WCSX Classic Cuts
Glenn Frey: “Smuggler’s Blues”
The Hook: Although it sounds as if it were written for Miami Vice, Frey actually wrote the song long before the show premiered for a film that never got made.
Album: Miami Vice (soundtrack)
Year: 1985
Writers: Glenn Frey and Jack Tempchin
Stats: Peaked at number-12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number-13 on the Mainstream Rock chart.
Background: The late Glenn Frey once told us that, in the mid-1980s, he and Eagles manager Irving Azoff acquired the film rights to a novel called Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade and planned to make a movie of it. Frey said it was this film, and not Miami Vice, that inspired the writing of the hit song that would be linked with the show.
The late Glenn Frey on how “Smuggler.’s Blues” was written for a film that never got made, not for Miami Vice. OC:…Miami Vice. :23
“’Smuggler’s Blues’ was going to be maybe the end title for that film. So Jack Tempchin and I had been reading that script and though the film never got made, we wrote the song as if there was going to be a film about it. Little did we know that nine months later drugs would be on NBC at 10 o’clock at night and people would be staying home to watch it. But that just sorta happened later and then we partnered up with the people on Miami Vice.”
