Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles whose broad vocal vary on songs like “Take It to the Limit” 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 said on its website Thursday in announcing his death.

“Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band,” the group stated.

Meisner, the band’s unique bass participant, helped kind the Eagles in 1971 together with Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Bernie Leadon. Meisner was with the band when it recorded the albums “Eagles,” “Desperado,” “On The Border,” “One of These Nights” and “Hotel California.”

“Hotel California,” with its mysterious, allegorical lyrics, turned among the many band’s best-known recordings. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 and won a Grammy Award for document of the 12 months in 1978.

But Meisner was uncomfortable with fame.

“I was always kind of shy,” he stated in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had needed him to face middle stage to sing “Take It to the Limit,” however that he most well-liked to be “out of the spotlight.” Then, one night time in Knoxville, he stated, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wanted another one,” Meisner stated, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.

“I told them I couldn’t do it, and we got into a spat,” Meisner instructed the journal. “That was the end.”

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

The Eagles offered extra data than every other band within the Nineteen Seventies and had 4 consecutive No. 1 albums and 5 No. 1 singles, based on the Hall of Fame. Its “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album alone offered upward of 26 million copies.

Before the Eagles, Meisner was briefly the bassist for Poco, one other Los Angeles country-rock band, which fashioned 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 out there Thursday night time. His spouse, Lana Meisner, was killed in an accidental shooting in 2016.

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

He acquired his first acoustic guitar round 12 or 13 years outdated and, shortly after, fashioned a highschool band, based on a 2016 interview with Rock Cellar Magazine. “We did pretty good, but we didn’t win anything,” Meisner stated.

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 find any work because there were a million bands out here,” he stated.

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

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

A full obituary will comply with.