Glyn Johns
Author: Steve Burgess
Publication: The Record Producers (book excerpt)
Date: 1982
1972 saw the first collaboration between Johns and a group he helped to huge fame, although once again, major success largely eluded the group until they were no longer working with Glyn – the Eagles. 'David Geffen, who was their manager, approached me to produce them, and I went to see them play in Boulder, Colorado, where I didn't think a great deal of them. Eventually, I was convinced to go back and see them again, when I spent a couple of days in a rehearsal studio with them, and realised that there was much more potential there than I'd seen on stage. We started recording quite soon after that second meeting – I brought them to England, we worked at Olympic Studios, and we made the album very quickly, in under three weeks. That was another example of the situation which occurred for Moments, where they really evidently didn't know what was going on, and I don't think I'd been as excited since probably Led Zeppelin – they were amazing, but they didn't really know what they'd got, and that was the point.
'The night I saw them playing in Boulder, they were playing rock'n'roll, Chuck Berry, but sort of badly, and you had Bernie Leadon on one side, a great country player, and Glenn Frey on the other, rock'n'roll from Detroit – they were pulling the rhythm section in two, which wasn't very good at all. They hadn't defined their position as a harmony band particularly well – they were singing harmony, together, but it wasn't nearly as strong as it became. Their writing was fairly obvious, and I liked them as people, which was the main thing that made me go back, and it wasn't until I saw them in rehearsal, without a PA and without all the bad sound, that I realised their quality. Bernie and Frey picked up acoustic guitars in some break, and they played a song that Randy had written, a ballad – just two acoustics and the four of them singing. And that was it – they had no idea, they just didn't realise how good they were at that. The whole thing was that Glenn Frey wanted it to be a rock'n'roll band, and of course, that's what it became when I stopped producing them. He and I fought like cat and dog all the time – we never liked each other very much, and I refused to accept him as the leader of the band, because I didn't think he was. In my view, they were all as important as each other. I don't think I really gave him enough credit, because he's actually a bloody good musician. Anyway, I made that album, and I made it with a very clear idea of the sound I wanted to get with them and the way I wanted to do it, and although they didn't let me know at the time, they didn't like it very much – they didn't seem to be over-enamoured of what was going on. I couldn't even get them excited on any playback – we finished the record and played it back, and they still weren't jumping up and down, which I just put down to them being insecure, which they were then. They actually didn't like the record very much, until, of course, it became successful, when they started to love it. But Frey had his direction for the band, and knew what he wanted to do with it, while the others felt they were being squashed, and eventually became so squashed that Randy and Bernie left the band. Now there are others in there, [Don] Felder and Joe Walsh and someone else, and Walsh, I would imagine, wouldn't take being told what to do too well, because he's a very strong individual in his own right.
'The band became enormously successful when I stopped producing them, although they were very different then, and we did have some success while I was still doing it, including their first number one single, which was something I recorded with them. But if you listen to it, you'll see that it really is rather different from things like "Hotel California" – the track I'm referring to is "Best Of My Love", but on the first album, we had "Take It Easy", "Witchy Woman" and "Peaceful Easy Feeling", which were all hits in America – not a bad start, really.
'Then we did Desperado, which I actually thought was going to be a monster hit album, and it really should have been. It's disgraceful that it wasn't, although it's gone platinum now and all the rest of it, but it should have just taken the world by storm. It has become a milestone, and one of those records we were talking about earlier which are definitely considered as going down in the annals, so people tell me, and I'm very proud of it, but it's very strange that it wasn't a hit at the time, although there is a very good reason for that, and that was that the record company were not on the case. Geffen had just taken over Elektra, and he was more involved with signing Bob Dylan.
'The last things I did with the Eagles as a group were some tracks on On The Border, which was a really weird album. They came to England again to do the album, but they were unhappy because they didn't particularly like being in England. They weren't happy with each other, they weren't writing very prolifically, they were finding everything rather difficult, they were totally insecure, and fairly miserable, and the experience wasn't very good. We had six weeks, and at the end of it, we hadn't got an awful lot done. I think they blamed me as much as anyone for that, which is the producer's lot really, and you just accept it, but obviously, I don't accept the blame. So on that occasion, they went home and changed manager and record producer. Bill Szymczyk was my replacement, and, I think, a very good one. He's a sweetheart – he and I had probably first met two or three years prior to this. With On The Border, he phoned me up and asked if it was all right him taking over the album, and of course, I said it was. And now he ends up taking the Who off me as well – goodness knows what's next'.