What was the first Eagles song to feature Timothy B Schmit on bass?
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(Credits: The Eagles)
Rather than calling it a day when bassist Randy Meisner left the band in September 1977, the Eagles simply drafted in a replacement and headed back into the studio. They couldn’t see the writing on the wall, but the dearth of original material that key songwriters Don Henley and Glenn Frey were able to come up with should have spelt it out for them.
Timothy B Schmit was the obvious answer to replace Meisner, having already taken over his spot once before in the pair’s previous band, Poco. Schmit was Meisner’s polar opposite as a personality, outgoing and agreeable, but not at all concerned with making space in the band for his own artistic voice. As he put it in the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, “I was just really happy to be there.”
His happy-go-lucky approach to playing bass for arguably the biggest band on the planet at the time meant he was oblivious to the growing friction within the Eagles. According to Frey, even with Meisner’s departure, the ill-feeling within the group didn’t subside, with an atmosphere of “resentment and plotting and complaining” in danger of derailing their recording sessions. Guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh were becoming increasingly unhappy with Henley and Frey running the show, and a rift even began to develop between the band’s two leading lights as their creative wellspring was drying up.
But Schmit thought he’d seen it all before. “In my experience, all rock and roll bands are on the brink of breaking up at all times,” he reflected 35 years later. Tensions running high was par for the course, particularly within the band behind Hotel California. Still, the Eagles just couldn’t seem to get it together in the studio, as they moved between two Florida locations over the course of several months in search of their next album. Then they did something no self-respecting rock outfit should ever do.
What did they record?
In the autumn of 1978, with the final studio album before their breakup still almost a year away from release, the Eagles decided to record a Christmas song. ‘Please Come Home for Christmas’ is a schmaltzy cover of blues singer Charles Brown’s 1960 holiday standard, which sounds like it belongs on the soundtrack of a Hallmark channel movie, and probably is. It’s not bad as festive fare goes, but is a clear indication of the creative rut the band was in.
Given that they’d failed to complete the recording of anything else for their next LP by that point, this workaday stocking-filler was the first Eagles song that Schmit played bass on. Which kind of summed up his role in the group. Harmless yet aimless, easy to like yet hard to love, and not bringing anything especially original to the table. The record confirmed beyond any doubt that the band’s best days were behind them.
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