1. Take It Easy

2. Witchy Woman

3. Chug All Night

4. Most Of Us Are Sad

5. Nightingale

6. Train Leaves Here This Morning

7. Take The Devil

8. Earlybird

9. Peaceful Easy Feeling

10. Tryin'

Rolling Stone

The Eagles' "Take It Easy," is simply the best sounding rock single to come out so far this year. The first time through, you could tell it had everything: danceable rhythm, catchy, winding melody, intelligent, affirmative lyrics, a progressively powerful arrangement mixing electric guitar and banjo, and a crisp vocal, with vibrant four-part harmony at just the right moments for maximum dramatic effect. To top it off, "Take It Easy" was co-written by Jackson Browne and Eagle Glen Frey, whose vocal on the record fell somewhere between Browne and Rick Nelson.

Now the album is here, and it's awfully good. Turns out that the Eagles are four veterans of the Los Angeles countrified rock & roll school, and they display to best advantage their distinguished backgrounds: Poco, Rick Nelson's Stone Canyon Band, the Flying Burrito Bros., Dillard & Clark, and a couple of Linda Ronstadt's always impressive bands, to name the most notable. There's another Jackson Browne song, "Nightingale," on the album, and it's just about as good as "Take It Easy." So is "Peaceful Easy Feeling," a haunting love song by unknown Jack Tempchin (who, so we hear, will eventually have his own album) distinguished by a strikingly cinematic lyric: "I like the way your sparkling earrings lay/Against your skin so brown./I'd like to sleep with you in the desert tonight/With a million stars all around ..." The song has a warmly intense Glen Frey vocal, and the Eagles' clear harmonies glide around its edges. Even the guitar bridge is a thing of beauty–the guitars of Frey and Bernie Leadon sound as softly luminous as the singing.

Those three are the absolute high points–they'll stand proudly right next to the best recordings of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Burrito Bros., and the other premiere Los Angeles groups. Not a bad start for a brand new band. But, surprisingly, that's not all. Each of the remaining seven tracks has something to recommend it. If Frey's "Most of Us Are Sad" and "Chug All Night," Mandy Meisner's "Tryin'," and "Train Leaves Here This Morning," written by Leadon and his former colleague Gene Clark, aren't as extraordinary as the previously mentioned three, they're not all that far behind. "Tryin'" and "Chug All Night" aren't great songs in themselves, but the Eagles use them as frames to hang their rock & roll licks on, and the controlled explosiveness of the performances makes them among the most exciting songs here. Glen Frey's snarling rhythm guitar is featured on these two, as it is on "Nightingale"; it's worth paying special attention to. "Most of Us Are Sad" and "Train ..." are slow, melancholy songs full of desert loneliness.

The only tracks that didn't touch me the first or second time through were "Witchy Woman," "Take the Devil," and "Early-bird." The last, a Leadon-Meisner song, is little more than an excuse to show off for a couple minutes on banjo (Leadon) and acoustic guitar. The other two are moderately fast, moody songs in which the playing and singing have much more to offer than the material itself. Even these are growing on me now, however, maybe in part because of the reflected glow from the adjoining music.

But I still keep going back to the song I started with. Each time I listen to "Take It Easy," it unfurls new pleasures. The compressed narrative in the second verse, full of Jackson Browne incisiveness, is my current point of special interest:

Standin' on a corner in Winslow , Arizona ,

Such a fine sight to see

It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford

Slowin' down to take a look at me

So come on, baby, don't say maybe

I gotta know if your sweet love is gonna save me

We may lose or we may win

But we will never be here again

So open up, I'm climbin' in

Take it easy.

The rest of the songs–and a major part of the album–is as good as those lines. So get the album, by all means. And get the single, too–it has a side that isn't on the LP. The Eagles is right behind Jackson Browne's record as the best first album this year. And I could be persuaded to remove the word "first" from that statement.

All Music

Balance is the key element of the Eagles' self-titled debut album, a collection that contains elements of rock & roll, folk, and country, overlaid by vocal harmonies alternately suggestive of doo wop, the Beach Boys, and the Everly Brothers. If the group kicks up its heels on rockers like "Chug All Night," "Nightingale," and "Tryin'," it is equally convincing on ballads like "Most of Us Are Sad" and "Train Leaves Here This Morning." The album is also balanced among its members, who trade off on lead vocal chores and divide the songwriting such that Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner all get three writing or co-writing credits. (Fourth member Don Henley, with only one co-writing credit and two lead vocals, falls a little behind, while Jackson Browne, Gene Clark, and Jack Tempchin also figure in the writing credits.) The album's overall balance is worth keeping in mind because it produced three Top 40 hit singles (all of which turned up on the massively popular Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975) that do not reflect that balance. "Take It Easy" and "Peaceful Easy Feeling" are similar-sounding mid-tempo folk-rock tunes sung by Frey that express the same sort of laid-back philosophy, as indicated by the word "easy" in both titles, while "Witchy Woman," a Henley vocal and co-composition, initiates the band's career-long examination of supernaturally evil females. These are the songs one remembers from Eagles, and they look forward to the eventual dominance of the band by Frey and Henley. But the complete album from which they come belongs as much to Leadon's country-steeped playing and singing and to Meisner's melodic rock & roll feel, which, on the release date, made it seem a more varied and consistent effort than it did later, when the singles had become overly familiar.