It’s time for the summer-touring-season package, fine. So the magazine puts on the cover … the Eagles, fine. The cover hedline is “Bitter Feud, Big Comeback.” Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about the Eagles, but I didn’t know that the band had had a new internal feud.

The group has of course had a famously long internal feud, which ended when the members got back together for the successful “Hell Freezes Over” Tour. That was in the mid-1990s. Then the group got into a fight with Don Felder—the guy who co-wrote “Hotel California”—but he left years and years ago.

I thought it would be funny to read about the latest feud. Except … there wasn’t one. It was just a rehash of the old feuds. The band tours a lot, these days, too, so here’s no big “comeback,” either. (They finally put out another studio album, Long Road Out of Eden, but that was last year.)

So anyway, I was about to toss the thing aside when I noticed it was kind of a good story. Then I noticed it was written by Charles M. Young. Young was one of the greatest Rolling Stone writers in the 1970s, which is to say he was one of the greatest magazine writers of all time. Fearless and hilarious, he was possessed of an unshakable rectitude and bottomless self-doubt; if nothing else, his writing on the Ramones and the Sex Pistols helped keep the magazine relevant when the punk generation threatened the mag’s old standbys.

Anyway, the story, though entirely lacking a news peg, is a pretty good look back at how the Eagles functioned as a band during its glory years. The band’s leaders, Don Henley and Glen Frey, are of course greedy, hypocritical assholes. But they also displayed a work ethic and a pretty steely discipline during a chaotic era, and for their troubles can still lay claim to the best-selling album of all time, their greatest hits set. But it’s fun to read Felder and the rest talk about what jerks they were.

Unlike most of the magazine’s cover stories, the writing isn’t attitudinal, flatulent or vaporous in its assessments. Young has a story to tell and some judgments to make and does it well. For example, he lets Henley gas on about not having had enough time to complete Eden, which was a 20 (!)-track double-album … and then lets Joe Walsh tell the real story: If Henley had had more time “We would have had a triple album!”

The story also reveals the details about the group’s cheap-ass deal with Wal-Mart. (You’ll recall they released the album exclusively through it: They made four bucks on each $12 CD sold.) And it has this quote from their longtime manager, Irving Azoff, about the gilt financial realities of the heritage touring act: “We make more money in 45 minutes of one show in Kansas City than our entire iTunes royalty.”

Unfortunately, there’s but a grubby little excerpt from the story at rollingstone.com here.