Glenn Frey often steered away from the press, happy to let his music do the talking.
But in September 2003, the Eagles co-founder spoke at length with Free Press music writer Brian McCollum to look back on his formative years in metro Detroit, where he*honed his craft with peers such as Bob Seger before heading for California.
"It was the golden age," Frey said of that Detroit rock era, while conceding that for many fans, his hometown chapter may seem fuzzy "because I left there so early in my career. Everybody knows what happened to me after 1971, and*I understand that."
Still, it was in Detroit that Frey found his musical direction, woodshedding on the local scene, honing his songwriting, and finessing his singing skills while becoming enchanted with vocal harmonies. From those Michigan roots — working the suburban club circuit with a series of bands — Frey went on to help develop the new sound of Southern California.
Large portions of this interview have never been published, and are being unveiled here in the wake of Frey's death Monday at age 67.
GLENN FREY'S DETROIT STORY
I was born in Detroit General Hospital in 1948. My mother started me on piano when I was five years old. They bought an old, used upright for about 10 bucks and put it in the basement of the house we lived in in Royal Oak. I grew up at 1616 Wyandotte, two blocks from Benjamin Franklin. The house doesn’t exist anymore — it was knocked down during the (I-696 and I-75 interchange) thing. At my mother’s insistence, I started taking piano lessons, and continued to take lessons ’til I was 12.
So it started with the piano. My uncle Nicky, who was a partner in a very successful photographic company — when magazine ads were a big part of selling cars — he played boogie-woogie piano. My mother loved the fact that he could come over and play piano.
I enjoyed piano for the first four or five years, but then started to sour on it. As things like the Boy Scouts and other opportunities started to present themselves, I grew a little tired of it by the time I got to be 12. So I basically stopped playing, and didn’t play for three or four years.
Then my aunt Virginia took me to see the Beatles at the Olympia (in 1964). I was just blown away. The audience was delirious, screaming at top of their lungs, shouting out the guys’ names. It was pandemonium and spectacle. And I was very, very impressed.
So I started thinking about playing the guitar. I got a tenor guitar — a four-string — and started playing with a couple of my friends in 10th grade. It was still kind of folky; it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll. We had a group called the Disciples. But it was more of a folky thing.
In the fall of ’65, when I was a (high school) junior, I went to this party and there was this band playing. I’m not sure they even had a name — they were freshmen, two years younger than me. Everybody was drinking beers. I got up and asked those guys if I could get up and sing with them. I don’t even remember what song I sang with them, but they liked my singing and asked if I’d join the band. So I joined and we named it the Subterraneans, after the Jack Kerouac book.
The Subterraneans played around in 1965. At that particular time, the holy grail was really the Hideouts (a chain of local teen clubs). That was the end of the rainbow. That’s what everybody was trying to achieve. Really, it was all about the Hideouts.
The first time I went to a Hideout was the one in Grosse Pointe. I remember it was the Quackenbush brothers’ band (the Tremelos). I never saw so many beautiful women, never saw such a scene. The best thing you could achieve in the Detroit area at that time was to get recognized by (Hideout operators) Punch Andrews and Dave Leone.
Then they had Hideout No. 2 in Southfield, then the Hideout in Clawson. These were the happening teen clubs in Detroit. We set our goals for auditioning and getting a gig. We changed drummers, and ultimately we got hired. We got a gig. We played at the Southfield Hideout. I remember the key song in our set was (the Who’s) “My Generation.” Our drummer Lenny Mintz from Southfield — he could play all the Keith Moon fills, so we thought that was pretty cool.
We got good enough, and I think I may have even started playing bass or rhythm guitar. The best band in Birmingham was called the Four of Us. The leader of the band was Gary Burrows. A guy named Jeff Jeff Alborell who played bass, rhythm guitar was a guy named Ziggy, and there were two drummers: a kid named Jimmy Fox, and a guy named Pete.
They were the only band I saw going around clubs in Detroit that really had all the vocals. Every band in Detroit was either patterned after Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels — the greaser soul-band vein — or they wanted to be the Stones, the Animals, a Pretty Things sort of thing, with just one singer and not a lot of background vocals.
Gary Burrows was getting tired of working with Ziggy — he thought maybe Ziggy was the weak link in the band — and saw me performing with the Subterraneans. He asked if I would like to join his band and audition to play rhythm guitar. So I auditioned and got the job. And I must say before I met Gary Burrows, I didn’t think too much about harmonies and that kind of thing. But that’s what he was into, and we spent a lot of time working on vocals. I joined the only surf band in Detroit. There was no other band in the suburbs that had the kind of set list we had. We wore those white boat-neck surfer shirts, white jeans and socks.
Gary was really captured by the whole concept of out-west — the Beach Boys, blondes, surfing and convertibles. He bought into it even before I did.
