Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (10 page)

Read Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles Online

Authors: Don Felder,Wendy Holden

Tags: #Arts & Photography, #Music, #Musical Genres, #Popular, #Rock, #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainers, #Memoirs, #Humor & Entertainment, #Theory; Composition & Performance, #Pop Culture

BOOK: Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles
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One Friday morning, I was listening to Mel Bay while Barry read aloud from the
Village Voice,
which he got by mail from New York, as it was next to impossible to buy in Gainesville.
 
“Oh, my God,” Barry said, sitting up suddenly. “Miles Davis is playing at the Village Gate tomorrow night.”
 
I’d heard of Miles Davis, but I’d never heard anyone play live jazz except at the Holiday Inn cocktail lounge, and then just movie themes. “Miles Davis?” I asked, innocently.
 
“Only one of the best jazz musicians in the world!” Barry cried incredulously. Staring at me in silence for a moment, he added authoritatively: “Pack a bag. We’re going.”
 
There was no arguing with him, so we grabbed some clean T-shirts and a toothbrush each, filled up his VW with gas, and took off. We drove nonstop, taking turns sleeping. The journey took more than sixteen hours. We arrived in Manhattan, found some seedy little nineteen-dollar-a-night hotel, took a shower, put on clean T-shirts, and hopped a cab to Greenwich Village. We walked into the Village Gate and sat down near the front. About twenty minutes later, the band we’d been reading about the morning before in Gainesville was standing right in front of us on the stage.
 
Those musicians proceeded to shred me. The finesse and the improvisation and the freedom in their art was unbelievable, with numbers like “Bitches Brew.” It was one of the most incredible lineups Miles Davis ever had—him on horn, seventeen-year-old Tony Williams on drums, Herbie Hancock on piano, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, and Ron Carter on bass.
 
Halfway through their second set, Miles Davis took a break and sat down at a table by the restrooms to have a beer. There were no dressing rooms and nowhere else for him to escape to. Determined to go over and tell him how much I liked the way he played, I started walking toward him with that intention. When I was just a few paces away, he looked up at me with these intense eyes, as if to say, “Come near me, boy, and I’ll eat you alive,” so I just kept walking right past him and into the men’s room.
 
Inside, I stared at myself in the cracked mirror and whipped up my courage. “I gotta go say it, I gotta go say it,” I repeated like a mantra, and out I came, determined to shake his hand like I had with B.B. King, but of course, by then, he was gone.
 
That gig was probably one of the most formative experiences of my life. B.B. King had blown me away with his rhythm and blues, but this was undoubtedly my strongest jazz influence, an event that showed me what real musicians could do. The dexterity, ability, and dynamics were from another, altogether more sophisticated, genre. This was yet another level for me, a challenge to confront at a time when I was already into jazz in a big way and playing it with Flow. I hardly slept a wink that night in the hotel for replaying the gig over and over in my head, and Barry and I drove home in reverential silence the following morning.
 
Not long afterward, I was lying in bed with Jan one sunny summer afternoon, watching the curtains billowing in the breeze, when a song came on the radio. Sitting up, straining to listen, I recognized the voice instantly. The presenter announced the number as “For What It’s Worth,” by Buffalo Springfield, but I knew better. The voice I’d heard belonged to Stephen Stills, the runaway kid with the military haircut who’d played in the Continentals.
 
“Wow!” I thought, lying back on the pillow with a smile. “He struck oil after all! That’s really cool. Maybe I could do something like that one day.”
 
Every time I heard that song, which became an anthem for the country’s most turbulent decade of young people railing against the establishment, I thought of Stephen and smiled. However, unlike him and Bernie, I wasn’t yet driven enough about my music to pursue it at the expense of everything else.
 
 
 
 
By the fall of 1968,
Flow was ready for its showcase concert in New York. John Calagna and Andy Leo, the road managers, had come down to Florida to hear us and liked what they heard. They felt they’d “discovered” the band, through their friendship with Mike and John, and could promote us through their relationship with the Young Rascals. They were right, and they were certainly the best access we’d had since the Cyrkle to someone famous.
 
