The 1970s was a monumental decade. Built on the foundations laid by the 1960s, it saw creativity flourish across almost every art form. In music, it burst into a remarkable array of genres, driven by a restless experimental spirit – one fuelled by a nihilism born of sclerotic economies and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation.
The 1970s was, in short, the 1960s taken to its logical extreme, and it produced all kinds of strange and brilliant things.
It was also the decade of the world-famous band, where musicians could make untold riches and be elevated to a near-godlike status by fans and an adoring industry. This was the epoch of the superstar musician – where those who topped the charts and sold out the most coveted venues were essentially untouchable.
Inevitably, rock got too big for its boots. By 1976 a younger generation had grown tired of it, and set about rewriting the book in their own image – hence punk as the antidote to an increasingly self-congratulatory status quo.
One band that came to embody the hellraising, commercially unstoppable essence of the 1970s rock group was the Eagles. Synonymous with the sun-drenched, intoxicating atmosphere of Los Angeles during this era, they were among the biggest bands on earth, loved by audiences across the globe thanks to tracks like ‘Tequila Sunrise’ and ‘Take It to the Limit’.
Such prominence, however, invites detractors. Chief among them was Steely Dan – a band whose sardonic, intellectually restless sensibility owed more to Frank Zappa and The Fugs than to the FM radio mainstream. Led by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, they occupied a singular space in rock, their wry lyricism and brilliant fusion of rock and jazz setting them apart from almost everyone. They were rock’s first real hipsters, and they loathed rockstar hypocrisy above all else. To them, the Eagles were among the worst offenders.
So annoyed were they by the soft-rock polish of the ‘Tequila Sunrise’ outfit that on their 1976 track ‘Everything You Did’, from The Royal Scam, Becker and Fagen took an explicit shot at their West Coast counterparts. The story goes that Becker’s girlfriend was an Eagles devotee, and after a heated argument between the pair, he produced the snarky line: “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbours are listening.”
Late Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey offered his own account in Gavin Edwards’ book Hotel California. “Apparently, Walter Becker’s girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time,” he explained. “I think it drove him nuts. So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day and that was the genesis of the line.”
Fortuitously for the Eagles, they were in the studio when The Royal Scam was released – which put them in exactly the right place to fire back. Their reply is embedded in the most famous song they ever recorded. ‘Hotel California’, the title track from their best-selling album, released in December 1976, contains the line “stab it with their steely knives” – a direct rebuke aimed at Becker and Fagen. The band originally named Steely Dan outright, but ultimately opted for something more elliptical.
As Frey explained: “We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, so ‘Dan’ got changed to ‘knives,’ which is still, you know, a penile metaphor.”
