95 More Songs of Summer - "Take It Easy"

 

This is not the song I would select if you asked me to name the Eagles' best song (I'd opt for "One of These Nights").  But if a martian landed on Earth and told me that he'd heard of this band called the Eagles and could I choose for him the most representative song from their catalog of the "Eagles sound," it would definitely be "Take It Easy."  And yes, that is the clumsiest pair of sentences to appear on this blog for a long time.

I'm pretty darn sure that the first time I heard this song was during our first family vacation to Los Angeles, back in the summer of 1972 - a trip made all the more special by the fact that we were driving a classic Kingswood Estate station wagon (and I'm not joking, that really was a classic car).

This is a cool video because it was probably the one and only time that every member of the Eagles appeared together onstage.  Now that Don Felder seems to have burned every bridge imaginable between himself and Henley & Frey, it's not likely we'll ever see that happen again.

"Take It Easy," the Eagles, from the summer of 1972.