The accidental hit Eagles gave away: “That was a really cool thing”
California rock band Eagles wrote plenty of timeless classic songs throughout their initial nine year run as a group, with their two principal songwriters in Don Henley and Glenn Frey having led the way throughout the period. Despite leaning on the duo for the majority of their hits, they also had a number of other talented songwriters within their ranks, offering a handful of tracks per album that showcased a different side of the band.
If anything, this may have meant that they were left with a surplus of songs to choose from when they were putting together the tracklists for their records, but they somehow always managed to make the right selections when it came to the final cut. However, there were probably a number of songs written by other contemporaries of theirs that they wished they’d written themselves.
Not much was happening in the Eagles camp in late 1977; the band had released Hotel California the year before and were coming to blows during their live shows in what proved to be a tense period for the group. They wouldn’t begin work on their follow-up album, The Long Run until early 1978, and by this point they’d parted company with Randy Meisner and replaced him with longtime friend Timothy B. Schmit.
Schmit had previously worked as the bassist in a band called Poco, who were operating as a soft country-rock band long before Eagles had achieved any success themselves. They’d always been a significant influence on Henley and Frey’s songwriting, but weren’t exactly successful themselves, failing to get anywhere close to the top of the charts in the US. At this point, this was the second time Eagles had poached a bassist from their Californian brethren, with Meisner having been a founding member of the group.
However, the timing of Schmit’s departure was a lot more fortuitous than Meisner’s had been. Hotel California was undoubtedly the biggest thing that the Eagles had ever done as a group, and they were reaching stratospheric levels of success as a group at the tail end of the decade. Having pinched Schmit from Poco, fans of the Eagles began to turn their heads towards the smaller group, and they began to get the attention they’d been deserving of for many years.
Therefore, in 1979, Poco managed to have a hit with ‘Crazy Love’, reaching the US top 20 for the first time in their career. Rusty Young, the songwriter, claimed in a 2014 interview with Goldmine that this couldn’t have happened without the Eagles’ stature helping them gain a new audience. Speaking of Schmit’s departure, he wasn’t at all bitter about him leaving the band, and actively encouraged his decision. “That was a really cool thing,” Young explained, “because how many times do you get to join a band like the Eagles?”
Poco would go on to have another hit in the same year with the Paul Cotton-penned ‘Heart of the Night’, which also reached the top 20 like ‘Crazy Love’ had managed. Eagles had created a soft-rock boom, and their connection with Poco was exactly the helping hand that the latter group needed to lift them to greater heights.
