Eagles won’t fly anymore
END OF AN ERA: The band can’t go on without founder, Henley says
LINCOLN, Mass. — The Eagles are finished.
Don Henley is direct. The way he describes it, the group he helped lead since 1971 died with his longtime musical partner Glenn Frey.
“I don’t see how we could go out and play without the guy who started the band,” Henley says.
He sits inside the Tudor mansion in Lincoln, Mass., that serves as the headquarters for the Walden Woods Project. Henley founded the non-profit organization in 1990 to protect the land that inspired 19th-century transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
This should have been a time to celebrate. On Sunday, the three surviving members of the final edition of the Eagles — Henley, guitarist Joe Walsh, bassist Timothy B. Schmit, each of them 69 — will receive Kennedy Center Honors. But Frey’s death in January, from complications brought on by years of battling rheumatoid arthritis and colitis, has cast a bittersweet cloud over the proceedings. Cindy Frey will be given her late husband’s medallion.
The Kennedy Center actually awarded the Eagles last year, but the band deferred in hopes Frey would get better.
Frey had stoically managed his health for decades and, in the summer of 2015, the Eagles wrapped up a massive tour. Frey headed to Hawaii with his family. He got sick and flew home for treatment. The drugs that helped him manage the pain compromised his immune system, causing Frey to get pneumonia. Doctors induced a coma from which he would never recover. Frey died Jan. 18. He was 67.
A month later, the Eagles gathered on stage to perform a tribute at the Grammy Awards. Jackson Browne stood in for Frey on Take It Easy, a song he co-wrote. That week, Henley, Walsh and Schmit also performed at a private memorial with several guest singers, including Glenn’s son, Deacon.
“It would just seem like greed or something,” Henley says. “It would seem like a desperate thing.”
Earlier this year, a reporter at Postmedia asked Henley if he imagined a future for the Eagles. He paused and then he praised Deacon, referenced the idea of playing again with Browne, but cautioned that “there have been no discussions along those lines, and we’re still going through the healing process — trying to get through all of this.”
Browne wishes Henley would reconsider.
“This is a great band even if it went on without Glenn,” he says. “They could have no trouble playing and singing those songs with guests.
“Like they had Bob Seger play at the memorial. They had me sing a song. They had J.D. Souther sing and he’s an incredible singer these days. I didn’t say this to them because they all seem resolute in saying, ‘Well, that would be wrong,’ but I see how the band could go forward without Glenn.”
The 39th Kennedy Center Honors ceremony will be held on Dec. 4. CBS will broadcast it on Dec. 27.