‘Where did your long hair go?’: thankfully not something we need ever wistfully wonder when we look at Timothy B. Schmit

‘A white boy from Sacramento’: Timothy B. Schmit with Travis Tritt and assorted Eagles.

What tickles me about the video for Travis Tritt’s rendition of ‘Take It Easy’, apart from the fact that it’s not a patch on the original version, is that the usually verging on the girlish Timothy B. Schmit looks the most macho in it.

The rest of them resemble a passel of maiden aunts next to Tim, with his cool facial hair, who narrows his eyes in a boy you wouldn’t take home to mom way and even manages a particularly manly shake of the mane at one point.[1] I’ve always been a sucker for a sexy hair toss and it has to be said that no one has hair more fitted to the task.

He strides forth like a gunslinger swaggering out of a saloon whereas the others amble along like a bunch of old buddies thinking about going fishing.

We know from The History of the Eagles documentary film that at this point, finding himself back with the boys and everything going swimmingly, Timothy B. was thinking to himself, ‘Come on, guys!’ in an endearingly plaintive way, wondering how they couldn’t recognise how right it was to be playing together again.

Having graduated from the freebie t-shirts and dungarees of his unpretentious youth in Poco and early Eagles days, Timothy’s sartorial style as a mature artist had betrayed a penchant for teaming polychromatic shirts of a Hawaiian bent with contrasting jazzy waistcoats in colour clashes of epic proportions.

But here he eschews all that flashy malarkey, keeps it simple and simply rocks. In a red flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearms, over a black t-shirt and plentiful masculine wrist jewellery, TBS is the only one I’d bother lining up against a wall.[2] But I’d volunteer for that duty whatever the hell he was wearing.

This longhaired desperado looks just the type you might encounter playing pool in a bar in the middle of a weekday in somewhere like Winslow, Arizona. I’ve stood on that corner and had some kind of pickup pull to a halt for the driver to ask if I knew the way to the probation office. Ever feel like you’re in a film? Even if it is a trashy afternoon made-for-TV movie, the kind you give up on halfway through.

So I’m assuming Travis Tritt is younger than the Eagles (yeah, by about fifteen years) but here he looks like someone’s slightly pudgy uncle in a billowing blouson trying to act a bit tougher than he is and fit in with the old hands.

This song was recorded for a 1993 thirteen-track tribute album, celebrating the band’s music,[3] with a portion of the profits going to the Walden Woods Project, founded by Don Henley in 1990.

For his interpretation of the Eagles classic, Tritt requested that the 1980 line-up of the country rock legends (Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Don Felder, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit) feature in the video. By some miracle engineered by the gods of music (possibly after a gentle nudge from Irving Azoff), they agreed. And the rest, as they say, is history.[4]

Photo half-inched from timothybschmitonline.com.

For first blog on Timothy and Eagles, see here.

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[1] Thank whatever gods may be that, when we look at TBS, we don’t need to wonder wistfully, ‘Where did your long hair go?’, a lyric from ‘Caroline, No’, a Brian Wilson song covered by Tim.

[2] No, actually, I could definitely be persuaded to give Don Henley a thorough pat down too.

[3] The album hit the number one spot on the Country Billboard chart.

[4] But, if you don’t know, by the next year, hell done got froze over, the band reformed and toured. Amen to that. And thanks be to Travis Tritt.