"One more chorus and I'm gonna kick your ass, buddy"

I learned an instrument by playing along with The Eagles' Desperado album, and for a long time the only cassette I travelled with had Rumours on one side and One of These Nights on the other, and so they really were the band that formed my youthful ideas regarding what music was about. If it weren't for a window that The Eagles opened up for me, my whole life would have been very, very different - for better or worse. With every passing of a figure from one's youth we look around to be re-assured that we're not the only ones who got them. My main disappointment recently is that the deaths of iconic figures in pop and rock history seem to have been rated in terms of their importance. Glenn Frey made the most important records of my gangling, stupid youth, and whether he was hip, cool, *important* or not - whether he was kind to his band mates (he wasn't), whether he made some terrible records (he did) or whether he left us with the best post-mortem joke about the warm smell of Colitis (debatable) Glenn Frey has passed. I can never, never hit a 'G' chord without passing over to a 'C' and a passing 'Am7' and wondering about possibly running down a road tryin' to loosen my load. You might not care. I do. And that's okay.