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Eagles · S1 E2
Glenn Frey
A kid from Detroit who moves to LA with a guitar and a plan. He meets Jackson Browne, shares an apartment, and learns to write songs through the wall
Echo Park, Los Angeles, 1969. Through the thin floor of his sixty-dollar-a-month apartment, a kid from Detroit hears the same unfinished song played over and over for hours, and starts to understand that this is how you learn to write.
Eagles, Seven Bridges Road, live rehearsal, 1977. Just the a cappella intro: five voices, no instruments, no audience. This is what the Laurel Canyon years would eventually produce.
Royal Oak, Michigan
Glenn Lewis Frey grows up in Royal Oak, a suburb north of Detroit where Motown pours out of every car radio and every backyard party. He starts piano lessons at five, picks up guitar in his teens, and drops out of college after a single semester. By his late teens he is orbiting the one local guy who has actually made it: Bob Seger.
“Bob Seger was the first person I ever met who had a record deal, who was actually on the radio. He was my proof that it could be done. If Bob could do it from Detroit, I figured I could do it from anywhere.”
— Glenn Frey, History of the Eagles documentary, 2013
TAP TO REVEAL: What hit record features Glenn Frey two years before Eagles even existed?
Echo Park, Los Angeles
The neighborhood where Glenn Frey rented a cheap apartment above Jackson Browne. Their shared building became an accidental songwriting school: Glenn learned the craft by listening to Browne work through the floor, revision after revision, day after day.
Nightingale
From Eagles (1972). Written by Jackson Browne, this is literally the music of the man Glenn heard through the apartment floor. A gentle, wistful track about longing and sleepless nights, performed with the kind of harmony blend Eagles were perfecting in the Troubadour scene.
Through the Floor
Every morning, Jackson Browne sits down and works on his songs. Same verse, over and over, changing a word here, rewriting a melody there, never settling for the first thing that comes out. Glenn Frey, lying on his floor upstairs, listens to every single revision. He later calls it the most important songwriting education he ever received.
What was the name of Glenn Frey's duo with J.D. Souther before Eagles?
Glenn Frey has the ambition and the California address, but he still needs a drummer. In Linden, Texas, a small-town kid named Don Henley is fronting a band called Shiloh and wondering if he will ever make it out.
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