Temps reached 66 degrees on April 25, 1994, in Burbank, Calif. – a bit colder than the typical high of 74, according to the National Weather Service. Inside the Warner Bros. Studio, however, hell was freezing over.
The warring Eagles were finally ending a nearly 15-year hiatus, as the The Long Run-era lineup took the stage to run through old favorites and a few new songs. This concert would be recorded for a blockbuster MTV special and nine-times platinum chart-topping album. Both were titled Hell Freezes Over, after a favorite reply from Don Henley after being asked when the Eagles would get back together.
“We’ve all grown up a lot. When you first break up, the wounds are open,” Glenn Frey told the Los Angeles Times back then. “There is going to be some anger and some hurt. But as years go by, all you remember is the good times. I said when we got back together, ‘I don’t live in the past. As far as I am concerned, this is Day One. Nobody has to make any reparations.'”
READ MORE: Ranking Every Eagles Album
The TV taping had been confirmed in March by Variety. The Eagles would be backed by a 37-piece orchestra during a pair of performances over two days. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some rust remained.
At different points, there were false starts for “Get Over It” and “In the City.” Henley also flubbed the lyrics on “Get Over It,” one of the new Eagles songs being premiered. “Well, I fucked that up,” he finally admitted, “but we’re going to move along and do the next tune.”
Performances of 11 classic-era songs from these soundstage shows were selected for the Hell Freezes Over album. They ended up including a studio version of “Get Over It,” along with the Timothy B. Schmit -sung “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” Frey-sung “The Girl from Yesterday” and Henley-sung “Learn to Be Still.”
Fans had an unlikely figure to thank for this long-hoped-for reunion: The group patched things up after making a healing appearance in the video for Travis Tritt’s cover of “Take It Easy.”
“I always thought about the Rolling Stones when we were apart,” Schmit told the Washington Post. “I would see that the Stones were still together even though there was a lot of publicity about Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] having a lot of problems. That’s what it finally came down to: Let’s do this thing and come together and work again.”
Watch Eagles’ ‘Take It Easy’ From ‘Hell Freezes Over’
How an Earlier Eagles Reunion Fell Apart
Frey and Henley had made an aborted attempt to reunite a few years earlier. They’d hoped to include some new songs on a new greatest hits package, perhaps in conjunction with a tour. Then Frey backed away.
“I wasn’t ready,” Frey told the Los Angeles Times. “I had just remarried [and] had just had major surgery to remove a section of my large intestine – a congenital thing since birth – that left me laying on my back in Cedars-Sinai with a bunch of staples in my stomach.”
By April 1994, however, the Eagles had finally recaptured a sense of community. In fact, they were emboldened enough to rearrange one of their best-known songs: The lilting take on the title track from Hotel California accentuated its roots as a stripped-down Don Felder demo simply dubbed “Mexican reggae.”
The Eagles returned to touring before Hell Freezes Over was released in November 1994. More than 100 shows were scheduled – though several were postponed when Frey’s stomach troubles flared up again just before an October date in Oklahoma City. Doctors recommended immediate surgery for what was described as a “chronic gastrointestinal disorder.”
These same health issues later forced the Eagles to pull out of the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in November 2015. Frey died the following January at age 67 after battling what the band described as “acute ulcerative colitis.”
Rock Music’s 25 Craziest Conspiracy Theories
Which stories are true, and which aren’t? Let’s count them down …
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
Six Little-Known Eagles ‘Hotel California’ Facts
