How the Eagles’ greatest hits broke the US charts

According to biographer Mark Elliott, in To The Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, pressure to release a “best of” came from Asylum’s new president Joe Smith, who was seeking to raise money while the band itself (responsible for more than 50% of the label’s revenue in the mid-1970s) delayed work on their fifth album in an attempt to renegotiate their royalty deal.

Drummer Don Henley described the recording as “the forced, hideous marriage of art and commerce” and told Elliott that Asylum “didn’t care whether their greatest hits album was any good or not. They just wanted the product.” Henley, who conceived the Eagles’ second LP, Desperado, as a concept album, particularly objected to the inclusion of his tracks stripped of their thematic context.

Instant crush

The concept of their greatest hits 1971-1975 is quite straightforward: all nine of the band’s singles to date plus the title track of “Desperado.” The record was an instant hit, spending five weeks atop the Billboard 200 album chart, and ending the year as the fourth most popular recording in America, behind Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive, Fleetwood Mac’s tenth self-titled album, and Wings’ Wings at the Speed ​​of Sound. After that, it continued to sell and sell, spending more than two years on the Billboard 200 chart.

From the 1980s onwards, it began trading places with Michael Jackson’s Thriller for the title of best-selling US album of all time, before finally establishing a clear lead in controversial circumstances in 2018. Warner Music Group, Asylum’s parent company, conducted a review of old sales and royalty reports to provide evidence, to the satisfaction of the RIAA, of previously unaccounted for purchases. Overnight, their magnum opus 1971-1975 increased its sales by nine million copies. Both Sony and Michael Jackson’s estate expressed concern at the time.

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