Eagles founding member Glenn Frey dies at 67
Los Angeles Times
By Hailey Branson-Potts and Christie D'Zurilla
January 18, 2016
Glenn Frey, the guitarist and singer who was a founding member of the Eagles, died Monday in New York City, the band said in a statement. He was 67.
Frey died of complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis and pneumonia, the band said.
“Words can neither describe our sorrow, nor our love and respect for all that he has given to us, his family, the music community and millions of fans worldwide,” the statement read.
The Eagles were to have been recognized with a 2015 Kennedy Center Honor in December, but in November the band requested that it be put off for a year, until “all four Eagles -- Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit -- can attend.”
Over the course of the group’s career, the Eagles have sold more than 120 million albums worldwide and won six Grammy Awards.
In a 2014 review of an Eagles concert at the Forum, Los Angeles Times music critic Randall Roberts summed up the band’s influence on pop culture during the 1970s and ’80s:
“The messages that the Eagles spread about California life were, after all, some of the most prominent of the era. Delivered over FM airwaves at the peak of terrestrial radio's power and ingrained into the minds of anyone living through the 1970s and '80s, the Eagles’ best songs captured a California settling into itself, more concerned with its valleys and hanging out than surf and sun.
“... For better or worse,” he wrote, “the Eagles helped to further characterize the region in the cultural imagination.”
The Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
Times critic Robert Hilburn wrote that it “was a moment of triumph for the band because it had been widely dismissed by much of the East Coast music establishment in the ‘70s for its laidback Southern California country-rock style.
“But the group’s music eventually took on a harder edge and its lyrics explored a generation’s struggles to balance the innocence and idealism of the ‘60s against the creeping disillusionment of the ‘70s with a biting, literary edge.”
FREY, Glenn (Glenn Lewis Frey)
Born: 11/6/1948, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.
Died: 1/18/2016, New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Glenn Frey’s western – soundtrack:
Desperado (TV) - 1987