Glenn Frey’s solo career took off in the ‘80s, as he proved a versatile hitmaker who didn’t need to be operating under the Eagles banner to succeed. One of his hits, “Smuggler’s Blues,” was very much a snapshot of the times. And yet it’s stayed relevant because of how effectively the song dissects its still-timely subject matter.
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Who was the fellow songwriter who helped Frey transition away from the Eagles and co-wrote this smash with him? And what was its connection to the hit ‘80s cop drama Miami Vice? Let’s take a trip back to figure out the meaning behind “Smuggler’s Blues.” First stop: the beginning of the ‘80s, as Glenn Frey dove into his post-Eagles career with some help from an old friend.
Glenn and Jack
Jack Tempchin had been buddies with Glenn Frey for almost a decade when he received a call from Frey to see if he wanted to help write some songs. Tempchin was a successful songwriter and artist in his own right, perhaps best known for “Already Gone” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” two songs that the Eagles turned into big hits. But despite that connection, Frey and Tempchin hadn’t ever written a song together.
They gelled immediately, writing a Top 20 hit (“The One You Love”) together in 1982 for Frey’s first solo album, No Fun Aloud. Frey was also thinking of dabbling of moviemaking around that time, and he and Eagles manager Irving Azoff gobbled up the rights to an acclaimed non-fiction book by Robert Sabbag from 1976 entitled Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade. Frey came to Tempchin looking for songs to support a potential movie, with Frey pitching an idea right off the bat: a song written from the point of view of a drug smuggler.
In an interview for this author’s book Playing Back the ‘80s: A Decade of Unstoppable Hits, Tempchin joked that he didn’t exactly do the reading homework to come up with lyrics for “Smuggler’s Blues.” “Glenn and I may have had past acquaintance with fellows who did that for a living,” Tempchin said. “Our lives had research enough in it, so we pretty much knew a lot about it already. I didn’t even read the book. Basically, we just got into it and said, ‘Here’s what we think about this whole thing.’”
[RELATED: Jack Tempchin’s Peaceful Journey]
Freeze: Miami Vice!
“Smuggler’s Blues” was released as a single from the album The Allnighter at a time when Frey’s solo career was at its peak. He had just unleashed the massive single “The Heat Is On” from the soundtrack of Beverly Hills Cop, which attracted the attention of Michael Mann, the mastermind behind the NBC show Miami Vice, which debuted in 1984.
The end result was Frey acting in an episode of the show that prominently featured “Smuggler’s Blues” and was inspired somewhat by its lyrics. It fit so seamlessly that many folks likely assumed that Frey wrote the song for the show, which wasn’t actually the case. But he did write, with Tempchin, “You Belong to the City” specifically for Miami Vice, and that song became a big hit as well. (By the way, Frey never did make that movie he had in mind. But at least it led to this outstanding song.
What Is “Smuggler’s Blues” About?
As we mentioned, “Smuggler’s Blues” was initially intended to appear in a movie. Frey’s first lines certainly set a cinematic scene: There’s trouble on the street tonight I can feel it in my bones / I had a premonition that he should not go alone. That premonition leads to spilled blood. It’s a grabby setup, and a clever one by Frey and Tempchin, as they show the consequences first and then spend the rest of the song describing the circumstances that beget this chaos.
Frey adds the slide guitar that gives the song that bluesy feel. And he nails the lingo of the streets with lines like You be cool for twenty hours and I’ll pay you twenty grand. When he starts to reel off everyone involved in the illicit drug trade, all at cross-purposes, you start to understand how easy it is for everything to go haywire, leaving a character like this always fighting for survival.
In the final stanza, Frey follows the drugs and the money. They move it through Miami, sell it in L.A. / They hide it up in Telluride and It’s propping up the governments of Colombia and Peru. He even suggests the racket directly involves the higher rungs on the power ladder. From the office of the president right down to me and you.
Ultimately, this character can see this whole web of villainy and violence playing out in front of him. But he’s loath to resist: It’s a losing proposition, but one you can’t refuse / It’s the politics of contraband, it’s the smuggler’s blues. The war on drugs rages on and on. “Smuggler’s Blues” still hits hard because of how well Glenn Frey and Jack Tempchin got inside the head of one of that war’s foot soldiers.
Photo by Adam Bettcher/WireImage for Starkey Hearing Foundation
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