Soundtrack of My Life: The Long Run by the Eagles

What was your first record or cassette? How about the first time you heard a song that hadn’t been played on the radio?

For me it was The Long Run by the Eagles.

It was Christmas of 1979, and deep inside me a lifelong love for music was lying dormant under a denim jacket, a pair of brown corduroys, and a t-shirt with the Fonz on the front. (Aaaay!)

I was in eighth grade. I owned a little one-speaker cassette/radio player and made my own mix tapes by recording my favorite songs from the radio: “My Sharona” by the Knack, “Flirtin’ with Disaster” by Molly Hatchet, “Double Vision” by Foreigner.

But I was ready for more. I wanted to listen to songs that didn’t have the DJ’s voice at the beginning and end, that weren’t 3-minute K-Tel radio edits, but were the full songs in all their 5-minute glory.

And so, for Christmas, I had asked for The Long Run, if for no other reason than to hear “Heartache Tonight” over and over.

I didn’t have a heartache. I didn’t party. But boy, did I love that song, especially the final drum roll at the end. After all, I was a drummer in a band myself. Well, I played snare drum in the school band. Sometimes. Taking turns with the other drummers.

But I wanted to be a drummer in a band.

And so my Christmas list in 1979 included The Long Run (and also Discovery by ELO–but that’s a story for another day).

And, yes, my parents came through that Christmas, and I found myself unwrapping my first album by the Eagles. Over the years I would collect them all, eventually owning every Eagles album on cassette, LP, CD, and now digitally. But on that Christmas day it was a new world for me, musically speaking.

As I listened to “In the City,” “The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks,” ” Teenage Jail,” and “Those Shoes” (“Butt out, butt out, whoa, whoa!”) I realized just how much great music there was that didn’t make it to the radio, and I was hooked.

I poured over the liner notes, reading names like Bob Seger, J.D. Souther, Jimmy Buffett, and David Sanborn, discovering other artists the hard way in the years before the Internet, Pandora or genius playlists.

Before long I had the whole album memorized, and I hummed it to myself as I delivered newspapers in the early hours of the morning.

Many years have gone by since then, and my musical tastes have widened and deepened, but I still love listening to it. A lot of critics call The Long Run one of the Eagles’ weaker albums, but it will always be one of my favorites.

What was your first album?

The Long Run track listing:

1. “The Long Run”
2. “I Can’t Tell You Why”
3. “In the City”
4. “The Disco Strangler”
5. “King of Hollywood”
6. “Heartache Tonight”
7. “Those Shoes”
8. “Teenage Jail”
9. “The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks”
10. “The Sad Café”