“It is with the heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of our comrade, Eagles founder, Glenn Frey, in New York City on Monday, January 18th, 2016…Glenn fought a courageous battle for the past several weeks but, sadly, succumbed to complications from Rheumatoid Arthritis, Acute Ulcerative Colitis and Pneumonia“. But the appearance was postponed because of Frey’s health problems.
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Following the end of the Eagles, Glenn continued to have a successful career as a solo singer, with his most famous offerings being “The Heat Is On” and “You Belong to the City”. Before Glenn Frey and Don Henley met, Glasser and Collins sang at gigs with Frey’s band in Detroit, and backup on songs for Bob Seger.
It would take the two 14 years, from 1980 to 1994, to find their way back to being “the Eagles“, and it was Henley who had to bring Frey back, who wanted to return to the past, not the other way around.
“The Frey family would like to thank everyone who joined Glenn to fight this fight and hoped and prayed for his recovery”.
If you are an Eagles fan, you recognize Frey’s voice and work and it was the topic of the morning on Rock 107, broadcasting from downtown Scranton.
“We were two young men who made the pilgrimage to Los Angeles with the same dream”, he said, “to make our mark in the music industry”. It was the ultimate collaboration between Henley and Frey, with Henley singing lead and sketching the story of the hotel where “you can check out anytime, but you can never leave” and Frey filling such conversational touches as “livin’ it up at the Hotel California”. The group stayed together through 1979, with Don Felder, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmidt joining as Leadon and Meisner left.
Demand for the band hardly declined over the years – the Eagles’ 2014 tour became the fourth-highest-grossing tour of the year, according to Forbes. “It was really Glenn who broke [the Eagles] up”, says Henley.
Henley reminisced how Frey became the “spark plug” of the band.
In a 2010 story in the Times, Frey recalled that there were just 40 people for the band’s first set but the club was packed by the time they played a fourth set that night. “He was amusing, bullheaded, mercurial, generous, deeply talented and driven”. I was writing my biography of the Eagles, and I asked Henley what he thought the essential difference was between him and Frey.
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Survivors include his wife, Cindy, and three children, Taylor, Deacon and Otis. Afterwards, Frey, Henley, Meisner and Leadon formed the Eagles, with Frey playing guitar and keyboards and Henley playing drums.
