On ‘Take It to the Limit,’ Eagles co-founder Randy Meisner, who died on Wednesday, delivered one of rock’s great vocal performances.
When the Eagles signed to Asylum Records in September 1971, full of great expectations, bassist Randy Meisner was the most accomplished and successful of the four band members. He’d been in Los Angeles the longest, and even though his career began in a desultory manner and he sometimes supported himself through small criminal enterprises, he’d accomplished the most.
Meisner, who died of heart disease on Wednesday at age 77, joined Buffalo Springfield in the spring of 1968, when the band’s country-rock hybrid was the toast of L.A., but almost immediately left with Richie Furay to start Poco, and played on their celebrated first album. Meisner also toured and recorded with Rick Nelson in his impressive Stone Canyon Band. He’d had more success than his Eagles mates Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon, and Marc Eliot, in his book “To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles,” wrote that Frey “felt privileged to be able to play with” Meisner.
The title of Eliot’s book acknowledges the important place of Meisner’s best-known song, 1974’s “Take It to the Limit,” in the success, durability and mythos of the Eagles. It’s not just one of the most popular and best songs by the bestselling American band of all time, it’s one of the best-sung songs in the Eagles’ catalog, or anyone else’s, a controlled, soulful masterpiece.
Nothing in “Take It to the Limit,” which Meisner wrote with Henley and Frey, specifically mentions L.A., but it’s all over the mood of the song. Several Eagles songs dwell in a state of melancholy reverie, with a wizened, worried sense that having been seduced by beauty, danger and a post-’60s ideal of freedom, the singer has frittered away time and romantic opportunities. “Take It to the Limit” does that, but in a more hopeful way than some of the Eagles’ other love songs.
Whether it was planned this way during the writing phase or not, Meisner’s performance benefits from the song’s structure: two verses and two choruses, no bridge.
