The Eagles swoop into Toyota Center Sunday for what the omnipresent radio spots (if not the band itself) say could be their last tour, and Rocks Off has been thinking about them a lot lately. It started more than a month ago, when C3 announced the Eagles would headline/close this year's Austin City Limits Music Festival, news greeted less than enthusiastically on ACL's Facebook page:
Of course, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh, et al., did have a few defenders, such has this well-spoken young man:
The other reason Rocks Off has been thinking about the Eagles is that our little radio here at work is capable of consistently picking up exactly two English-language FM stations, the Eagle (107.5 FM) and the Arrow (93.7 FM), both of which play the band a lot. If you couldn't, you know, tell by one of those station's names. And the more we listen to the Eagles, the more we've grown to appreciate them critically.
That's right, critically. Since they were long gone down that seven bridges road by the time we started listening to and caring about music, it took Rocks Off a long time to discover who the Eagles were, and a longer time still to overcome the prejudices that were constantly being drilled into us from our hipster and critical brethren; namely that the band was the absolute worst thing to happen to both rock and roll and recorded music since Pat Boone bastardized Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti."