Another great one gone

Bruce Weber has an obituary in The New York Times for Glenn Frey:

Glenn Frey (photo, top), the guitarist, singer and songwriter who co-founded the Eagles, whose country-tinged, melodic rock tunes, wistful love ballads, philosophical anthems, observations of the outlaw life, and testaments to the wages of decadence made it perhaps the leading American band of the 1970s, died recently in New York City. He was 67. An announcement on the band’s website said the cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis, and pneumonia.
The Eagles, founded in Los Angeles, California in 1971 by Frey and drummer and singer Don Henley, lived furiously in the musical spotlight for nearly a decade, pumping out hits that defined a post-Beach Boys California pop in the midst of an era that otherwise gave birth to both disco and punk.
The band flamed out in 1980 and disbanded, but got back together fourteen years later, its popularity barely subsided, but it was the rocket-like rise and spectacular early success that landed it in 1998 in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whose website said the Eagles sold more records than any other band in the 1970s. It had four consecutive Number One albums, five Number One singles, and its Greatest Hits 1971-1975 album alone sold upward of twenty-six million copies.
The band’s hit songs included yearning, battle-of-the-sexes musings like Lyin’ Eyes and Heartache Tonight,” and the cool-cat lifestyle statements Take It Easy and Peaceful Easy Feeling, all of which featured Frey’s light, casual, relaxed lead vocals, as well as the Number One hit Hotel California (video), the band’s signature song from its 1977 album of the same name.
Its imagistic, vaguely mystical lyrics, written by Frey, Henley, and Don Felder, hint at a drug-fueled state of being, perhaps promising rapture, perhaps not, and have supplied fuel for countless interpretations:

There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell”
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor
I thought I heard them say...
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year
You can find it here

Glenn Lewis Frey was born in Detroit, Michigan on 6 November 1948, and grew up in the suburb of Royal Oak. His father was an auto factory worker; his mother, as he described it in History of the Eagles, a 2013 documentary about the band, “baked pies at General Motors.”
He took piano lessons from the age of five and “that alone could get you beat up after school in suburban Detroit,” he said, but he switched to guitar after seeing the Beatles perform live in downtown Detroit and watching the girls in the audience go wild.
He played in bands around Detroit (he played acoustic guitar on an early recording by another local rocker, Bob Seger), before moving to Southern California and crossing paths with the likes of Jackson Browne (with whom Frey wrote the song Take It Easy) and Linda Ronstadt.
He also met Henley, and the two of them toured with Ronstadt’s band. Frey and Henley, with two other members of Ronstadt’s band, the bassist Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, who played guitar and other stringed instruments, were the first incarnation of the Eagles.
The band members were known for their often conflicting personalities, which led to changes in personnel (other members included the guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh and the bassist Timothy B. Schmit) and eventually to the breakup of the band.
Frey and Henley battled over creative control and other matters; Frey, whom People magazine once referred to as the Warren Beatty of rock, has acknowledged a certain profligate lifestyle during the band’s first decade. “By 1976 and 1977, Glenn and I were living in a big house that belonged to Dorothy Lamour, up in the hills with a 360-degree view,” Henley said on the website superseventies.com. “Glenn and I were the odd couple. I was sort of the housekeeper, the tidy one. He was the lovable slob. All around the house he’d leave these little cigarette butts standing on end. They looked like miniature cities.” After the band broke up in 1980, Frey embarked on a solo career, producing hit songs including The Heat Is On.
Survivors include his wife, Cindy, and three children, Taylor, Deacon, and Otis.
An underestimated reason for the success of the Eagles, perhaps, was their perfectionism, especially Frey’s. “Glenn, I think, took three days in the studio on the word ‘city’ at the beginning of Lyin’ Eyes, Felder, who joined the band in the mid-1970s, said in an interview on the website ultimateclassicrock.com. “It would either be a little early, or a little late, or the ‘t’ would be too sharp. It literally took a long time to get that word perfect, maybe to an extreme. But every time that word goes by now and I hear it, I can appreciate the time and dedication and perseverance that it took to get it perfect.”

Rico says that, like the Beatles, some music will live forever...