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The Long Run: Behind The Song That Predicted Eagles’ Longevity
Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
In Depth

The Long Run: Behind The Song That Predicted Eagles’ Longevity

The title song of Eagles’ sixth album, The Long Run was written in response to the shifting musical landscape of the late 70s.

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The Long Run, the pessimistic title track from Eagles’ sixth album, came at a time of group stress and musical change. There is a charged, spiky feeling to the song – at odds with Eagles’ image of laidback Californians. Even the title of the song itself, according to its co-writer Don Henley, was ironic, suggesting durability when Eagles were “breaking apart, imploding under the pressure of trying to deliver a worthy follow-up to Hotel California”.

Listen to ‘Take It To The Limit: The Essentials Collection’ here.

Who wrote The Long Run?

The Long Run was written by Eagles’ prime songwriting team, Don Henley and Glenn Frey. The dynamic between the two wasn’t always easy, but the tension delivered masterpieces. As a partnership, the Henley-Frey confidence first really blossomed around the time of Desperado, Eagles’ second album. “Glenn used to call Don his secret weapon,” remembered Linda Ronstadt, who had witnessed the birth of Eagles when both Henley and Frey were members of her touring band.

In 1976, Henley shed a little light on their approach to writing songs together. “I know some people write a lot of tunes, pick the best and throw the rest away, but with us they never reach that far,” he said. “We do save ideas, though, especially ballads. We also try to balance an album because we believe it’s a work of art and it should have contrast and continuity at the same time.”

What does The Long Run mean?

At the time, Frey and Henley weren’t keen on explaining the meaning of their songs. “The more we explain these songs, the smaller they become,” Henley said in a 1979 radio interview, when the album The Long Run was released. On the face of it, the lyrics of The Long Run seem to refer to a relationship, where hope is increasingly replaced by cynicism. “It’s talking about a love affair,” Frey said, in that same 1979 interview.

Later on, however, Henley revealed a little more about the song’s context. “Disco had exploded, and punk was on the rise,” he said in 2016. “We were beginning to see press articles about how we were passé. Those kinds of jabs were part of the inspiration for the song The Long Run: “Who is gonna make it?/We’ll find out in the long run.”

Musically, the song is one of Eagles’ most soulful numbers, drawing inspiration from the Stax record label and the driving Memphis sound of its in-house band, Booker T And The MGs. Glenn Frey, in particular, never forgot the impact that this era of soul music had on him. “Though I left Detroit and went to California to cut my teeth on country-rock, I’ve remained obsessed with the music of my adolescence, the great soul hits of the 60s and early 70s,” he said in 1988. “There are a whole lot of people who miss the sound of Sam And Dave and Wilson Pickett.”

What was the B-side to The Long Run?

The B-side to The Long Run was The Disco Strangler, another track written by Henley and Frey, with input from fellow Eagle Don Felder. The song was also on The Long Run. Taken at face value, The Disco Strangler has very dark lyrics suggestive of a stalker or serial killer who targets young women on nights out.

However, given Henley and Frey’s penchant for metaphor (and their ambiguous feelings about the rise of disco), it may also be a sarcastic comment on the music’s anonymous dancing culture.
Antipathy to disco in the US had been building throughout 1979, where (mainly) rock fans burned or otherwise destroyed records by artists such as Van McCoy and Donna Summer. The slogan “Disco Sucks” became a protest against disco’s music and culture, and The Disco Strangler feels in line with this sentiment.

When did Eagles record The Long Run?

The album The Long Run, took 18 months to create, and was recorded between March 1978 and September 1979. While Hotel California, Eagles’ fifth album and an enormous success, had been a happy experience, this next album was not. “Pressure to perform at peak level, pressure to deliver more of the same, the changing nature of the band dynamic, the constantly changing public tastes… it was impossible for us to take the time off that we needed in order to get our heads together,” Henley said.

The shifting band dynamic that Henley refers to is the loss of bassist and Eagles co-founder Randy Meisner; one of the band’s stalwarts, Meisner had co-written and sung lead on the group’s 1975 hit Take It To The Limit. “I felt I’d had enough of all the travelling so I left and did my own thing for a while,” he said in 2016. “It was towards the end of the Hotel California tour. I was on the road, really getting frustrated.” Meisner’s replacement was Timothy B Schmit, who can be heard playing bass on The Long Run.

Mere months after The Long Run was released as a single, on 27 November 1979, Eagles went on an indefinite group hiatus. Although this was widely seen as a permanent split at the time, Frey has said that it was not. “For the record, we never broke up, we just took a 14-year vacation,” he said, as the reconvened band performed live in 1994.

Henley has also reflected on this, contrasting the cynicism of The Long Run with Eagles’ ultimate reunion. “The group was breaking apart, and we were writing about longevity, posterity.” Henley said in 2016. “Turns out we were right. Irony upon irony.”

Buy ‘Take It To The Limit: The Essential Collection’, plus Eagles box sets, vinyl and more at the Dig! store.

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