Our set list was Beach Boys songs, Beatles songs, Hollies, a lot of Top 40 stuff, especially if it had vocals. That was a very important step for me.
I stayed in the Four of Us for a while. Now I was out of high school and in Oakland Community College. I got offered the job for Four of Us right when I had graduated in ’66. I’d wanted to go to Michigan State, but couldn’t get the principal to sign my application — we’d had some problems.(Laughs)
I ended up going to junior college and did three things: went to the parking lot and got high, went to the lunchroom and looked at girls, and went to folk club meetings. I basically wasted my parents’ money.
The Four of Us broke up. I started this band called the Mushrooms. By now I’d met Punch Andrews (manager of Bob Seger) and played for him at several clubs. I’d seen Bob Seger perform live, which was very impressive. Bob Seger was only guy in the suburbs who had a record deal and a hit record. They played Bob’s stuff on local radio: “East Side Story,” “Persecution Smith,” the Cameo-Parkway stuff. That allowed Bob’s band to do stuff nobody else could do — play Ohio, Indiana, get out of the Detroit area.
(Andrews) had Hideout Records at the time, recording some of the bands playing his clubs. Punch put Bob and I together. He said, "I'd like to record you, but you don't write any songs, so I'm going to have Seger write and produce for you." The most important thing that happened to me in Detroit was meeting Bob and getting to know him. He took me under his wing. He produced those sessions. Nothing much came out of it, and it didn’t get much play. We did the (television show) “Swingin’ Time,” did a show in Ohio.
The whole thing with that Mushrooms record never really amounted to much, except I met Bob.
We started hanging out together. We'd drive around all night and smoke dope and listen to the radio. We'd drive to Ann Arbor and hang with (musician) Scott Richardson at his house, go to the Fifth Dimension club and see the Who and Jimi Hendrix there. We were all trying to scratch the puzzle: how to make it in the music business.
Bob allowed me to start playing on his records — he let me come in and do percussion overdubs on "Heavy Music" and play acoustic guitar and backgrounds on ("Ramblin' Gamblin' Man"). It was my first professional recording experience, where things were miked and rehearsed. I was impressed. He was like my big brother for those couple of years before I left for California.
The other revelation that we had … and Bob told me this too. We liked the Rationals. They were a soulful little band, one of my favorites from that time. But Bob said, “You know, you’re never going to get anywhere unless you write your own songs.”
That seemed like a daunting task to me. I remember responding with something like, “What if they’re crummy? What if they’re bad?” And he said, “Well, the first few probably will be bad. Just throw those away until you write a good one.” And that really stuck with me. Bob was the first guy (in Detroit) that did original material, before anybody else.
Shortly thereafter — in what would you call the Detroit music explosion of ’68, ’69, ’70 — there were other bands that started to do that: Ted Nugent, SRC, the MC5. They started doing original material, too, no matter how primitive. Every other band were just copy bands. That’s what suburban Detroit was populated by — bands playing teen clubs, bar mitzvahs, high school dances. The big challenge was to write your own material.
My last year in Detroit, I remember a couple of things happening that were kind of funny. At one point, I was going to be the bass player in Bob’s band. He was going to get rid of (Dan) Honaker. It was going to be me, Bob and Pep Perrine. He was on that Cream power-trio thing. He was going to be a guitar player. We got high and jammed in his basement for a couple of nights. We really thought this was it. Fortunately for everybody, my mother found out I was smoking pot, and she called Punch Andrews to say he might be jeopardizing his career. So of course that put the kibosh on me working with Seger. That was the impetus to go to California.
The other impetus was when Punch called me over: “I want you and Seger to meet me at this place in Oak Park. I’ve got these four girls that sing female Motown songs.” The three of us went over to her house — her name then was Laura Polkinghorne, now Laura Creamer — and saw these girl singers, the Mama Cats. So we met them, and I started going out with one of the girls in the group, Joan Sliwin. The Mama Cats moved out to California, ended up getting a record deal with Lee Hazlewood, and stayed in California (as the group Honey Ltd.).
I started out buying student-standby tickets — $66 from Detroit to California in ’67 — to visit my girlfriend. I thought*California was for me. When the Detroit Lions would play away games —*“Here we are at the Los Angeles Coliseum!”*— when it was sunny with palm trees in December, that sounded good to me. “Let’s burn our long johns and move west!”
I didn’t really see much of a future for myself in the Detroit music scene.*I had some other problems and things going on — it was*probably better to go to California*before I got in trouble with the police. Let’s just say I was creating some problems for myself. To tell you the truth*... the Vietnam War and the draft was really an important issue at that time. If you went to college and got a (student deferment), as soon as you got out you were a 1a (status) again. That wasn’t every attractive. I remember sitting in the parking lot of Oakland Community College*saying, "This sucks, I've got to get out of here."
