Why the Eagles’ Disco Song Is Pretty Bad
The Eagles were known for their classic rock and country songs. People don’t associate them with disco music. Despite this, they released a famous disco song in the 1970s. Here’s a look at why their attempt to go disco didn’t work out well.
The Eagles’ disco song felt both old and new
On one level, “One of These Nights” is basically your average Eagles song. There’s a mysterious, perhaps evil, lady (a witchy woman, perhaps?), some pretty harmonies, and angst. But nobody remembers this song the way they remember “Lyin’ Eyes” or “Hotel California.” Why is that?
Well, “One of These Nights” doesn’t accomplish its supposed purpose. It’s meant to be a sexy disco number but it’s not sexy at all. The disco elements don’t add up to much because they are too muted to get you on the dancefloor. Listening to “One of These Nights,” you might get the sense that The Eagles didn’t understand disco.
Why the band was incentivized the write a disco song
Of course, it’s not surprising that The Eagles decided to go disco for a moment. Everyone in the 1970s went disco for at least one single. It didn’t matter if your modus operandi was heavy metal (Kiss’ “I Was Made for Lovin’ You”), pop (Cher’s “Take Me Home”), R&B (Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall), or rock (Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Silly Love Songs”). The industry demanded all disco, all the time for a while.
Did The Eagles debase themselves with “One of These Nights?” No, the song could have been a lot worse. It’s not “Disco Duck.” But it did show that the rock/disco divide was there for a reason beyond mere musical preferences. A lot of rock artists made dance music in the 1970s for purely commercial reasons and didn’t know how to make it work.
How Don Henley explained The Eagles’ change is style
During a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, The Eagles’ Don Henley discussed the background of the album One of These Nights. “Glenn [Frey] and I now wanted to take advantage of the momentum we had going; we wanted to write more songs that would be played on the radio,” he recalled. “Glenn and I had always been fans of the records that were produced in Memphis by Willie Mitchell, especially the Al Green records where the drummer, Al Jackson Jr., would hit the snare and the ride tom-tom at the same time on the backbeat. So, that was a big influence on the title track, but there was also a little nod to disco (we had shared a studio in Miami with the Bee Gees) with the ‘four-on-the-floor’ bass-drum pattern.”
Henley had the audacity (but he’s a rock star so of course he did) to compare One of The Nights to the music of The Beatles. “Stylistically, the One of These Nights album is all over the map, but somehow it worked as a coherent whole. In those days, you could do things like that — you could mix different styles on the same album. The Beatles had made it acceptable.”
While “One of These Nights” is not one of the better disco songs out there, at least it wasn’t a complete embarrassment like some other rock/disco hybrids.
