dEFROG ON 45 #50: WAIT FOR THE WEEKEND TO GO OFF THE DEEP END
Coming up on Episode 50 of this series, and people ask: “How come you haven’t mentioned The Eagles yet?”
So let’s take care of that right now.
Obviously The Eagles dominated the airwaves and the charts in the mid-late 70s. And I confess I liked a lot of their songs, starting from “Witchy Woman” and “One Of These Nights” up to all the hits from their album The Long Run.
Interestingly, though, I only ever bought one 45 of theirs - “Heartache Tonight”. And it paled in comparison to the B-side, “Teenage Jail”, which I ended up liking more because it didn’t really sound like a typical Eagles song.
These days, I’m ambivalent towards The Eagles. But I still do like listening to their earlier stuff sometimes, especially the spooky ones.
And of course, “Journey Of The Sorcerer,” which ended up being the theme to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series. That never gets old.
FUN FACT: I almost bought a 45 of “Life In The Fast Lane” once. I was music director at a college radio station where the general manager had very strict rules on swearing in songs, due to the fact that we were part of a conservative college in a conservative town (Clarksville, TN, represent!). He freely admitted the down-side was not being able to play “Life In The Fast Lane”, his favorite Eagles song, because of the lyric “We’ve been up and down this highway / haven’t seen a goddamn thing”.
I distinctly remembered hearing an edited version on the radio when the single came out, with the lyric changed to “damn thing”, which was acceptable to the GM. So I started trawling used record stores to find the 45 version. I eventually found a few, but every one of them had the original album version. So either the radio station in question had a special FCC-friendly copy of the 45, or they did their own edit on tape.
Young, vicious and frail,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at http://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1369126.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
So let’s take care of that right now.
Obviously The Eagles dominated the airwaves and the charts in the mid-late 70s. And I confess I liked a lot of their songs, starting from “Witchy Woman” and “One Of These Nights” up to all the hits from their album The Long Run.
Interestingly, though, I only ever bought one 45 of theirs - “Heartache Tonight”. And it paled in comparison to the B-side, “Teenage Jail”, which I ended up liking more because it didn’t really sound like a typical Eagles song.
Click to viewThese days, I’m ambivalent towards The Eagles. But I still do like listening to their earlier stuff sometimes, especially the spooky ones.
And of course, “Journey Of The Sorcerer,” which ended up being the theme to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series. That never gets old.
FUN FACT: I almost bought a 45 of “Life In The Fast Lane” once. I was music director at a college radio station where the general manager had very strict rules on swearing in songs, due to the fact that we were part of a conservative college in a conservative town (Clarksville, TN, represent!). He freely admitted the down-side was not being able to play “Life In The Fast Lane”, his favorite Eagles song, because of the lyric “We’ve been up and down this highway / haven’t seen a goddamn thing”.
I distinctly remembered hearing an edited version on the radio when the single came out, with the lyric changed to “damn thing”, which was acceptable to the GM. So I started trawling used record stores to find the 45 version. I eventually found a few, but every one of them had the original album version. So either the radio station in question had a special FCC-friendly copy of the 45, or they did their own edit on tape.
Young, vicious and frail,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at http://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1369126.html. Please comment there using OpenID.