The Eagles’ first single, “Take It Easy”, was released on the first day of May in 1972, and it gently began the process of seducing a troubled world out of some of its greatest anxieties. The Vietnam anthems had come and gone. So had the highest-profile victims of drug experimentation. The protest movement was losing its momentum. The 1960s were well and truly over.
But here was the counterculture adopting an opposite approach. Forget those clamorous demos and feisty slogans. Go the other way, said the sunny opening chords of “Take It Easy”. Everything will be fine. Californian indolence was turned into an (in)action plan for a generation fatigued by its struggles. “Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy,” soothed the chorus. Submit, instead, to the sound of those gorgeous harmonies.
“Take It Easy” was mostly written by Jackson Browne, a non-Eagle, and partly by Glenn Frey, an alpha-Eagle. Browne, a boyish and mournful young songwriter, started the song with an account of his woman problems. Out of the seven on his mind, he said, only one was a friend. The rest wanted to own him, or stone him. Never mind; take it easy.
In the following verse, he placed himself in a geographically remote and existentially bereft place, to further reflect on his lucklessness. “Well, I’m standin’ on a corner in Winslow Arizona…” And then he got stuck. His friend Frey, less melancholy by nature, concluded the line with a surge of pure LA narcissism: “Such a fine sight to see, it’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.”
Here was the reward for taking it easy, if you were young, bright-voiced and, well, male. You didn’t even have to make a move. Happiness was a flatbed Ford away. The Eagles took the song to number 12 in the US charts. Browne also decided to record his own version, which appeared on 1973’s For Everyman, more measured than the Eagles’ hit, and embellished by the lovely pedal steel playing of legendary West Coast session-man “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow.
But the song’s devotees began to wonder: what exactly was it about that corner on Winslow, Arizona? They would soon find out. In the years following the song’s release, the city suffered a reversal in its fortunes when a new bypass was built to take motorists away from what was a respectably thriving centre. (See the Pixar movie Cars, partly inspired by Winslow’s misfortune, to get the idea.)
How, the city’s authorities wondered, could they lure people back into Winslow? What was it famous for? They looked — where else? — to that fortuitous line from “Take it Easy”. And so was born, in 1994, the Standin’ on the Corner Foundation. It devised a plan to build a park on the now-fabled junction, centred on a bronze statue of a guitar player at rest, which looked remarkably like the young Jackson Browne. The park opened in 1999.
The move was a success: boomers befuddled by the pace of post-acoustic guitar life sought solace in the revivified city centre, which began to attract tourists, tens of thousands a year. In 2016, Browne’s friend and co-writer Glenn Frey died, and the SOTC foundation sprang into action once more, commissioning a statue of the Eagles frontman, leaning against a lamppost, which now stands just a few metres away from the original.
The timing was freakishly apt: just as the whole of America seemed to become embroiled in the issue of the relevance and suitability of its public memorials, smashing down statues and urging their replacement with more worthy figures, Winslow seemed to give its citizens a gentle message: weren’t they heroes too, those denim-clad troubadours, who counselled nothing more profound than to turn life’s dial down a notch or two?
And the song itself? In all honesty, it hasn’t spawned many cover versions, such was the strength of its association with Browne, Frey and the rest. But there was a jaunty 1993 version by the country singer Travis Tritt, who asked some of the Eagles, who had broken up 13 years earlier, to appear in his video of the song. The five members of the band who turned up had such fun that they decided to reform. They commence their latest international tour at the end of August, loosening their load somewhere near you.
What are your memories of ‘Take It Easy’? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s
Music credits: Rhino/Elektra; Warner Music Group - X5 Music Group
Picture credit: Redferns