Legendary ’70s Rockers Nearly Came to Blows Onstage 45 Years Ago Today originally appeared on Parade.
Rock and roll history is filled with stories of feuding band members — and 45 years ago today, The Eagles experienced one of the most infamous onstage arguments of all time, with two of the legendary musicians spending the entire concert threatening to beat each other up.
Known to fans as the “Long Night at Wrong Beach,” The Eagles played a benefit show for California Sen. AlanCranston’s reelection campaign in Long Beach, Calif., on July 31, 1980. It was the late date of The Long Run tour, and guitarist Don Felder didn’t want to play the gig in the first place, as he explained in his autobiography Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles.
“I didn’t even know who the Cranstons were,” Felder wrote, per Classic Rock. “I made my views clear, but I knew that if ‘The Gods’ [singer-guitarist Glenn Frey and drummer Don Henley] wanted to get into political campaigning, then I wasn’t in a position to argue. Still, you never saw John Lennon, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix getting into bed with a politician.”
After Frey heard Felder give the Senator’s wife a less-than-enthusiastic greeting backstage before the show, he “got really mad,” as he explained in the documentary History Of The Eagles.
“I was drinking a long-neck Bud, and walked into the tuning room where Walsh and Felder was, and took the beer bottle and threw it against the wall and smashed it,” he said, adding, “I stormed out, and got more mad, and more mad, and by the time we went onstage I was seething. I wanted to kill Felder.”
According to Felder’s recollection, Frey approached him while the band was playing “The Best of My Love,” saying: “F—k you. I’m gonna kick your ass when we get off the stage.”
“Both of us were burned out after our months on the road. Neither of us really wanted to be there that night, and for me it was one gig too many,” he wrote.
As the night progressed, with Felder getting “drunker than I’d been in a while,” both men’s tempers reached a fever pitch. When the band started playing “Rocky Mountain Way,” Frey warned Felder, “Only three more songs before I kick your ass, pal.”
In the end, no physical altercation took place that night. According to Frey, Felder left the stage before him, “took his cheapest guitar, busted it into a million pieces, jumped in his limousine and drove off. And that was it. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
The Eagles did break up for a time after that, and though they reconvened in 1994, Felder was later kicked out of the band. After Frey’s death in 2016, the band continued his son Deacon Frey.
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Legendary ’70s Rockers Nearly Came to Blows Onstage 45 Years Ago Today first appeared on Parade on Jul 31, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 31, 2025, where it first appeared.
