On July 31, 1980, the Eagles played a benefit concert in Long Beach, California, for Senator Alan Cranston, a show that would turn out to be their last for the next fourteen years. By the time the curtain came down, two of the band’s own members had come close to a physical fight in front of thousands of unsuspecting fans.
Tensions inside the band had been building for years, fueled by the grinding pressure of multi-platinum success and growing creative friction, particularly between guitarist Don Felder and frontman Glenn Frey. That night in Long Beach, the friction boiled over mid-performance. According to Frey’s own later recollection, Felder turned to him onstage during the set and warned him that he’d be settling things physically the moment the show ended, with only a few songs left to go before the confrontation. Frey says he spent the rest of the set outwardly performing for the crowd while inwardly seething, all while the band ground through hits including “Best of My Love” as if nothing at all were wrong.
The Eagles never played together again in that lineup. Each member went on to pursue solo work; Frey and drummer Don Henley both found considerable commercial success on their own, while bassist Timothy B. Schmit and guitarist Joe Walsh released solo material of their own. When asked directly about reuniting, Henley delivered the line that would define the breakup for the next decade and a half, telling an interviewer the band would only play together again when hell froze over.
For years, that quote functioned as a kind of permanent epitaph for the Eagles. But behind the scenes, the members never entirely lost track of each other, and longtime manager Irving Azoff kept gently planting the idea of a reunion. A 1993 country tribute album covering Eagles songs reignited public interest in the band’s catalog, and a subsequent music video shoot involving several of the original members reportedly served as the spark that got Frey and Henley talking again directly. Bassist Timothy B. Schmit later said part of what changed his own thinking was watching the Rolling Stones continue touring successfully despite their own well-publicized internal tensions, realizing the Eagles didn’t necessarily need to stay broken up just because they’d once fought.
Two months after that fateful video shoot, Frey and Henley had lunch with their management team and agreed to formally get the band back together. In April 1994, the Eagles filmed an MTV special that doubled as their official return, releasing it under a title that practically dared the universe to prove Henley wrong: “Hell Freezes Over.” The accompanying tour became one of the most successful of the decade, and the band continued performing together, in various lineups, for more than two decades afterward. Felder himself was eventually fired from the band again in 2001 over a separate dispute, proving that even hell freezing over couldn’t entirely smooth out every wrinkle in the Eagles’ famously turbulent history.