Perhaps no one would have been surprised back in 1975 when the Eagles finally hit #1 on U.S. charts for the first time. They had been one of the hottest new acts of the decade thus far and scored a number of radio hits like “Take It Easy” and “Witchy Woman.” However, few would have guessed the song that took them there on this day 48 years ago – “Best of My Love” seemed like a sure-fire hit, a nice, slightly achy love song with some fine steel guitar from Bernie Leadon. Yet it bucked the odds three different ways.
The song was from their third album, On the Border, which had done OK for them but hadn’t really grown their profile or stature with the singles “Already Gone” and “James Dean.” Even the fact that it was available in quadrophonic sound in its 8-track version didn’t spark a stampede to the sales counter. The label, Asylum Records, were all but ready to throw in the towel on it and get them working on a new record… until surprising things happened.
One DJ in Kalamazoo, Michigan liked the song and played it, despite it not being a single. His listeners loved it too and kept requesting it and soon it was on the one station’s hit chart. Asylum took notice and pressed 1000 copies of a 7” single of it and gave it to the station to distribute. So popular were they that Asylum decided to release it as a surprise third single from the record across the world. It soon picked up fans everywhere, including on the adult contemporary stations which hadn’t been big on the band until that point. It got to #1 in the States and Canada, their first in each country, and hit #14 in Australia, their first hit there. Soon it went gold in the U.S.
If that wasn’t unlikely enough, the songs origins made it more so. It was written by a trio of members, Glenn Frey, JD Souther and Don Henley. Souther says “Glenn found the tune…the three of us were writing it in a deadline to get it finished.” Frey remembers “I was playing acoustic guitar in Laurel Canyon and I was trying to figure out a tuning that Joni Mitchell had shown me…I got lost and ended up with what would later turn out to be ‘Best of My Love.’”
Henley wrote the lyrics, largely about a recent breakup with a girlfriend, sitting in an L.A. restaurant. They took the song with them to England, where they began recording the album with famous producer Glyn Johns. However, that didn’t go well as they didn’t gel well with Glyn. He wanted them to sound more country, they wanted to be a little more rock’n’roll. And he didn’t like them being high while working, and by then the Eagles (as with many California acts) consumed vast quantities of cocaine. They soon ditched the UK and Johns to finish recording close to home in L.A. with Bill Szymczyk, who ended up doing the final mixing of this song (and produced almost all the rest of the album.)
So everyone was ecstatic in the band’s camp when the song was a smash…right? Well, not quite. The record label lopped over a minute off the album version to make the single, without consulting with The Eagles. Henley in particular was furious, as was the manager, Irving Azoff. When it went gold, Azoff broke a piece off an actual gold record and sent it to the record company office, calling it the “Golden Hacksaw Award.” Guess the record executives didn’t always get the best of the Eagles love back then. Although after Hotel California went multi-platinum and the band’s Greatest Hits went on to sell something in the range of 40 million copies, we suspect all was forgiven!