Music Review: The Eagles at the Inglewood Forum

I was watching L.A.'s Eyewitness News on Wednesday night, and reporter Leanne Suter couldn't contain her glee at the show, "Forum in Inglewood officially reopens with Eagles show."

Sports fans will recall the Inglewood Forum as the home of the Lakers for many years. I saw my first arena concert there in 1979, when Foreigner played (the original Foreigner, of course, with the great Lou Gramm).

My wife and I have seen the Eagles in concert a couple of times in recent years (we took our boys to see the band last year at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas). And no doubt Glenn Frey and Don Henley have got this traveling show tuned in tight as a button.

Here's Randall Roberts at the Los Angeles Times, "Live review: The Eagles christen the Forum, take it easy":

Throughout the history of Southern California rock, two bands have loomed largest in America's popular imagination: the Beach Boys and the Eagles.

While the Beach Boys presented a more wholesome lifestyle involving fun (fun, fun), surfing, and chasing girls, the Eagles sold more records, attracted more groupies, preferred dusk to midday and smoked more pot. Or, as Glenn Frey said during the Eagles' return to the Forum on Wednesday: "The Beach Boys were pioneers. The Eagles were settlers."

Playing the first of six nights at the beautifully renovated Inglewood arena, the band presented a three-plus hour retrospective dubbed "History of the Eagles," a sort of concert companion to the band's 2013 documentary of the same name. Over the night, Frey, Don Henley and bandmates guided fans through the peaks and valleys of their catalog -- "Hotel California," "Lyin' Eyes," "Take It to the Limit" and more -- offering everything your average Eagles fan would want to hear, with plenty of bonus Joe Walsh wildness.

Theirs is a fascinating history, one that unfolded over the evening with instrumental clarity, pretty harmonies and many guitar solos. Delivering steady, stoned ballads and relatively revved up rockers with fellow members Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit and, for some of the night's best moments, founding member Bernie Leadon, the Eagles presented a valid argument that the best of their hits warrant continued exploration.

The messages that the Eagles spread about California life were, after all, some of the most prominent of the era. Delivered over FM airwaves at the peak of terrestrial radio's power and ingrained into the minds of anyone living through the 1970s and '80s, the Eagles' best songs captured a California settling into itself, more concerned with its valleys and hanging out than surf and sun.

The cover of "Hotel California" alone is one of the defining California images of the '70s, an updated version of orange crate art that exudes warmth and mystery. For better or worse, the Eagles helped to further characterize the region in the cultural imagination (and helped propel the careers of both David Geffen and Irving Azoff)...

There's still more at the link.

Roberts fails to mention guitarist Steuart Smith, who replaced Don Felder in 2001. Smith plays some of the band's most iconic lead solos, for example, teaming up with Joe Walsh on "Hotel California." Stay with that video at top all the way through. It's a decent amateur mobile recording and shows the jumbotron images during the song's guitar solo. Great stuff.

More at Billboard, "The Eagles Reopen The Forum in L.A. With a Nostalgic Night of Hits."