The gig was to be at a small club in Manhattan called the Fillmore East. The Allman brothers had played there just before us. They were steaming ahead of us in terms of success. Duane had been doing some impressive session work, they’d recorded an album in L.A., abandoning the name the Allman Joys in favor of the Hourglass, but they still kept in contact through friends in Daytona and Gainesville and we wished each other well.
 
We drove up from Florida in a van, with borrowed equipment from the Young Rascals, and set up on the stage. The road managers had invited some record company executives along to hear us play. Among them was Creed Taylor, a legend in the business, who’d worked with Stan Getz and had just produced the Quincy Jones album
Walking in Space
, a phenomenal creation. He was the man.
 
We were one of three bands playing to around five hundred people that night, in a club that was relatively new and unheard of. I knew Hendrix had once played there, and I’d seen Paul Butterfield and a monster blues-guitar player named Buzzy Feiten in the past, so I was impressed enough to know this was for real. Fortunately, we played really well that night, and when the gig was over, Creed Taylor came backstage to see us.
 
Creed was middle-aged, wore a suede jacket with patches on the sleeves, and exuded calm. “Okay, guys, I liked what I heard tonight. You were great,” he told us. “I’m prepared to offer you a recording contract worth five thousand dollars. What do you say?”
 
It was the most money we’d ever made. We couldn’t believe our luck. After a hasty band meeting with the road managers, we accepted immediately and signed on the line the next day. Despite all my reservations about leaving Gainesville, here I was, a few months later, in the Big Apple with a record deal. New York was somehow less scary than California. I’d been here a couple of times before. I could drive home in less than twenty-four hours if I wanted to, and anyway, I was too excited about the future to be frightened anymore.
 
Our five-thousand-dollar advance lasted less than a month. We put a deposit on a Dodge delivery van—I was the only one with a good enough credit rating to take on the payments—a warm coat each, and a couple of microphones for our PA system. The rest went on grass, food, rolled cigarettes, and Jack Daniel’s.
 
Signed up with Creed Taylor Incorporated (CTI), we found a small apartment on Horatio Street on the Lower West Side. It was in the meat-packing district and not a particularly good place to be in those days. I was nearly mugged at knifepoint, and a friend who came to stay was hit in the back of the head with a wooden plank by another robber.
 
The road managers helped us with our writing and rehearsing, and they organized a few gigs around town to keep us working. The Young Rascals became our sponsors. They’d had another couple of hits after “Groovin’ ” and “A Girl Like You,” and they gave us some of their old instruments and loaned us a PA so we could play clubs. There was a set of drums from Dino Danelli and a Hammond B3 keyboard from Felix Cavaliere, and Gene Cornish gave me one of his guitars, a big Gibson electric.
 
Living in New York as part of a band with a record deal was all very well, but my excitement was tempered by the fact that my fellow musicians were lethargic and excessively drug-oriented.
 
I’d always been the motivator before, booking the gigs and making the contacts; I was as much a manager as a player. But this band’s contact was through Mike and John, not me, and the rest of the guys had the idea that they didn’t have to do very much, because the road managers were going to make them stars. I felt kind of helpless, unable to do anything about the situation. We were living in a crappy apartment with no money, and none of them ever did anything except play music. Jan and I had split up, because of the distance, and I felt increasingly lonely and miserable.
 
My frustration was only highlighted whenever Bernie came to town. He and I had stayed in touch, and he was doing very well for himself. When he’d first moved back to California, he’d joined a folk-rock band called Hearts & Flowers as a banjo and guitar player and performed on their second album. Through his old friend Chris Hillman, he met Gene Clark from the Byrds and the legendary banjo player Doug Dillard. Bernie also had helped found the band Dillard & Clark, until he joined the Corvettes, Linda Ronstadt’s backup band for the tour to promote her debut solo album after leaving the Stone Poneys,
Hand Sown . . . Home Grown
.
 
“You gotta come back west with me. That’s where it’s all happening, man,” Bernie would say every time I saw him. We’d meet backstage at whichever gig he was playing, jam a little, and have a few beers. “I’ve made some great contacts, and I’m sure I can get you work.”
 
