Partying Like It’s 1979 With the Eagles and Friends

For all our blessings in Southern California, we are cursed with a bad time zone--something you are reminded of every four years when you step into the voting booth, fully aware that the presidential election has already been decided by voters in the Central and Eastern time zones.

The Eagles’ New Year’s Eve concert was another reminder of this inequity.

Anyone attending the show who had been near a television set Friday had seen spectacular countdowns for hours before stepping into Staples Center--from Bethlehem to Tokyo, Beijing to Sydney. We had watched fireworks, the ringing of bells and gala light shows--not to mention learning that the computers still worked.

Here at home, the Eagles, one of the best rock bands this country has produced, tried gamely to convince that the concert was really our special moment. But the evening couldn’t overcome the sense of Pacific time zone anticlimax.

The show’s special features ranged from the Eagles’ playing some songs that the quintet has recorded but rarely, if ever, performed (from “Ol’ ‘55” to “Please Come Home for Christmas”) to a brief film that saluted major sociocultural events of the century.

The film was highlighted by a good-natured sequence that made fun of the Eagles’ history of internal friction by juxtaposing staged clips of individual band members taking credit for everything from starting the band to being the one who really wrote “Hotel California.”

Shown during intermission, the film set the scene nicely for the evening’s millennium countdown. But the subsequent fireworks display couldn’t begin to compete with such TV images from earlier in the day as the grandeur of lights reflecting off the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids.

The band would have had a better chance of creating a magical moment by maximizing another of the night’s special features--the homecoming nature of the bill, which also featured Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne.

Ronstadt and Browne not only helped the Eagles define the melodic, introspective Southern California sound of the ‘70s, but they also had personal ties. Some members of the Eagles were once in Ronstadt’s band, and Browne co-wrote the Eagles’ first hit, “Take It Easy.”

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So, the natural thing would have been for them to come together at midnight. There’s even a line in “Take It Easy” that would have captured the sense of the shared millennium for everyone in the room:

Some may lose and some may win

But we will never be here again.

Instead of the potential warmth of that moment, each act performed independently on a tight timetable that contributed to an aura of icy professionalism. Things went so smoothly that the Eagles finished up (playing “Take It Easy”) less than five minutes past the scheduled 1:10 a.m. closing time.

Unfortunately for Ronstadt fans, the show’s starting time ran ahead of schedule. Though the tickets read 8 p.m, Ronstadt took the stage at 7:45. That meant only a few hundred of the later-estimated 17,500 fans were in their seats when she opened her 40-minute, “greatest hits”-leaning set with “When Will I Be Loved?”

Normally, you don’t like to see artists rely on familiar work from decades ago, but it made sense on a nostalgia-minded night where fans had paid up to $1,000 each precisely to hear the hits.

Backed by a five-piece band and three singers, she showed in places why she has been acclaimed for years as one of the best pure vocalists in all of pop. But Ronstadt, who was making a rare concert appearance, also seemed to be rushing through several of the songs rather than connecting with them.

A more comfortable Browne, whose eight-piece band included slide-guitar treasure David Lindley, also served up some celebrated ‘70s hits in a 45-minute set, including “Running on Empty.” He also spotlighted some of his more politically conscious and generally more uneven, post-’70s material, such as “World in Motion.”

The Eagles had the luxury of a nearly three-hour set and they used the time well, playing lots of hits, including the opening “Hotel California.” The band also wisely updated its set with Don Henley’s post-Eagles material, including “The Boys of Summer.”

It was a strong set. If we had all been in a different time zone, it might have been even a special millennium moment. As it was, however, you just couldn’t help but feel that the champagne had already been poured before the show even began.