Eagles Say Goodbye, Again and Again
The Eagles at Madison Square Garden
What comes after a farewell tour? For the Eagles the sequel to their coyly named “Farewell I" tour in 2005 was nothing less than their first studio album since 1979, “Long Road Out of Eden" (ERC II), a 20-track, two-CD set that has sold nearly four million copies in the United States since its release last year. That led in turn to one more tour, which came to Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night, to be repeated on Friday and Saturday.
The Eagles Glenn Frey, a founding member, called the Eagles “the band that time forgot." After a bitter 1980 breakup and periodic reunion tours since 1994 (with attrition; the band's longtime guitarist Don Felder was fired in 2001) the Eagles now have some current material to play onstage.
They got most of it out of the way at the start of each set in a two-part concert that held nearly three hours of music. “Long Road Out of Eden" is, in its way, an honest album. Reclaiming, sometimes imitating, the sound of the 1970s Eagles, the album is the wistful and bilious work of middle-aged songwriters -- Mr. Frey is 59 and Don Henley is 60 -- who are thinking about fading possibilities and angry at the state of the world.
The 10-minute title song, by Mr. Henley, Mr. Frey and the bassist Timothy B. Schmit (who joined the Eagles in 1977), juxtaposes the vigil of a soldier in Iraq with oblivious gas guzzlers and greedy oilmen. Love songs like Mr. Frey's “No More Cloudy Days" and Mr. Henley's “Waiting in the Weeds" grapple with loneliness and painful memories. The new songs have the old Eagles' high harmonies and carefully stacked guitar parts, though their melodies tend to ramble. And the Eagles knew better than to make them the centerpieces of an arena show. Fans wanted hits, and got them.
Onstage the Eagles have always sought to reproduce their painstaking studio productions, and most of the time they did, bolstered by three keyboardists, a horn section, a violinist and a drummer who took over the kit when Mr. Henley wasn't drumming and singing at the same time. All the close-harmony “ooh's" were in place, and Steuart Smith, Mr. Felder's replacement, faithfully copied his parts in the guitar architecture of “Hotel California," alongside the band's other longtime member, Joe Walsh. Mr. Schmit, who mostly sings harmonies, strained at the high notes of his lead vocals, but the songs weren't transposed down. Now the band is even recreating past tours; Mr. Frey introduced songs with recycled jokes.
The Eagles perform on Friday and Saturday
Madison Square Garden
(212) 465-6741
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