Eagles
Eagles Live

*NOTE: There is a mark that plays 21 times as a moderate thump at the start of track 2 on side 2, "New Kid in Town."

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

These vintage Asylum pressings have the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, these are the records for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Eagles Live Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1980
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing these records are the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions are the only way to find pressing that sound as good as these two does.

Midrange Magic

What's magical about The Eagles? Their voices of course, what else could it be? It's not a trick question. They conquered the charts with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. An Eagles record with mediocre sound in the midrange -- like many of them -- is to us a worthless record.

When you drop the needle on a copy with gritty, spitty, lean, congested vocals, give up and move on. You have a bad pressing and no amount of cleaning or adjusting of the table is likely to fix it.

What We're Listening For On Eagles Live

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• Hotel California
• Heartache Tonight
• I Can't Tell You Why

Side Two

• The Long Run
• New Kid in Town
• Life's Been Good

Side Three

• Seven Bridges Road
• Wasted Time
• Take It to the Limit
• Doolin'-Dalton
• Desperado

Side Four

• Saturday Night
• All Night Long
• Life in the Fast Lane
• Take it Easy

About the Album

Eagles Live is the first live album by the American rock band Eagles, a two-LP set released on November 7, 1980. Although the Eagles were already in the process of breaking up, the band owed Elektra/Asylum Records one more album and fulfilled that contractual obligation with a release of performances from the Hotel California and The Long Run tours.

Eagles Live was mixed by Glenn Frey and Don Henley on opposite coasts in Los Angeles and Miami, respectively, and as producer Bill Szymczyk put it, the record's harmony and instrument fixes were made "courtesy of Federal Express." The 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide said it is "perhaps the most heavily overdubbed [live album] in history." "Seven Bridges Road," a Steve Young cover, was released as a single and became a top-40 hit.

Recording

Five of the tracks were recorded in October 1976, during three performances at The Forum in Inglewood, California. The other ten tracks were recorded in July 1980, from three shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and one at the Long Beach Arena in California. The band had different line-ups in 1976 and 1980; Timothy B. Schmit joined in 1978, replacing original bassist Randy Meisner. Five lead singers are featured in the 14 vocal songs on the album [excluding the brief musical interlude of "Doolin Dalton (Reprise II)"]: Henley, Frey, Joe Walsh, Meisner and Schmit. Songs from each Eagles studio album except one (On the Border) are included, as well as two Walsh solo tracks and one cover song: the acoustic harmony-laden "Seven Bridges Road."

Plagued for years by internal strife, the band had reached a breaking point by July 31, 1980, when The Long Run tour concluded with a concert in Long Beach, California, that served as a fund-raiser for then-Senator Alan Cranston's campaign. The version of "Life in the Fast Lane" for Eagles Live was recorded at this show, which was most notable for a dispute between bandmates Frey and Don Felder that culminated backstage, when they nearly came to blows. Frey then refused to even speak to the other band members, let alone join them to record overdubs for Eagles Live; therefore, the recording was done piecemeal. Frey was in Los Angeles while the rest of the band was in Miami, with Henley overseeing the post-production sessions. Tapes were sent back and forth between the two locations until the album was completed. Szymczyk said: "I had my assistant in Los Angeles with Glenn, and I had the rest of the band fly to Miami. We were fixing three-part harmonies courtesy of Federal Express." Five different lawyers were thanked in the liner notes.

The Eagles rejected a $2 million offer from the label to record two new songs for the album. The only previously unreleased song in the album is a version of "Seven Bridges Road". The song was a showcase for the band's close harmony singing, as the verses of the song feature a cappella vocals from all five members.

-Wikipedia