On February 15, 2016, at the 58th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Jackson Browne took Glenn Frey’s place at center stage and sang lead on “Take It Easy.” Behind him were Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit and founding Eagle Bernie Leadon. Frey had died on January 18, at 67. The song they played was the Eagles’ very first single, and it only exists in its famous form because, more than four decades earlier, Browne got stuck and Frey got him unstuck.
A song that stopped on a street corner
“Take It Easy” started as a Jackson Browne song. He started writing it around 1971 on a road trip through Utah and Arizona, a trip on which, he has said, his car broke down. He had the first verse. Then he started the second verse with a man standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and the words dried up.
Browne has told that part himself more than once. He told Rolling Stone he had taken the song only as far as that Winslow corner. In another interview, with Flagstaff music historian Matthew Ziegler, he said the corner was always Winslow, but the image of a woman at the wheel of a truck came from a different stop on his travels: a Toyota pickup pulling out of a hot dog stand in East Flagstaff. It was not, he admitted, really a flatbed Ford.
He also remembered what he handed Frey to work with. Browne gave him the Winslow corner and a loose idea about the woman, along with one piece of advice:
“You know girls out there drive trucks.”
In the 1994 documentary Jackson Browne: Going Home, he said much the same thing, that he had liked the fact that so many women in Arizona were driving trucks. So the scene was real. Browne just could not find the words that made it land.
What Glenn Frey heard through the floor
At the time, the two men lived in the same small apartment building in Echo Park. Frey was renting a single room upstairs; Browne worked below him, and Frey could hear him writing. Frey later said that listening to Browne work every day taught him a lot about songwriting.
In Frey’s own account, he told Browne he loved the song he kept hearing. Browne played it for him, then admitted he was stuck and played the unfinished second verse. Frey came back with a girl in a flatbed Ford slowing down for a look at the man on the corner. Frey said Browne was thrilled and declared that they had co-written it, though Frey said the song was still mostly Browne’s. Frey said Browne already had the Winslow lines; what Frey added was, in his words, “the package without the ribbon.”
Browne has been quick to credit that ribbon. He told Rolling Stone he did not even know what a flatbed Ford was:
“You need a guy like Glenn, who’s a ‘girl-Ford-Lord’ guy.”
Browne let Frey’s new band have the song. The Eagles released “Take It Easy” in May 1972 as their debut single, with Glenn Frey singing lead, and it climbed to No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. Browne cut his own version a year later on For Everyman.
Singing the line without the man who wrote it
On January 19, 2016, the night after Frey died, Browne was playing a concert in Clearwater, Florida. Before “Take It Easy,” he told the audience:
“It is a song that I started, and I didn’t know how to finish it.”
He added that if he had finished it by himself, it would not be the song it is. The next night in Fort Lauderdale, he thanked Frey again for adding what Browne considered maybe the most memorable line in the whole song.
Four weeks later he was on the Grammy stage. Don Henley later told the BBC the performance was very difficult and admitted, “We actually almost didn’t do it.” Bernie Leadon, who left the Eagles in 1975, played the guitar solo he had played on the original record. Near the end of the song, a large color photo of Glenn Frey appeared on the screen behind the band and stayed there to the last note. Then the five men gathered at the front of the stage and bowed.
That night, Browne sang the second verse he could not finish decades earlier, including the line Frey wrote to rescue it. There was no one standing in Glenn’s spot to sing it but him.
Still standing on that corner
Winslow, Arizona, has spent years thanking both men for one verse. Since 1999 the town’s Standin’ on the Corner Park has featured a bronze statue of a young troubadour with a guitar, standing on a corner. In September 2016, seven months after the Grammy tribute, Winslow unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Glenn Frey in the same park.
The troubadour on that corner finally has company, and it is Glenn. If you ever stopped in Winslow just because of that verse, what was it like to finally stand there?