Those Cruel Shoes Steve Martin And The Eagles

Those Shoes Album: The Long Run (1979)
by Eagles

Cruel Shoes is a collection of essays and short stories by Steve Martin and is also the title of one of the essays included, a satirical short-short story about a woman in a shoe store.

Cruel Shoes was Martin’s first book, released in 1977 as a handmade limited edition of 750 signed and numbered books published by Press of the Pegacycle Lady (Victoria Dailey). The cover is just pale paper over pressboard. It only contained 48 pages and many of the stories that appeared in the trade version were not included.

Table of contents
The works included in the 1979 trade edition of the book are:

"My Uncle's Metaphysics"
"Demolition of Cathedral at Chart
"Annareddy Akshayareddy and her struggle"
"The Boring Leading the Bored"
"Cruel Shoes"
"The Bohemians"
"Serious Dogs"
"The Diarrhea Gardens of El Camino Real"
"Turds"
"The Undertakers"
"The Day the Dopes Came Over"
"The Smokers"
"She Had The Jugs"
"Sex Crazed Love Goddesses"
"Women Without Bones"
"The Children Called Him Big Nose"
"Wrong Number"
"Morse and the Naughty Magnets"
"Dynamite King"
"The Gift of the Magi Indian Giver"
"Poodles... Great Eating"
"Shuckin' the Jive"
"How To Fold Soup"
"The Vengeful Curtain Rod"
"Cows In Trouble"
"The Complete Works of Alfredo Francesi"
"Society In Aspen"
"The Day the Buffalo Danced"
"Things Not To Be"
"No Man's Land"
"Oh Mercy, The Prose-Poem Triptych!"
"Comedy Events You Can Do"
"Dr. Fitzkee's Lucky Astrology Diet"
"The Morning I Got Out of Bed"
"What to Say When the Ducks Show Up"
"The Year Winter Lasted Nine Minutes"
"The Almaden Summer"
"The Nervous Father"
"Dogs In My Nose"
"Awards"
"Rivers of the Dead"
"When Men Shop"
"The Last Thing On My Mind"

Limited 1977 edition
"Confessions"
"Smokers"
"Jugs"
"Women"
"Poodles"
"Alfredo"
"Cows"
"Self-review"
"Serious"
"S.M. Collection of Am. Art"
"Day"
"Sex Crazed"
"Wrong #"
"Morse"
"Gift"
"Fold Soup"
"Dr. Fitzkees"
"Morning"
"Year"
"Last Thing"
"Other Books"
"My Uncle's"
"The Day"
"Children"

The Long Run is the sixth studio album by the Eagles. It was released in 1979, on Asylum in the United States and the United Kingdom. This was the first Eagles album to feature Timothy B. Schmit, who had replaced founding member Randy Meisner, and the last full studio album to feature Don Felder before his termination from the band in 2001.

This was the band's final studio album for Asylum Records. It also turned out to be their last studio album as the Eagles disbanded in 1980 until 2007's Long Road Out of Eden after the band had reformed in 1994.

The album was originally intended to be a double album. The band could not come up with enough songs and the idea was therefore scrapped. The recording was protracted; they started recording in 1978, and the album took 18 months to record in five different studios, with the album finally released in September 1979. According to Don Henley, the band members were "completely burned out" and "physically, emotionally, spiritually and creatively exhausted" from a long tour when they started recording the album, and they had few songs. However, they managed to put together ten songs for the album, with contribution from their friends J. D. Souther and Bob Seger who co-wrote with Frey and Henley on "Heartache Tonight". (Souther also got songwriting credit on "Teenage Jail" and "The Sad Cafe".)

According to Henley, the title track was in part a response to press articles that said they were "passé" as disco was then dominant and punk emerging, which inspired lines such as "Who is gonna make it/ We'll find out in the long run". He said that the inspiration for the lyrics was also "irony", as they wrote about longevity and posterity while the group "was breaking apart, imploding under the pressure of trying to deliver a worthy follow-up to Hotel California".

Randy Meisner decided to leave the Eagles after an argument in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the Hotel California Tour in June 1977. He was replaced by Timothy B. Schmit.

The song is not to be taken altogether seriously. In a statement before The Long Run was released, Don Henley said the album was "tongue-in-cheek cynical," and that "most of the humor is so dry nobody will think its funny."

Don Felder and Joe Walsh did a double talk-box guitar solo at the end, which is very unusual. Joe Walsh was an early practitioner of the device, which he used on his solo hit "Rocky Mountain Way." In a 1981 interview with the BBC, Walsh talked about the device: "There's a Country singer from Nashville named Dottie West who's a longtime friend of mine, and her husband is a pedal steel guitar player named Bill West, who actually came up with the concept of the talkbox, but never really got the credit for it. There was a record which I think was called 'Forever' by Pete Drake in the late '50s, and they used it on that and various people used it. I met Bill and Dottie in Nashville, and Bill showed me this talkbox and gave me a prototype that he had, which I used for 'Rocky Mountain Way', and Don Felder and I pursued that in the Eagles and worked out some double guitar parts, and it turned into a song, which was 'Those Shoes,' and that's actually both of us playing through talkboxes, which hadn't really been done. It's an old idea, but that was a new innovation."

Don Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote this song. Henley sang lead and Joe Walsh played the guitar solo.
The Eagles were not on the best of terms when recording The Long Run, which was their last album before they re-formed in 1994. They frustrated their record company as it took them 3 years to follow up their very successful Hotel California album, which was released in 1976. Ironically, sessions for The Long Run took place at Love 'n' Comfort Studios in Los Angeles.