The end of the 1970s was more than just the end of ten calendar years for bands like the Eagles, who had cut their teeth and rose to fame with multiple career-defining songs in the previous decade. The scene was changing, as scenes often do. Players were leaving, and new ones were taking their place. The collective hangover from a decade of boozing and doing drugs was finally starting to settle in.
For the Eagles specifically, this transition into 1980 also saw the end of the band’s original lineup. Tensions had grown too high, spilling over into their live performances. The band released The Long Run in 1979, one year before their first disbandment. And strangely, the album’s closing track, “The Sad Café,” almost served as a musical prediction of the events to come.
An Album Closer Inspired By California Scene Watering Holes
Before the Eagles became the Eagles, they were a group of musicians cutting their teeth in California as Linda Ronstadt’s backing band. Eventually, the band broke away from Ronstadt’s solo work and began writing and recording together as a dedicated group. The Eagles spent their time at the California scene’s hot spots, from the Troubadour to Dan Tana’s restaurant. In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Don Henley explained how both of these venues helped inspire the closing track on The Long Run, “The Sad Café.”
“We could feel an era passing,” Henley recalled. “The crowd that hung out in the Troubadour and the bands that were performing there were changing. The train tracks that had run down the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard had been ripped out [so] the train no longer came through—the same train that Steve Martin [yes, that Steve Martin] had once led an entire Troubadour audience to hop aboard and ride up to La Cienega Boulevard, then walk back to the club. Those remarkable freewheeling times were receding into the distance.” And indeed, he certainly captures this feeling in “The Sad Café.”
I remember the times we spent inside the Sad Café. Oh, it seemed like a holy place, protected by amazing grace, and we would sing right out loud the things we could not say. We thought we could change the world with words like love and freedom. We were part of the lonely crowd inside the Sad Café. The connections to the music industry are evident in the following verses, with lines like Some of their dreams came true; some just passed away, and some of them stayed behind inside the Sad Café.
How This Eagles Song Strangely Predicted Their 1980 Breakup
The phenomenon of a shrinking or changing scene seems pervasive in all genres, decades, and geographical locations. Art is already a constantly evolving concept, and the passing of time only adds to the feeling that the “good ol’ days” of any given scene are long gone. And while the Eagles’ “The Sad Café” might speak to these experiences on a universal level, there seems to be a band-specific narrative that predicted the group’s split a year before it happened.
I look at the years gone by and wonder at the powers that be, Don Henley sings in the second half of the song. I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free. One could imagine Henley looking back on his whirlwind of a professional career, living the stereotypical “rockstar” life with his bandmates for years on end. Interestingly, he places “fortune” and “freedom” at odds, implying that the success the band enjoyed came at a personal cost one could only fully appreciate in hindsight.
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