How the Eagles’ Greatest Hits broke the US charts

According to biographer Marc Eliot, in To The Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, the push to release a “best of” came from incoming Asylum boss Joe Smith, who was seeking to raise funds while the band themselves (responsible for over 50% of the label’s revenue in the mid-’70s) delayed work on their fifth album in an attempt to renegotiate their royalties deal.

Drummer-vocalist Don Henley called the record “the forced and hideous marriage of art and commerce” and told Eliot that Asylum “didn’t give a shit whether the greatest hits album was good or not. They just wanted product.” Henley, who’d envisioned the Eagles’ second LP, Desperado, as a concept album, particularly objected to the inclusion of its tracks stripped of their thematic context.

An immediate smash

The concept of Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 is entirely straightforward: all nine of the band’s singles to date plus the title track of Desperado. The record was an immediate smash, spending five weeks on top of the Billboard 200 album chart, and finishing the year as America’s fourth most popular record, behind Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive, Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 10th album, and Wings’ Wings at the Speed of Sound. After that it just kept on selling and selling, spending more than two years on the Billboard 200.

From the 1980s onwards it began trading places with Michael Jackson’s Thriller for the title of the US’s bestselling album ever, before finally establishing a clear lead in controversial circumstances in 2018. Asylum’s parent company, Warner Music Group, conducted an audit of old sales and royalty reports to produce proof, to the satisfaction of RIAA, of previously uncounted purchases. Overnight, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 increased its sales tally by nine million copies. Both Sony and the Michael Jackson estate expressed their concern at the time.