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The previous post at this blog discussed how young music “reactors” on YouTube create channels that attract viewers to watch these reactors hear, ostensibly for the first time, various popular songs from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
It's a curious concept, one I felt drawn to in a strong way. After all, they were talking about songs I heard on the radio when I was growing up.
Some of these “reactors” are music professionals — voice instructors, members of symphonies, classical music experts. Their reactions have made a big impression on me, and I find their observations are the most legitimate.
The bulk of the other reactors, I gather, are simply people who might have listened to contemporary music growing up, “growing up” years that were in the 1990s or 2000s. And today, they are being challenged to give older music a listen and a chance to make an impression.
One popular artist picked by the reactors to check out is country singer and legend George Jones, the subject of the previous post. After I activated the George Jones post, it occurred to me that another performance that has left many “reactors” in awe is a 1976 live concert performance of the Eagles’ Take It to the Limit, whose lead vocal was handled by band bassist and co-founder Randy Meisner.
Every reactor was stunned by how Meisner handled the song’s lead vocal. Several said they didn’t understand why Meisner didn’t do more lead vocals because they thought he had the best voice in the band.
The answer is that Meisner disdained the limelight, wrote way too few songs himself (the Eagles had a tightly observed practice that whoever wrote the song would handle lead vocals. And as it turned out, Don Henley and Glenn Frey did almost all the songwriting for the band).
I agree that Meisner’s Take It to the Limit performance in that 1976 live concert video is absolutely stellar. Sadly, as I learned only in recent years, it was his refusal to sing that song for an encore at a show during the band’s 1977 tour that resulted in his exit from the band.
By 1977, Meisner grew very frightened of not being able to hit the climactic high falsetto notes in the song’s final refrains. And his band treated that as a line in the sand that they couldn’t allow him to cross.
Curiously, Meisner, who also had co-founded the country-pop band Poco in 1968 before joining the Eagles, left Poco after the band’s first album, Pickin’ Up the Pieces, because he was angry he wasn’t invited to participate on the album’s mix playback sessions. The band responded by wiping away Meisner’s lead vocal on the title track and having the band’s drummer, George Granthan, re-record it. The band also used a dog to replace Meisner’s image on the illustrated album cover art. His bass work and backup vocals were kept on the recordings.
Meisner attempted a solo career and assembled or joined a few ensembles in the ensuing years, but his time with the Eagles was clearly the high point of his musical career. He died on July 26, 2023, at age 77 due to complications associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The image of Meisner at the top of this post is in the public domain and from his Wikipedia entry.
