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Life In The Fast Lane: (1970s Music) The Eagles (The Truth Behind The Song)
Joe Walsh – Life in the Fast Lane
Life in the Fast Lane (2013 Remaster)
Life in the Fast Lane
“Life in the Fast Lane” is a song written by Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, and recorded by American rock band Eagles for the band’s fifth studio album Hotel California (1976). It was the third single released from this album, and peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Content
The song tells the story of a couple who take their excessive lifestyle to the edge. On In the Studio with Redbeard, Glenn Frey revealed that the title came to him one day when he was riding on the freeway with a drug dealer known as “The Count”.[1] Frey asked the dealer to slow down and the response was, “What do you mean? It’s life in the fast lane!”[1] In that same interview, Frey indicated that the song’s central riff was played by Walsh while the band was warming up in rehearsals and Walsh was told to “keep that; it’s a song”. Don Henley recalled that the “song actually sprang from the opening guitar riff. One day, at rehearsal, Joe [Walsh] just busted out that crazy riff and I said ‘What the hell is that? We’ve got to figure out to make a song out of that.”[1]Henley and Frey, the primary lyricists for the band, then wrote the lyrics for the song.[1]
Critical reception
Cash Box said that “with the influence of six-stringer Joe Walsh, the Eagles are harder and funkier than ever here.”[2] In 2016, the editors of Rolling Stonerated “Life in the Fast Lane” as the Eagles’ eighth-greatest song.[1] In 2017, Billboard ranked the song number four on their list of the 15 greatest Eagles songs,[3] and in 2019, Rolling Stone ranked the song number eight on their list of the 40 greatest Eagles songs.[4]
Personnel
Partial credits from liner notes.[5]
- Don Henley – lead vocals, drums
- Glenn Frey – backing vocals, clavinet
- Joe Walsh – lead guitar, rhythm guitar
- Don Felder – lead guitar, rhythm guitar
- Randy Meisner – bass guitar, backing vocals
Covers
In 2007, Jill Johnson recorded the song on her album Music Row.[6]
The song was used as the soundtrack for the roller coaster The Eagles’ Life In The Fast Lane, which opened at Hard Rock Park in May 2008.[7][8]
On July 25, 2019 the rock band Hinder released their cover of the song as a non album single.[9]
Charts
| “Life in the Fast Lane” | |
|---|---|
| Spain cover release | |
| Single by the Eagles | |
| from the album Hotel California | |
| B-side | “The Last Resort“ |
| Released | May 3, 1977 |
| Recorded | 1976 |
| Genre | Rock |
| Length | 4:46 |
| Label | Asylum |
| Songwriter(s) | Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey, Don Henley |
| Producer(s) | Bill Szymczyk |
| The Eagles singles chronology | |
| “Hotel California” (1977)”Life in the Fast Lane” (1977)”Please Come Home for Christmas” (1978) | |
| Audio | |
| “Life in the Fast Lane” on YouTube | |
| Chart (1977) | Peak position |
|---|---|
| Canada Top Singles (RPM)[10] | 12 |
| Canada Adult Contemporary (RPM)[11] | 41 |
| US Billboard Hot 100[12] | 11 |
Certifications
References
Last edited 3 months ago by Bruteforce7700
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In his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Francis Schaeffer noted:
The man who followed on from that point was English–Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). He proposed drugs as a solution. We should, he said, give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads. All that was left for Aldous Huxley and those who followed him was truth inside a person’s own head. With Huxley’s idea, what began with the existential philosophers – man’s individual subjectivity attempting to give order as well as meaning, in contrast to order being shaped by what is objective or external to oneself – came to its logical conclusion. Truth is in one’s own head. The ideal of objective truth was gone.
This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups–for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965-1958. The Beatles’Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassible by other means of communication.
Here is a good review of the episode 016 HSWTL The Age of Non-Reason of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?, December 23, 2007:
Together with the advent of the “drug Age” was the increased interest in the West in the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. Schaeffer tells us that: “This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today.” Drugs and Eastern religions came like a flood into the Western world. They became the way that people chose to find meaning and values in life. By themselves or together, drugs and Eastern religion became the way that people searched inside themselves for ultimate truth.
Along with drugs and Eastern religions there has been a remarkable increase “of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope.” As modern man searches for answers it “many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine.” For many people having the “occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having meaning” is better than leaving the upper story of nonreason empty. For them horror or the macabre are more acceptable than the idea that they are just a machine.
Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:
The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there.
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Johnny Cash had a long struggle with drugs and his story was told in an earlier post.
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