Why Eagles Hated ‘Greatest Hits Volume 2’

You cannot blame Asylum Records for desirous to milk their now-defunct money cow. Eagles have been of their imperial part in the second half of the ’70s, buoyed by 1976’s stratospheric Hotel California and its flawed (however nonetheless large) follow-up, 1979’s The Long Run. Even the postmortem, contractually obligated Eagles Live, launched in November 1980, went platinum inside two months.

And after all, best-of compilations had already confirmed a profitable gambit for the band, as 1976’s Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) earned the first-ever RIAA platinum certification and went on to change into the bestselling album of all time within the United States, with gross sales exceeding 38 million.

Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) drew a dividing line between Eagles’ country-rock origins and their hedonistic, harder-rocking second act. It solely made sense to memorialize that second act, particularly with Hotel California functioning as a veritable greatest-hits in itself. So it was no shock that eight of the ten tracks on Greatest Hits Volume 2 have been culled from the band’s two most up-to-date studio albums as much as that time, rounded out by Eagles Live‘s “Seven Bridges Road” and the pointed album nearer “After the Thrill Is Gone,” off 1975’s One of These Nights.

It was additionally fortuitous timing, as Frey had launched his debut solo album, No Fun Aloud, in May 1982. The LP went gold off the energy of two Top 40 singles, “I Found Somebody” and “The One You Love.” Henley’s solo bow, I Can’t Stand Still, adopted in August 1982 and fared even higher because of the smash single “Dirty Laundry,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and pushed the album to gross sales of roughly 700,000.

Listen to Eagles’ ‘Seven Bridges Road’

These debut album figures would have been trigger for celebration for many artists, however Henley and Frey weren’t most artists; they have been ex-members of one of many bestselling rock bands in historical past, they usually felt they nonetheless had extra to show. “I sold 650,000 copies or something, which is respectable, I guess, for a first album,” Henley advised Analog Planet about I Can’t Stand Still. “I had a gold album and a gold single. … I was moderately satisfied.”

That satisfaction curdled into frustration when Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 2 hit cabinets simply in time for holidays, with neither Frey nor Henley’s session or consent. With its nameless cowl artwork (a vinyl document repurposed as a taking pictures goal) and slapdash observe itemizing, it bore all of the telltale indicators of a unexpectedly assembled label cash-grab.

And it labored.

“Don and Glenn were now competing in the charts against the Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 2, released by Asylum/Elektra in time for the 1982 Christmas market, cobbled together from Hotel California and The Long Run,” former Eagles guitarist Don Felder defined in his 2007 memoir Heaven and Hell: My Life within the Eagles (1974–2001). “Despite its lack of direct involvement with the band, it far outsold both solo albums. It was a hard act to follow.”

It did not assist that Frey and Henley, who selected to be actually faceless throughout Eagles’ zenith, have been now going up towards such a well-recognized model. “The trouble was that, after years of keeping our names out of the newspapers and our faces off Eagles album covers in favor of the artist Boyd Elder’s incredible decorative cattle skulls, no one really knew who Don Henley and Glenn Frey were — or any of us, for that matter,” Felder wrote. “For years, we’d been able to walk around L.A., into restaurants, clubs and theaters, and melt anonymously into the crowd. It is one of the great bonuses of being an Eagle. No one knows what we looked like.”

Although Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 2 solely reached No. 52 on the Billboard 200, it loved an extended shelf life and was finally licensed 11-times platinum by the RIAA. Yet its reputation wouldn’t encourage Eagles to kiss and make up — not less than not for some time. When requested in 1980 if his outdated band would reunite, Henley famously replied, “Yeah, sure, when hell freezes over.” His quip impressed the title of the band’s 1994 stay reunion album, their first launch since Greatest Hits Volume 2.