Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles whose broad vocal vary on songs like “Take It to the Restrict” helped catapult the rock band to worldwide fame, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77.

The trigger was issues from power obstructive pulmonary illness, the band mentioned on its web site Thursday in asserting his demise.

“Randy was an integral a part of the Eagles and instrumental within the early success of the band,” the group mentioned.

Meisner, the band’s authentic bass participant, helped type the Eagles in 1971 together with Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Bernie Leadon. Meisner was with the band once they recorded the albums “Eagles,” “Desperado,” “On The Border,” “One among These Nights” and “Resort California.”

“Resort California,” with its mysterious, allegorical lyrics, grew to become among the many band’s best-known recordings. It topped the Billboard Scorching 100 in 1977 and received a Grammy Award for file of the yr in 1978.

However Meisner was uncomfortable with fame.

“I used to be at all times sort of shy,” he mentioned in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had wished him to face middle stage to sing “Take It to the Restrict,” however that he most well-liked to be “out of the highlight.” Then, one night time in Knoxville, he mentioned, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wished one other one,” Meisner mentioned, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.

“I instructed them I couldn’t do it, and we obtained right into a spat,” Meisner instructed the journal. “That was the tip.”

Meisner left the band in September 1977 however was inducted with the Eagles into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in 1998. An essay by Parke Puterbaugh, revealed by the Corridor of Fame for the occasion, described the band as “wide-eyed innocents with a country-rock pedigree” who later grew to become “purveyors of grandiose, dark-themed albums chronicling a world of extra and seduction that had begun spinning significantly uncontrolled.”

The Eagles offered extra information than some other band within the Nineteen Seventies and had 4 consecutive No. 1 albums and 5 No. 1 singles, in accordance with the Corridor of Fame. Its “Biggest Hits 1971-1975” album alone offered upward of 26 million copies.

Earlier than the Eagles, Meisner was briefly the bassist for Poco, one other Los Angeles country-rock band, which shaped in 1968. He left that band shortly afterward and joined Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.

A listing of Meisner’s survivors was not instantly obtainable Thursday night time. His spouse, Lana Meisner, was killed in an unintentional taking pictures in 2016.

Born Randall Herman Meisner in Scottsbluff, Neb., on March 8, 1946, he began working towards music at a younger age.

He obtained his first acoustic guitar round 12 or 13 years outdated and, shortly after, shaped a highschool band, in accordance with a 2016 interview with Rock Cellar Journal. “We did fairly good, however we didn’t win something,” Meisner mentioned.

He was nonetheless a teen when he joined one other band and moved to Los Angeles in 1964 or 1965, Meisner instructed the journal.

“We couldn’t discover any work as a result of there have been 1,000,000 bands out right here,” he mentioned.

Years later, Meisner would discover loads of work with the Eagles.

“From day one,” he mentioned within the interview with Rock Cellar, “I simply had a sense that the band was good and would make it.”

A full obituary will comply with.