The music business had moved west, as some said civilization had, to settle in Los Angeles. I returned to L.A. quite simply because I had run short of money. From Los Angeles came the “new music,” the singer-songwriters, all American. They had been young men and women when The Beatles first appeared. Now, with The Beatles gone, they wrote the music that, as always, spoke to us and our concerns, about the things we were going through. But there was a difference. The once passionate certainties, all the cries for “further,” the huge spiritual and political ambitions, had faded, replaced by variously guised concerns about how and why we had all gone wrong. About “us” Jackson Browne sang: “Some of them were dreamers and some of them were fools. . . And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered.” We were being busted for hedonism, an accusatory finger hard to dismiss.
In 1972, Don Henley and Glenn Frey of the Eagles recorded their first album. Desperado, a portrait of the American Wild West, of gunfights and broken love, of youthful dreams and disillusionment, with the clear implication that we had inherited the same spirit as these romantic outlaws. Then, just one album before they, too, broke up, the Eagles wrote Hotel California, which was about those of us in the new Wild West, circa 1975.AN AMERICAN STORY
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