successful executive, husband and father -- could be so good at so many things. They wondered how he made all it look so easy. He was just really good at stuff. He was also generally able to avoid stress because he was smart and competent and hard working. Yep. The kid had figured out life. He never met Bob Seger. He never met Jackson Browne. He never met Don Henley. But, he had it all.
This is not the biography of Glenn Frey, but it probably should have been.
By 2013, having listened to more of The Eagles than the average person (and by any statistical measure, even “average” would be a lot) and having also watched the Alex Gibney documentary of the band, I came to realize something both obvious and profound: Glenn Frey was both the C.E.O. of the band and its least talented member. As you comb through the albums, but especially the hits, you begin to see that while Frey’s fingerprints are everywhere, the best songs were written by others and sung by Don Henley. The hits that Frey wrote and performed, namely “Take it Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” are about as likable as they are uninteresting. Save for the band’s harmonies and their larger legacy, the Frey songs would be forgotten by now. Even the truly great songs that he co-wrote with Henley (“Desperado,” “Hotel California,” “One of These Nights”) succeed largely on the tenor of the drummer’s incredible voice.
And yet, Glenn Frey was most clearly the band’s leader. He was the general manager of Henley’s preternatural talent. Frey fired the members he thought were underperforming or asking for too much. Frey handled the interviews. Frey dealt with the lawyers and managers. He was good at it. It came naturally to him. The same part of him that liked things “Easy” and liked his sunrises with tequila, had an aptitude for dealing with high stakes matters. He had charisma. He had ideas about how the band should function. He played good enough rhythm guitar. He could play some keys. His voice was better than adequate. He was good with harmonies. But, more than anything, Glenn Frey knew how to work with Don Henley.
Until he didn’t. The Eagles broke up in 1980. Frey’s run as the band’s C.E.O. was extraordinary, but like many corporations, they just got too big and buckled. Quality suffered. Egos bruised. Cocaine helped. And then hurt. By 1981, Frey was recording his first solo album and found that life without Don Henley looked a lot like the middle of the Adult Contemporary charts. With the benefit of his former band’s reputation, Frey was able to both sell records and get his songs on the radio. As one would expect, the albums were well made. Frey learned his way around a song. He was nothing if not professional. His solo debut was a modest triumph, feasting on pent up Eagles demand. His 1984 follow-up, “The Allnighter,” sold equally well, buoyed by “Smuggler’s Blues,” a decent and “of the moment” hit that was featured in an episode of “Miami Vice” (which Frey also acted in). That same year, Frey scored a hit with “The Heat is On,” a song which he did not write and did not appear on his solo album, but which appeared in “Beverly Hills Cop 2.” Both of these modest hits were more up-tempo, employed pumps of synthesizer and featured Frey as a man of the 80s -- pale suits, no tie, lots of money, plenty of feeling, but no actual effort or struggle. Over time, his music featured less guitar and fewer harmonies. The songs got slower. By the time he released 1988s “Soul Searchin’,” his moment as a bankable Rock star had passed. The album sold poorly. Its singles succeeded on the Adult Contemporary chart but not on the Rock or Pop charts. It was official, Glenn Frey was middle-aged. Worse, he was past prime.
During the late 80s and early 90s, Frey was trying an impossible artistic balancing act. He was attempting to sound serious and passionate with a voice that was easy and cool and in a form that is slow and smooth. He was trying to write everyman songs about life, love and politics from the vantage of unprecedented wealth and privilege. Basically, he was trying to do something that only one other man was doing effectively. And that man was Don Henley.
In 1989, Henley conquered every chart and won every accolade with “The End of The Innocence,” an album of effortless, beautiful, possibly empty politics and vague wisdom. Henley was standing on the corner that Frey wanted to occupy. It was a small corner. And Henley was huge. Additionally, while this was happening, the window for mainstream Rock music was closing. Hair Metal was ascending and Alternative Rock and Hip Hop were percolating. These tectonic shifts were not fully apparent at the time. But, when Glenn Frey got around to his fourth solo album, he was forty-three years old and a complete anachronism. His fans had largely moved on. Radio had moved on. And he was living, on thousands of acres in Aspen, Colorado, happy with his family but deeply resentful of his former bandmate. Though he likely did not know it or understand why, his career as a viable solo artist was over. And yet, he would go forward. Henley wasn’t going to win. No way. Frey hunkered down and made his own fifteen song, hour long epic about universal love and American politics. Glenn Frey couldn’t lose. He had tens of millions of reasons to believe that he would succeed.
“Strange Weather” was released in the summer of 1992. On a chart topped by Mariah Carey, Sir Mix a Lot and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, there was no place for Glenn Frey. The album did not crack the top 200, a first for Frey. The only single from the album of note was “Part of Me, Part of You,” a song from the movie “Thelma and Louise,” released a year earlier and bolted on as the final track for “Strange Weather.” In every quantifiable way, the album failed miserably. It was his last album for a twenty year span and the last album of originals altogether. If it were made by an Adult Contemporary artist not named Glenn Frey, it would be considered eminently professional but ultimately boring. Coming from Frey, though, it is rich with subplot and confounding on many levels.