I just didn’t see that the Detroit music scene (was my future). For me, it was more about
: You’re not going to make it until you go to a major market. You’re not going to be a rock ‘n’ roll star living in Detroit. Seger was the exception to that. It seemed I needed to go where the Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds were. That scene was calling. I just felt that was where I had to go.
After coming out to California the first time to visit my girlfriend and meeting people, we drove right through Laurel Canyon, and David Crosby is standing right there. The place to go was L.A.
So thank God my mother called Punch. Believe me, I’ve reminded her of that many times. We’ve had a good laugh about that one.
A LIVELY DETROIT SCENE
The Summer of Love didn’t just happen in San Francisco. It happened everywhere. San Francisco had Haight-Ashbury. We had Plum Street. We had Wayne State. San Francisco had the Fillmore. We had the Grande Ballroom. So certainly, it was an exciting time, yeah. It was for me.
A MOTOWN LESSON
One other thing that happened with Seger and I:*He’d finished “Heavy Music” with a guitarist named Carl Lagassa. Doug Brown helped out. One night, Seger, Doug, Carl and I went over to (Motown A&R man) Mickey Stevenson’s apartment. He was producing Kim Weston at the time.
Motown was a place you almost couldn’t get into — it was almost like reverse discrimination. They had the best recording studio, but you couldn’t use it. We went to Mickey Stevenson’s apartment, smoked the strongest pot I’d ever smoked in my life — I was absolutely devastated — and Bob played “Heavy Music” for him. Mickey went into a rant: “Here’s how we would have cut this record if we’d done it at Motown!” He proceeded to stand up in front of us: “Here’s what we do! The backbeat is the most important thing. We put everything on it: hand claps, snare drums, another snare drum, this, that.” My mouth was wide open. This revelation!
STUDYING THE ART OF THE HOOK
A lot of what got me started happened around this time. What set Bob apart from the pack was that he was such a good songwriter. We used to drive around listening to the radio and critiquing records. One time the Cowsills came on CKLW — I said, "I don't want to listen to that" and started to push the button. Bob said, "No, no, let's listen. They're on the radio; we're not." He wanted to study records we didn't even like, to see what was the attraction.
Bob also said, “You can never say the title of your song too many times.” And you can go back … See how many times he said “ramblin’ gamblin’ man,” count how many times he said “heavy music.” It’s a good point to know as a songwriter.
A LASTING RELATIONSHIP WITH SEGER
Bob came out here (to California) and we got the guys in the Eagles to sing on his stuff, and we started writing songs together again. There was a song on my solo album, “That Girl.” Bob helped me write “Heartache Tonight,” the Eagles sang on “Fire Lake,” I sang on “Against the Wind.” We were able to continue our relationship in the ’70s, which was gratifying for both of us.
(Seger was) nice, and naive. He wasn't a schemer, by any means. Music is a calling, and everybody starts out playing music because they love to play, they love the self-exploration and self-expression. That's something Bob had, and it's something that never dies.
I’m in my 50s now, and I’m sure most of the people you’re writing about are probably my age. Being in a band was like being in Little League: You got your uniform out way before the gig, made sure you had the right things to wear that night. It was the high point of the week. I have friends now who play on Wednesday nights at some obscure club down the coast here in California, and they love it. Because it’s all about playing. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest skier to enjoy skiing, and you don’t have to be the world’s greatest guitar player to enjoy playing music. And that’s the way we all started out. We all had dreams of stardom.
There’s a line in the Eagles song “The Sad Cafe”: “I don’t know why fortune*smile on some / And lets the rest go free.”*So who’s to say? I think it’s the songs. What set Bob Seger apart from the pack was the fact that he was such a good songwriter. There were other guys who had tore-up whiskey voices, but they didn’t have the kind of material Bob did. As he got into the ’70s, the guys in his band wanted it to be a Detroit, heavy driving rock ‘n’ roll thing, but his ballad writing set him apart — even, in my opinion, from Springsteen. These songs, like “We’ve Got Tonight,” and “Famous Final Scene” — that ability was really the thing that set him apart from everybody
Re: Remembering Glenn Frey
Originally Posted by Ive always been a dreamer
!!
A lot of my favorite actors and musicians look similar, including guys I had crushes on in high school. But finding more pictures of him recently it's really freaked me out as there are some he looks so much like my Dad. LOL My Dad in the early 80s when my parents met used to have somewhat long hair that matched what Glenn's looked like in that photo from 1970 where it wasn't too long yet and no facial hair. Just my Dad has green eyes. Then as the 80s went on my Dad had "The Long Run" era hairstyle, but they didn't resemble each other recently as my Dad never dyed his hair and kept a beard. I showed those pics recently to my parents and my Mom and brother couldn't stop laughing. LOL We all joked that clearly she had a type and that maybe my Dad's favorite wasn't really Don Henley after all. LOL
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