Below: Amos records was the home
It wasn’t merely the threat of being drafted that drove Frey west,
of both Don Henley (with Shiloh)
though. It was also the fact that he couldn’t see any way of making it in
and Glenn Frey (with Longbranch
music if he stayed in Detroit.
Pennywhistle) in 1969–70.
Frey and Souther hit it off from their first meeting, and were soon making music together. Their only album was an expensive production. The sleeve had a double fold-out design, and the musicians spent a day posing for a series of photos that showed them fooling around on a beach for the rear image, and sitting looking very mellow by candlelight for the front. The recording sessions took place at the TTG Studios on Sunset and Highland. In 1966, Frank Zappa had recorded Freak Out! there and, in 1968, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors would make use of the same two-inch, sixteen-track recording equipment. It was a hip, LA studio that, along with the Troubadour club on Santa Monica Boulevard, served as a meeting place for all the many different musicians thronging the scene as the 1960s became the 1970s. Once he and Souther had found one another, and despite the failure of Longbranch Pennywhistle, there was no stopping Frey. One of their fellow strugglers was a young songwriter called Jackson Browne, with whom they lived in an Echo Park apartment complex. “Jackson Browne, J. D. Souther, and I all lived at 1020 Laguna in Echo Park. J. D. and I shared a $60-a-month, one-room apartment—a couch and kind of a bed with a curtain in front of it. Right underneath us in an even smaller studio apartment was Jackson. He had his piano and guitars down there. I didn’t really know how to sit down and work on a song until I heard him playing underneath us in the basement. He would work on ‘Jamaica Say You Will,’ and he had the first verse debut album, Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man. He also sang with a folk quartet
Above and previous page: The
and chorus. Then he would sing the second verse—sing it five or six
(The Four of Us) at college in Detroit before forming The Heavy
front and back covers of the
times—and then silence. Twenty seconds later, he would start again,
Metal Kids to play rock songs. However, the trip to LA with Seger to
Longbranch Pennywhistle
and if he liked it, he’d sing it over and over again. I had never really
record Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man at Capitol Records’ studio had given
album. Frey is the flying one.
witnessed that sort of focus—someone being that fastidious—and it
him a taste of the sun, sights, and Strip, which proved to have a heavy
gave me a different idea about how to write songs; that maybe it wasn’t
pull. When a draft letter arrived at his house in Detroit he was no
all just going to be a flood of inspiration. That’s when I first heard ‘Take
longer living there; he had moved to LA to share an address with an
It Easy.’”
old girlfriend, whose sister just happened to be dating another former resident of Detroit, J. D. Souther.
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The Eagles
Los Angeles & Country Rock
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