“Thanks, Bernie,” I’d say stoically, “but I’m gonna hang around here first and see what happens with Flow. We have a record deal now, and I’d be crazy not to see it through. Besides, I don’t have any money, or even a car. How am I supposed to get around in L.A. without wheels?”
 
When it finally came time for Flow to go into the recording studio and cut its first album, we were all pretty scared. Creed Taylor used a studio over in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The room we used was round and was supposed to have a natural ambience. It was owned and run by Rudy Van Gelder, a German optometrist by trade, who’d become a recording engineer with impeccable credentials. He’d worked with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk, and was said to be responsible for the Blue Note sound. He had top-notch Neumann microphones and state-of-the-art eight-track recording equipment with mixing consoles and equalizers. He sat in his recording booth manning the controls like some mad scientist. He literally wore white gloves to make his very antiseptic, high-fidelity recordings.
 
One day, Andy and John took us into Atlantic Studios and allowed us to listen in while the Young Rascals were cutting their latest single. We knew them well, and the atmosphere was relaxed. They were on the last take by the time we arrived, and we stood at the edges of the studio and listened to them record “It’s a Beautiful Morning.” I liked it immediately. It had bongos and sounded really cool. I wondered if it would be a hit.
 
When it was our turn to set up, in the Englewood Cliffs studio, we were very edgy. It was our first real recording, and we felt under immense pressure in this clinical environment with a man in a white lab coat and the latest high-tech equipment all around us. Creed came in, sat down in the control room, looking for all the world as though he were going to pull out a pipe and smoke it, but he didn’t say a word. There was no musical direction, nothing.
 
I realized suddenly, and with considerable discomfort, that it wasn’t Creed Taylor or Rudy Van Gelder who made all those legendary recordings, it was the artists themselves. I wasn’t the only one with butterflies in my stomach. We began to play, but you could hear and feel that it was a very forced performance. In fact, it was a train wreck, and there was nothing any of us could do to pull it back from the abyss.
 
The album was called
Flow
and the cover featured a stencil of the band’s name with soapsuds dripping from it. We hated it. We thought it looked like an ad for laundry detergent. I was proud of the album because it was my first, but I was also hugely disappointed. I’d expected to take it out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable, and be blown away like I was with Quincy Jones’s record. I’d used the same recording techniques, engineer, and producer. I just couldn’t understand why my record didn’t affect me in the same spine-tingling way. There was further disappointment. We had a fair amount of airplay around New York, but we weren’t “AM-ORIENTED,” and a lot of radio stations wouldn’t play us because of our long jazz solos. Word came back that we were all right, but we weren’t the Young Rascals. We might have looked and sounded a bit like them, but we were a marketing nightmare because there was no obvious slot for us. We picked up an eclectic following of jazz buffs instead of the mainstream fans that were going to the clubs and buying records.
 
There was no talk of a follow-up album, and suddenly there were longer and longer periods without work. Even though we’d had some success, drugs, not music, had motivated it. Our managers were frustrated. They’d pretty much explored all the limited avenues they had access to. When we did get some gigs, we wound up having to do mostly cover versions of other people’s songs to pay the bills. We tried to slip a few of our original numbers into the set, hoping that people would understand what we were about, and some seemed to like it, but most just wanted to dance.
 
I realized we had to get out of New York and into an environment that would be more conducive to songwriting and taking the band to the next level. Mike had driven to Poughkeepsie to see a friend the week before and had spotted a For Rent sign at the side of the road in a little town called Dover Plains. He scrawled down the telephone number. After speaking to the owner and realizing that we could afford the rental, we piled onto packing quilts in the back of our Dodge van and drove north. Bob Dylan’s backup group, the Band, had relocated to a modern pink house in West Saugerties in the Catskills and recorded their first album,
Music from the Big Pink.
The house we found wasn’t pink. It was white, stood on three hundred fifty acres, and looked like something out of
Gone with the Wind.
It cost us $150 a month—far less than the price of our crummy New York apartment.

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