We make it harder than it has to be

Wow, this isn't as old as I thought it was. Certainly this was heard in the backseat of the car, flying down a country road--but no, that was this one, similarly a delicious R&B groove. No, this was heard when I was in fifth grade, and things were getting harder. I flunked a science test during the third or fourth week of school because, up to that point, I hadn't needed to study, do homework, think about school once I was home with Nancy Drew and Barbie and Mork and Mindy and the Bosom Buddies. What the hell? I dimly remember a big red number below 70 scrawled at the top of the test by Mr. Enoch, who we inexplicably gave a ridiculous and very late 20th century small-minded nickname involving moles (predating Austin Powers by two decades). The feel-good fourth grade was over. Nothing but homework and headaches while I strained to see the blackboard all year and then, finally, in May of fifth grade, glasses. 

Maybe this gave me short-term nostalgia for a few years earlier, when life was easier. 

Swear I'm gonna find you

A new series: Songs I Associate with Landsdowne Drive. 

The bow-shaped sound of Meisner's bass fit just right with looping over the hills of Landsdowne Drive. We often drove that way to get to Fayette Mall from my grandmother's house.

And it was right here where these twin apartment buildings on either side of Landsdowne, at the top of (what seemed to be) a huge hill, each with swimming pools. To my five year-old mind, these were the height of luxury. A pool! At your home! I lived in a duplex at the time so I understood rental living. (Little did I know renting and I would have what feels like a lifelong relationship.)

But with a POOL! You could run out of your door and jump into it in time with the little diddle-dit-doo-doo guitar thing in the verse after Felder's guitar solo!

These were the goals: living in the sun-soaked "new" part of town, playing in the pool with the big, bright sky arching overhead, letting One of These Nights just happen to you.

I'm already standing on the ground.

Here we are again.

Another who constructed sonic wallpaper of my growing up is gone.

This is my first true love -



But this is Glenn in his earliest glory. Not his song, but he took it and made it, gently, his own.

Must Play Loud: Caught Up in Endless Solutions

Your Guilty Pleasure: So Put Me on A Highway (By Request)

This wistful ballad from One of These Nights is the epitome of The Eagles' Southern Californiafied country rock. I did not know that the band essentially formed out of Linda Ronstadt's backing band; Glenn Frye, Don Henley, and Randy Meisner were session musicians for one of her early 70s albums. Meisner takes the lead on "Take It To The Limit," one of the few times either Henley or Frye don't sing on an Eagles hit single. And this one was pretty huge at the end of 1975, and I'm sure continues to be a before-set-break slow burner for umpteen bearded cover bands from Southern Cali to South Carolina.

Here's some god, not another spreadsheet, 2:00 pm reading for you. Meisner quit the Eagles after the Hotel California tour (he checked out and he could leave. Sorry.), and became a session player from here to Dan Fogelberg, returning to relative obscurity. Except that for the better part of the 90s, he contended with a personal outlaw, a rogue impersonator who traveled between Nevada and California, trading on the name of the Eagle that everybody sorta-kinda knew, and bilking dozens of women out of money, dignity, and their pants. Here was a charismatic shyster who probably told some tales about "Take It To The Limit," spun yarns about upcoming record deals and tours, but who was well-known in Vegas casino pits and rode the Greyhound. According to this gambling world update from 2006, the impersonator, Peter Lewis Morgan, was caught, convicted and served barely a year before returning to Vegas and his Meisnerdom, as if nothing had happened.

It's a bizarre tale, but what it's got me thinking of primarily is how one can toil at one's art in obscurity, then not (dude toured for Hotel California. Come on.), then toil again while likely enjoying the largesse of that moment in the sun. And that there's a D-level throughout the entire entertainment socio-industrial complex, and how astonishingly easy it is trade on the amount of power associated with D-level fame, and how it feels for anonymous, everyday souls to interact with D-level fame, even in the grasping bronze age of reality TV.

Ugh. Let's put that lurid dialectic aside and get some solace in ol' Waylon's drawl and Willie's reedy simplicity. What I didn't know (for shame) is that everyone's favorite Outlaws covered "Take It To The Limit" and even named the album after that track.

Get in the truck get on the road. It'll be cooler with the wind in your hair.