Glen Frey's passing yesterday was a strange juxtaposition with that of Bowie's a week before. Polar opposites musically, but somehow strangely connected, in death as in life. It reminded me of a particularly poignant passage in Nick Kent's memoir of the seventies Apathy For The Devil on finding himself in LA in 1975.
'I remember us going to Rodney Bingenheimer's disco only to discover the gnome-like Rodney cueing up old glam records on the house turntable to an audience of just three pilled-up punters dreamily occupying the dancefloor like extras from Night of the Living Dead. We stuck around for half an hour - just to be polite - and then made our excuses and ran for the exit door. As we were stepping outside we noticed a disturbance on the pavement before us.Two of the three patrons we'd just been rubbing shoulders with were splayed out on the cold concrete like wounded birds. Just a few feet away, a long-haired man in an expensive looking fur anorak was staring at the human wreckage with undisguised glee in his cocaine-rimmed eyes. Ben recognised the guy; it was Glen Frey from the Eagles.
We both understood the subtext. Two years earlier glam had been the big noise in town but now it was dead on its legs and the rugged and rigidly heterosexual Eagles had lately risen up victorious as the new messiahs of West Coast rock. It wasn't hard to fathom out why. Their music was as comfortable and reassuring to mainstream America as slipping on a pair of old slippers. It didn't challenge its audience on any level or promote alternative lifestyles. It just blended together contemporary hippie mysticism with fanciful cowboy folklore and then served the combo up like a musical box of chocolates wrapped up in a ribbon-bow of mock-prairie harmonising. Their records were like those washed-denim jeans that were so in vogue at the time: bland, inauthentic but impossible to escape. More than any other home-grown act they had their finger on the pulse of what America really wanted to hear in the mid-seventies.'
'Let's go bowling...'
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