As most know, in early January one of the founding members of The Eagles, Glenn Frey, passed away. As someone who has hit his 50s, I told many of my friends that we needed to get ready for a whole lot more of this. And, as the generation that grew up as popular culture was exploding in the 1970s and 1980s, we would really be the first generation to see so many people dying and then realizing how much each certain person meant.
So, with the passing, I returned to the music of the band. The Eagles are on my personal short list of “bands of my youth.” Styx was “my band” and I still own all of their LPs. Boston, The Doobie Brothers, and The Eagles were right there for me in my youth when I was dreaming of fronting a band just like that.
I purchased a CD of all their wonderful hits called “The Very Best Of” and inside was a wonderful booklet where Cameron Crowe compiled the thoughts of Frey and Don Henley about each of the 33 songs in the collection. As a songwriter myself, I love to listen to writers that I respect to see what was going on in their minds when they wrote a certain song.
Frey and Henley share how in 1979 the band put out what would be really their last album, The Long Run in which the band struggled with the issues of fame. As Glenn said about the song “Heartache Tonight”….”and then they sold 12 million records, and everything changed!” Well, on that LP, the band recorded the song “The Sad Cafe” and you can listen to it here. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnzsk-q7yAk]In their musings with Crowe, both men report an amazing and thought provoking idea. Frey says that his favorite lyric on the song is “I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free.”
Do you get it? The band was sharing in the song that maybe financial and commercial success wasn’t really everything they had thought it would be. Henley shared that while there had been a wonderful, almost magical time of life in the mid-1970s with many other artists out in LA, “of course, there was the dark side. Friends and acquaintances of ours (from that era) had begun to meet untimely ends—classic cases of ‘too much, too soon.” He goes on, then, to note a similar thought as Frey: “We were struggling to make sense of that dichotomy, that contradiction. Is fortune a good thing or a band thing….is being fortunate, before you are ready to accept it and deal with it, actually fortunate–or is it unfortunate.”
The song expresses this lament, this sense of a tension between a hope to live well in the future and an almost pointlessness to the life that has come already. Certainly, a lament of pointlessness in the lives that had gone on, probably gone on too soon in the minds of Frey and Henley. Look at this idea in the lyrics:
“Out of the silver light the past came softly calling, and I remember the times we spent inside the Sad Cafe. 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 this world with words like “love” and “freedom.””
“Oh, expecting to fly, we would meet on that shore in the sweet by and by. Some of their dreams came true, some just passed away and some of the stayed behind inside the Sad Cafe.”
“The clouds rolled in and hit that shore. Now that glory train, it don’t stop here no more. Now I look at the years gone by and wonder at the Powers that be. I don’t know why fortune smiles on some, and lets the rest go free. Maybe the time has drawn faces I recall, but things in this life change very slowly if they ever change at all. No use in asking why; it just turned out that way. So meet me at midnight, baby, inside the Sad Cafe.”
Today in the country, and in my college, I see many hoping to find “the fortunate” come their way. They want “fortune.” Frey and Henley warn that fortune may not be a fortunate thing, but rather an unfortunate thing. And perhaps if we look with a more critical eye at the country’s journey from the 1970s…it isn’t a journey of a poor, pitiful place with ills and poverty and sadness. Instead, it is a country of excess, of luxury, of riches. As a country, we are the fortunate band that has hit the big time. And yet…
Maybe, like the song sings, our good fortune as a nation has merely led us to a realization that we would have been better off to be part of “the rest” that fortune could have let us “go free.” I was recently reading about my favorite authors, Tolkien and Lewis, professors both…and the recounting of their lives was one of an unhurried life, slowly, comfortably passing through the world with little concern with racing towards some place of fame or fortune. Tolkien almost never sent his famous manuscripts to press, both thinking no one would really want to read about hobbits and thinking that it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t seeking fortune or fame.
Maybe we should rename the USA “the Sad Cafe”….not because we are poor or broken or a bad place to live. More people still stream into the USA, legally and illegally, than any other country (in fact, more than many other countries combined). No, perhaps we are the Sad Cafe because we HAVE gained our success. Glenn Frey, in the interview with Crowe, said “We were getting older…and there was a sadness because we had seen, close-up, that everybody’s dreams don’t come true. Or, at least, not in the way they think they’re gonna come true.”
In your personal life, and in our national life, you have a choice to make. You can race into the rat race for the illusive fame and fortune…and find what many before Frey and Henley have found, that it’s not all that its cracked up to be. Or, maybe you can gain the wisdom to see that true success is not something you get with more money or fame. Instead, a life well-lived, comfortable as Tolkien and Lewis were with a comfortable (we might even say slow) place of life, is what you should be aiming for.