The songs on “Strange Weather” generally fall into two camps -- (1) plodding, soulful rockers that are slower than “You Belong to the City,” but not properly ballads and (2) mid-tempo, bluesy Rock songs that sound like theme music for a Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando. If those genres fail to entice, I’m sorry to say that it gets worse. Aside from three very brief, unnecessary instrumentals, the average track length runs over five minutes. None of the songs feature extended jams. None of them have the sort of grooves you want to go on endlessly. No. The length is a matter of glacial pace and the singer’s obvious belief that he has a lot to say. There are about a dozen times on “Strange Weather” wherein I thought that if I could play the record at 1.1 or 1.25 times speed, as I could with a podcast, that I would be happier and that the music would not suffer significantly.
For a man who got famous playing acoustic guitars and singing sparkling harmonies, there are almost none to be found on “Strange Weather.” Instead, we get synthesizers that are stuck in the mid 80s and a still very capable enough singer who sounds incapable of conjuring the grit or pain contemplated by his songs and lyrics. He’s the rich man singing about not rich man stuff. It is not his fault. His voice goes down easily — that’s just a genetic feature. But the incongruity of it is unnerving. Instead of playing to his strengths, he reaches well beyond, into the realms of imitation and insincerity. “Long Hot Summer” finds Frey imitating his “Miami Vice” self, over slow keyboards, sturdy bass and some Peter Frampton vocoder-thing that may also just be a synthesizer. Splashing water on his face in the mirror and going on about something that he clearly feels is metaphorical, deep and dark, but reads as empty and meaningless, Frey sings:
It's three o'clock in the morning (don't do it)
You wait for the sirens to moan (don't do it)
You stare at the trigger, but somehow you figure
You don't feel like dying alone (don't do it)
The mean streets are gettin' meaner
Everybody's got a gun
This ain't no city, it's a nightmare darlin'
We're all dying in the sun
It takes five songs for us to get some guitar. But when we do, it’s a third rate imitation of Eric Clapton at his third best. “He Took Advantage (Blues for Ronald Reagan)” is an uninteresting, smoky, bluesy rocker with unforgivable lyrics. Frey tries to sell his anger, but it’s the kind of anger that feels like tangy BBQ sauce on baby back ribs at the Hard Rock Cafe. As politics, it is the height of unsubtle. As a song, it comes close to a groove. But the real crime is that you don’t believe a word of it. It may be the ease of his voice. It may be the dullness of his message. It may be his wealth. Or his compound in Aspen. Whatever it is, it reeks of preachy insincerity. It’s also probably one of the best tracks on “Strange Weather.”
On “River of Dreams,” Frey commits several additional offenses. He plainly rips off the hook from Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Fire” (and “Backstreets”), he plagiarizes The Boss’ lyrical style, and he offers up a title that Billy Joel would use a couple of years later on his ghastly, final solo album. The song, like most of the album, is generally listenable, save for the three extra minutes of nothing great tacked on at the end. When Frey moves away from the plodders, as he does here, there is some relief. But even the palatable tracks generally amount to waiting for a moment that never comes. You wait for the easy, country-ish jangle of an acoustic guitar. You wait for some harmonies. You wait for a chorus to tell you there’s gonna be a sunrise, or a heartache, or a drink at the bar, or something. Instead, he gives us synthesizer grooves that fit uncomfortably between mid-tempo and ballad, and half-baked perspectives that read alternately as hollow or disingenuous. Repeatedly on “Strange Weather,” the singer attempts to indict rich businessmen and Hollywood types, which, unto itself, is neither novel or problematic. However, when Frey then goes one further, and tries to embody the voice of the poor, the working man or the victim, he fails to suspend the disbelief. On “I’ve Got Mine,” the singer almost dares us with:
There's another kind of poverty
That only rich men know
A moral malnutrition
That starves their very souls
And they can't be saved with money
They're all running out of time
And all the while they're thinking
It's OK 'Cause I've got mine
Don Henley succeeded, in spite of himself, when he sang for the voice of “everyone.” He doubly succeeded when he sang for the voice of a nostalgic “everyone.” Frey was either too clever or too dull to see that empathizing with everyone is safe and easy, but empathizing with actual suffering is much harder work. Big and bad ideas aside, he also had one unresolvable vulnerability: he could not sing like Don Henley.
There is not much, if anything, to like on “Strange Weather.” Candidly, there was not much to like about Glenn Frey in “The History of The Eagles” documentary. He seemed too controlling and too confident, given his talent relative to his bandmates. And yet, I have no reason to believe that Frey was a jerk or mean-spirited. I don’t even doubt his politics or good intentions. Aside from his spats with his fellow Eagles, there was very little scandal in his too short life. With the benefit of perspective, it is hard to denigrate the enormous success he had, briefly, as a solo artist, and for a decade with his band. He achieved so much and was indisputably a large part of The Eagles prosperity. If nothing else, he kept the band striving and moving forward. He was a great C.E.O. In real life, he looked so comfortable in a polo and with a golf club in his hand on a course in southern California. He made it hard not to wonder “what if?” What if he’d just gone the other route. Stayed with the sportswear company. Ran it forever. Passed it on to his kids. Played wine bars and the occasional wedding. He would have been incredible at it all. I’m sure of it. That route may have not been so bad. Maybe it would have been better. It would have been easier. And Glenn Frey was good with easy.