Glenn Frey’s son Deacon is unsung hero of Eagles’ farewell tour

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By Nicholas Hautman

You’ve most likely by no means heard of Deacon Frey.

The 30-year-old performs iconic venues like Madison Sq. Backyard and The Discussion board night time after night time, and but he’s managed to stay essentially the most low-key rock star of his technology.

Not like most musicians his age, Frey isn’t on Instagram and doesn’t have any studio albums out.

However you most actually know his father, the late Glenn Frey, who rose to fame within the Nineteen Seventies as a founding member of the Eagles and went on to have a profitable solo profession within the ’80s.

After Glenn died in 2016 on the unripe age of 67, his center little one, Deacon, stepped as much as the plate to hold on the legacy of the fallen Eagle.

Dashing, wavy-haired and mustachioed like his dad, Deacon has been performing with Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit and Vince Gill ever since (sans for a short break in 2022), and the band is again on the street this summer season for the primary leg of what’s anticipated to be a years-long farewell tour.

On Wednesday night, the Eagles introduced their phenomenal two-hour swan track, dubbed The Lengthy Goodbye, to UBS Area on Lengthy Island, the place Deacon was the unsung hero.

The Rock & Roll Corridor of Famers didn’t make a spectacle in regards to the youngest member of their tribe after they stepped onstage on the more and more in style Belmont Park venue, as a substitute treating him as if he had been part of their lineup for many years — similar to 76-year-old Henley.

In spite of everything, Deacon has been an honorary Eagle his total life.

He was born in 1993, only a few months earlier than the Grammy-winning group started planning their memorable comeback from a 14-year break with the chart-topping stay album “Hell Freezes Over.”

Because the Eagles’ second wind stretched on, a younger Deacon and his siblings, Taylor Frey and Otis Frey, have been firsthand witnesses to greatness.

The band stored promoting out arenas and even launched their first new album in practically three many years, 2007’s “Lengthy Street Out of Eden,” which defied the percentages by beating Britney Spears’ seminal “Blackout” to No. 1 on the charts.

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However then Glenn died in a devastating blow to the Eagles, the Frey household, his followers and past.

Henley acknowledged that he didn’t assume the group would ever hit the street once more, however the next yr they did — with a then-24-year-old Deacon forfeiting relative anonymity to turn into the “New Child in City.”

Since then, “Take It Straightforward,” “Peaceable Straightforward Feeling,” “Already Gone” and plenty of different classics that his father made well-known 40- or 50-some years in the past have turn into second nature for Deacon, whose mushy however easy voice captivated the group at UBS.

All through the must-see present, it was laborious to disregard the twinkle-eyed scion’s palpable affect on the ever-harmonic legends round him.

Had Deacon not joined them in 2017, Henley, Walsh and Schmit could have by no means carried out collectively once more after shedding their beloved Glenn.

However Deacon has turn into the glue for these guys, and it’s evident there’s a mutual respect between them.

The rising vocalist and guitarist doesn’t hunt down the highlight onstage (or off); the truth is, every time one in all his bandmates rotated in to sing lead on tracks like Henley’s disco-leaning “Certainly one of These Nights,” Schmit’s swoony “I Can’t Inform You Why” or Walsh’s raucously enjoyable “Life’s Been Good,” Deacon gladly took a step again to allow them to do their factor.

When the Eagles all got here collectively, although, magic was made — with Glenn’s strikingly gifted inheritor entrance and heart the place he belongs.