From 50,000 Feet

There must be an interesting tale behind this week’s Rolling Stone cover story (link is to an excerpt only) about the Eagles.

According to the rules of celebrity marketing, the timing is a little off.  The Eagles have been touring since March.  Their new album, Long Road out of Eden, came out last October and has already sold more than 6 million copies. Usually cover stories are timed around the launch of new entertainment product when they’re news, not a few months later.  True, they just played New York.  Perhaps that aroused the interest of provincial Manhattanphile Jann Wenner, the magazine’s founder and publisher.

I suspect the Eagles pushed to have the story written, offering as an irresistible enticement to allow access to a writer from the magazine’s peak years, with whom they later feuded. The cover appearance, a PR coup, was surely negotiated.  What was the Eagles’ agenda?

My instincts tell me that despite the new album’s financial success, it hasn’t had the kind of cultural impact the Eagles expected. It was a much bigger deal in the media when the band first reformed back in 1997, toured and put out a live album.  And, of course, in the 70s, the pop-music spotlight was always on the Eagles.  They refined what became known as the California sound: Laid-back, countrified, introspective and a little sinister. Their Hotel California album was treasured not just as a set of songs, but as some kind of literary masterpiece.

The reason for the new disc’s muffled impact has to do, I think, with the band’s decision to sell it via a partnership that seems to run counter to the left-wing political stances with which the band is usually associated.  You can’t buy Long Road Out of Eden anywhere but at Wal-Mart. Until recently, you could only download it off Wal-Mart’s website or the Eagles’ own, although you can now get a download from Amazon. It’s still not on iTunes, and if you find a copy at another music store, it was probably purchased at Wal-Mart and marked up for resale.

Since I don’t live near a Wal-Mart, I was only vaguely aware that the Eagles had ended a nearly 30-year break from making a new studio album.  I don’t listen to much pop music on the radio anymore, but if I did, I’d have been unlikely to hear a single from it.  When other acts from the same era put out new music — Bruce Springsteen, the Who, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones — it seems like a much bigger deal because you see their promotion everywhere, online, in stores and on TV. The consequence of selling Long Road to Eden exclusively through Wal-Mart is that the album is a kind of hiding-in-plain-sight secret to many music fans.

Undoubtedly some fans (and detractors, of which the Eagles have always had many) avoid Wal-Mart, because that’s what progressive-minded people are supposed to do. From WakeUpWalMart.com, a labor-sponsored site:

Well, there are two visions for America: Wal-Mart’s America, where profits come before people, and our vision, where people come first.

• In Wal-Mart’s America, workers are paid poverty level wages even when they work full-time.
• In our America, workers are paid a living wage with proper health and retirement benefits.
• In Wal-Mart’s America, wealthy companies shift their health care costs onto taxpayers like you and your families.
• In our America, corporations live up to their responsibility and provide their employees with adequate and affordable health care coverage.
• In Wal-Mart’s America, suppliers are forced to make their goods cheaper even if it means shipping U.S. jobs overseas.
• In our America, we value U.S. jobs and companies that buy and sell “Made in America.”
• In Wal-Mart’s America, women are paid less than men.
• In our America, women and men are treated equally - fair pay for everyone.

Rolling Stone has also worked hard over the years to burnish its progressive image, with at least one political article per issue, 99 percent from a hard-line left-wing perspective.  This 2006 Paul Krugman piece, which cites Wal-Mart’s low wages and benefits as an example of economic inequality, is typical.

Today, Wal-Mart is America’s largest corporation, with 1.3 million employees. H. Lee Scott, its chairman, is paid almost $23 million — more than five times Roche’s inflation-adjusted salary. Yet Scott’s compensation excites relatively little comment, since it’s not exceptional for the CEO of a large corporation these days. The wages paid to Wal-Mart’s workers, on the other hand, do attract attention, because they are low even by current standards. On average, Wal-Mart’s non-supervisory employees are paid $18,000 a year, far less than half what GM workers were paid thirty-five years ago, adjusted for inflation. And Wal-Mart is notorious both for how few of its workers receive health benefits and for the stinginess of those scarce benefits.

But the magazine’s take on the Eagles’ Wal-Mart deal is surprisingly sympathetic and unironic.  In a portion of the article not available online, the deal is explained this way:

Irving Azoff, the Eagles’ manager for four decades, figured out that the band was an established brand with an established audience with a habit of buying albums, not downloading. The Eagles therefore had no need of a record label’s starmaking machinery. He cut a deal directly with Wal-Mart to sell the double album for $11.88 — less than a normal first-run single CD — while the Eagles collected twice the normal royalty rate (four dollars)….

“Whatever you might think, the money is secondary to the Eagles,” says Azoff.  “They’re going to cash the checks, but they don’t sit around at night plotting to go with Wal-Mart because we’re getting more money. It’s great to see the record company relegated to the back seat. We make more money for 45 minutes of one show in Kansas City than our entire iTunes royalty.”

And that’s all Rolling Stone has to say about the Eagles and Wal-Mart — a kudo for sticking it to the record companies.  The rest of the magazine story is about the band’s history and how its members interact.

So, tell me if you think I’m wrong, but I suspect the Eagles now feel like the Wal-Mart deal cost them a chance at respect and influence.  The title song for the new album is a full-on protest song, with lyrics that squarely attack the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq.  I’m sure they had high ambitions for it:

Music blasting from an SUV
On a bright and sunny day
Rolling down the interstate
In the good ol’ USA
Having lunch at the petroleum club
Smoking fine cigars and swapping lies
“Gimme ‘nother slice of that barbecued brisket!”
“Gimme ‘nother piece of that pecan pie”

Freeways flickering, cell phones chiming a tune
We’re riding to Utopia; road map says we’ll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it’s a long road out of Eden…

Weaving down the American highway
Through the litter and the wreckage, and the cultural junk
Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda
Now we’re driving dazed and drunk

Went down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay
Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way
He said, “It’s hard to stop this binging once you get a taste
But the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste”

Behold the bitten apple - the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it’s a long road out of Eden 

Wal-Mart is generally not where shoppers go to hear that kind of invective.  And I think that bothers the Eagles, not financially, but in their egos.  So they reached out to Rolling Stone, I  suspect, in hopes of having their pecan pie and eating it, too; to make the new album’s release more of an event. I wonder if it’s going to work out like they hope.

Tags: Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden, music, PR, Rolling Stone, Wal-Mart