• Eagles: The Essential Album-By-Album Guide

Two hours before showtime at the 02, London's state-of-the-art big venue for music, Don Henley is answering e-mail in his dressing room on a laptop and watching political talk shows from America on his other computer, which is hooked up to a large HD television screen. Sweating off an attack of bronchitis, he is wearing a fat woolen hat pulled down to his eyebrows, a long...

EAGLES (1972)
Key Tracks: "Take it Easy," "Witchy Woman," "Peaceful Easy Feeling"
Quick Take: Bringing together several strains of lily-white Sixties Southern California pop — the Beach Boys' harmonies, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield's folk-rock, Poco and the Flying Burrito Brothers' mix of rural country and back-to-nature hippie music — the Eagles fashioned a sound on their debut that was so doggone easy to listen to, there was absolutely no reason not to like it. Breezy...

I don't know why fortune smiles on some/And lets the rest go free," sings Don Henley on "The Sad Café," the concluding song on the Eagles' last studio album, The Long Run. Those lines capture eloquently the degree to which the Eagles had come to see the superstardom they enjoyed in the Seventies as a kind of curse that generated dissension among the band's members, critical controversy, creative paralysis and a nearly metaphysical discomfort with the hedonistic delights "however fully...

Don Henley has the haunted blue eyes of a consumptive Romanian poet who has decided his manhood depends on assassinating Vlad the Impaler. Or maybe it's just the haunted blue eyes of a Texas Calvinist who hasn't quite assimilated the California good life — all that hellfire and brimstone he heard as a kid creeping back like stink from a dead rat under the floorboards to reek, "You don't deserve this massage. The Eagles are about to play in front of 50,000 drunken teenagers in Milwaukee...