The band desperately needed inspiration after the surprise success of their 1972 debut album. “He said, ‘This is really good, man,’” Henley later remembered. Sitting at the piano overlooking the city, Henley played “Desperado,” a ballad inspired by Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. In 1973, as the members of the Eagles began work on their second album, Glenn Frey and Don Henley rented a mountaintop home in Laurel Canyon. We wanted to write more songs that would be played on the radio.” Mission accomplished. “Although there were still disparities within the band in terms of songwriting, direction, ,” Henley said later, “Glenn and I now wanted to take advantage of the momentum we had going. One of These Nights became the band’s first album to top the Billboard charts, producing a trio of hit singles: “One of These Nights,” “Lyin’ Eyes,” and “Take It to the Limit.” It also propelled the group to stadium-headliner status. Leadon resented Henley and Frey listening to demos and making changes without the rest of the band, and at one point disappeared from sessions for three days. Not everyone was happy with the sessions. Inspired by Al Green, Henley belted the title track with a soulful falsetto over a four-on-the-floor dance groove. They layered complex guitar riffs on “Too Many Hands,” and built Bernie Leadon’s banjo instrumental “Journey of the Sorcerer” into a folk-prog epic. Working with their producer Bill Szymczyk, the band took new risks. “The only two people in this group who tend to think alike are Glenn and me,” said Henley, “and we’ve always wanted every song to be the best that it could be.” While chronicling fame’s dark side can be a tired trope, Henley and Frey proved they were keen observers of life in the fast lane. Sharing a Beverly Hills home together, the two wrote classic after classic: The sleazy dance-floor stomper “One of These Nights,” and “Take It to the Limit,” an anthem about the downsides of life on the road, co-written with Randy Meisner. Released in 1975, One of These Nights was the Eagles most “painless” album, according to Frey, whose songwriting partnership with Don Henley was hitting new peaks. The moment was, of course, the genesis of the Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes,” which Bob Buziak, the former president of RCA Records, called “among the best LA rock ’n’ roll songs ever written.” “Look at those lyin’ eyes,” Frey said, before immediately picking up a pen. At their favorite restaurant next to the Los Angeles club the Troubadour, Frey noticed an attractive blonde woman out to dinner with a much older man. The members of the Eagles were struggling to write strong material for the band’s fourth album when, one night in the mid-1970s, guitarist Glenn Frey went out to dinner with a friend, the songwriter J.D. In the sweeping yet cynical piano ballad “The Last Resort,” Henley is already bracing for the moment when the party has to end-not just for a band that would split within four years, but for the very notion of American capitalism itself.

But Hotel California is both a portrait of ’70s excess from behind the velvet rope and the soundtrack to the inevitably cruel comedown.

That swagger spills over into the brontosaurus stomp of “Victim of Love” (the closest this band ever got to heavy metal) and the disco-fied “Life in the Fast Lane,” an account of Hollywood hedonism as alluringly decadent as a penthouse masquerade ball with an open bar. Formerly the frontman of dirty-boogie outfit the James Gang and an eccentric, hard-rockin’ solo artist in his own right, Walsh immediately puts his stamp on the band with the opening “Hotel California,” where he and six-string wingman Don Felder added the exclamation point to Don Henley’s eerie, enigmatic narrative with one of the most dramatic, finger-aching guitar solos in the rock canon. That shift can be largely attributed to the new kid in town: Joe Walsh, who replaced outgoing founding guitarist Bernie Leadon. That honor, of course, goes to the title track of their 1976 smash Hotel California, the record where the Eagles expunged any lingering trace of their country-rock roots and took up residence in the football stadiums of the world. But here’s the crazy thing: The band’s most popular, career-defining song was still to come. To put the Eagles’ mid-’70s dominance into perspective, consider this: In early 1976, the group released Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, a compilation that would spend the next half decade in the Billboard Top 200 and go on to become the biggest-selling American album of the 20th century.

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