BACK in their mid Seventies hey day, The Eagles willingly represented the quasi hippy brigade soft rock tunes and diluted country songs proffered the message of peaceful, easy feelings to a youthful crowd of post Haight Asbury casualties and Vietnam victims.
Within those admittedly loose contexts the band had their estimable place. But now? If anything, The Eagles represent the greed is good aesthetic of the Eighties, a complete about face to the immaterialism of the previous decade.
Yet they have put behind them their differences, regrouped after a well documented and acrimonious split and started out on their biggest ever European tour with the first of two performances at the RDS in Dublin last night.
It seemed somewhat unlucky, to say the least, that almost everyone's favourite summer band was playing to thousands of people sheltering under umbrellas. There's little doubt that, if the sun had been hot and shining, this would have been a better event. As it was, the threatening grey clouds delivered sucker punches in the form of the occasional cold downpour, and even the collective history and back catalogue of The Eagles couldn't cope with that.
They sang in front of a back drop of a rocky mountain way, these cowboys who looked as if they had never stepped in cow dung, and they played all their best known songs to the generally muted applause of the packed venue.
Yet how laid back could they go? All the way, apparently. So much so that some songs - Peaceful Easy Feeling, Tequila Sunrise and Take It Easy, to name but three had to be scraped off the protective tarpaulin.
Yet how laid back could they go? All the way, apparently. So much so that some songs - Peaceful Easy Feeling, Tequila Sunrise and Take It Easy, to name but three - had to be scraped off the protective tarpaulin.
The best aspect of this concert was the undeniably high quality of the harmonies, and the occasional sweet tune, but sadly there was no muscle here, merely flaccid, dewyeyed memories.
"Every form of refuge has its price", sang The Eagles in Lyin' Eyes. They sang that line: without any apparent sense of irony whatsoever. Perfectly understandable in the circumstances . .