Eagles' CD Box Set a Treasure Trove

Hear me, o ye young, and attend unto my hard-won wisdom. Of all the indignities and depredations to which we fall prey in middle age, few are more humbling than the experience of listening, at a remove of some 20 to 30 years, to the popular music that formed the soundtrack, as it were, of your young and vigorous life—songs by artists you worshipped for their lyrical profundity and their genius with a melody line or rhythm track—only to discover that in truth this once-hallowed music, not to put too fine a point on it…sucks.

Thus, it was with no small trepidation that I opened the plastic seal on the boxed CD set “Eagles,” containing seven of the group’s best albums that so beautifully bridged the fences between rock, pop, folk, and country beginning in the 1970s.

Would the music measure up? Were such songwriting gems as “Take It Easy,” “Tequila Sunrise,” “Lying Eyes,” “Desperado,” “The Best of My Love,” “Hotel California,” and dozens of others, actually as timeless as they seem in memory, or was I hearing them through the soft complimentary filter of life in 1970s America, when I was young and energetic and living large and no goal seemed impossible?

I’m both proud and relieved to report that upon repeated listening, these guys who produced a decade’s worth of great pop music are even better than I remembered.

The sheer musicianship, for one thing, is staggering in its consistency. I realize it’s hard to go wrong with side players the caliber of Joe Walsh, but even so, there are no throwaway cuts here. Even the less-distinguished songs (and every group has some) are meticulously polished in the studio and yet escape being overproduced as so much of the era’s music was.

Classic guitar solos don’t get any better than these. If you can listen to these songs at full volume on your car stereo and not at times momentarily steer with your knees so as to play air guitar, you don’t have an ounce of rock-and-roll in your bones.

But what makes the greatest of these efforts by songwriters Glenn Frey and Don Henley endure—to be sung around campfires and on festival stages, in my humble prediction, long after the Eagles and myself have all turned to dust—is the lyrics that go straight to the head and heart at once.

I sometimes tell people that my favorite contemporary philosopher is Don Henley, and I’m only half joking. There’s a blinding amount of wisdom hiding in the words of these radio-friendly melodies:

—“Beautiful faces and loud empty places / look at the way that we live / wasting our time on cheap talk and wine / left us so little to give…” (“Best of My Love”)

—“Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy…” (“Take It Easy”)

—“You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave…” (“Hotel California”)

—“When it comes down to dealing friends / it never ends…” (“Tequila Sunrise”)

—“Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy / she’ll break you if she’s able / the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet…” (“Desperado”)

And perhaps the most hard-won lesson of all, that I could never have fully understood in my 20s:

—“Every form of refuge has its price…” (“Lying Eyes”)

Tell it, brother.

It’s not often, in any art form, that you find truth and beauty in equal proportion, but this treasure trove of music manages to pull it off.

Ironically, most of these songs were written in an atmosphere of excess and drugs and hard living, and yet they manage to be deeply moral without being moralistic. Much of what passes for “religious” music these days could learn from Frey’s and Henley’s clear-eyed assessment of their own failings and of their respect for our shared humanity.

But I digress.

If life were fair, the aging members of the Eagles will win a whole new audience of young listeners who realize that this is very different stuff than they’re finding on today’s radio airwaves. Different in a good way.

If not, then at least my fellow geezers and I get the satisfaction of knowing that we weren’t just dreaming the first time around. These guys play like demons and sing like angels. And music doesn’t get much better than that.