Creativity Quote by Glenn Frey

The glamour in Glenn Frey’s memory has a hangover. By calling his final stretch with the Eagles a “treadmill,” he punctures the myth of rock stardom as pure freedom and reframes it as relentless motion: always performing, always partying, always expected to be “on.” The word does quiet work here. A treadmill isn’t just exhausting; it’s repetitive, enclosed, and strangely joyless. You can run hard and still go nowhere.

Frey’s candor about “a lot of drinking” and “getting high a lot” reads less like confession than calibration. He’s telling you what the cost structure was in a band that had become an institution: success scaled up, so the coping mechanisms scaled up, too. “Pretty intense times” is almost comically understated, the kind of euphemism people use when the details would sound either too ugly or too familiar. That restraint signals a musician who’s already done the mythmaking and now wants to reclaim the narrative from it.

Then the perspective shifts to his parents, and the quote gets its sting. Their “relief” is a reality check on the rock-and-roll fantasy: whatever fans heard as California cool, the family heard as danger. Frey lets that contrast hang there, implying that leaving wasn’t just a career move or band politics; it was survival, or at least the first step toward it. The subtext is blunt: the Eagles machine could manufacture hits, but it could also grind people down.