Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (14 page)

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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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Randy then joined his musical hero Ricky Nelson in the Stone Canyon Band and did some session work on James Taylor’s
Sweet Baby James
album, before getting homesick and giving up music altogether to work at the John Deere tractor plant so he could be with his wife and family. In 1971, Rick Nelson invited him back to L.A., and he decided to give his career one last try.
 
Don Henley moved to L.A. from Texas with his band Shiloh, bankrolled by country singer Kenny Rogers. After a false start with Amos Records, the band broke up. The fuzzy-haired Henley, with his sandpaper voice, soon became part of the furniture at the Troubadour, a former folk club on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Doheny in Hollywood. It was a magnet for rock musicians, folksingers, and songwriters, where the likes of Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt would regularly hold court in the corner and plot their dreams.
 
Glenn Frey, a natural R&B guitarist and singer, whose idol was Bob Seger, had moved to L.A. from Detroit and teamed up with a talented musician and songwriter named John David (J.D.) Souther. They wrote songs together and in 1969 formed the duo Longbranch Pennywhistle. Their first album, put out on Amos Records, flopped. They shared an apartment complex with singer/songwriter Jackson Browne for a while, and by 1970, Frey decided he wanted a solo career. A huge Elvis fan, he dubbed himself the Teen King. David Geffen, an up-and-coming promoter and future record company executive with people like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, urged him to stick with a group.
 
Recalling the Anaheim gig with Ronstadt and hoping to recapture the magic of that night, Frey and Henley approached Meisner and Bernie Leadon about forming their own group. The move was, one of them once said, born of a mix of “desperation, fear, and insecurity.” They realized they played well together, but they only knew each other socially over a few beers and had no idea how they’d all get along. They signed up with David Geffen and his newly formed record label, Asylum, created as the antithesis of the cigar-smoking men in suits who’d previously run the record industry.
 
What they needed first and foremost was a name. The Doors, the Byrds, and the Beatles had all done well with something short and concise. Glenn Frey, the Detroit-born, would-be “James Dean” of the band, wanted something that sounded punchy, like a teen gang out of
West Side Story.
On a combination of peyote tea and tequila out in the Mojave Desert one night, Bernie recounted from a Carlos Castaneda book that the Hopi Indians revered the eagle above all other animals, because it flies closest to the sun and has a great moral spirit. The Eagles were born.
 
They may have barely known each other, but by the spring of 1972, just when I was at my lowest ebb in Boston, they were in England recording their debut album,
Eagles
, with Glyn Johns, the producer of classic works by the Rolling Stones, the Who, Traffic, Led Zeppelin, and Steve Miller. It was an uneasy relationship, made harder by Johns’ perfectionism, his antidrug stance, and several differences of opinion as to how much of a country flavor the music should have. Despite the early tensions, within a few months, their special mix of country and rock gave them a record in the Top 10.
 
That summer, they toured with an odd assortment of British bands, including Yes, Jethro Tull, and Procol Harum, and they dominated the Top 40 with three hit singles: “Take it Easy,” written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey, “Witchy Woman,” written by Bernie and Don Henley, and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” by songwriter Jack Tempchin. Each number captured the laid-back, “anything is possible” culture of the time and found emotional resonance with every idealistic teenager who’d ever dreamt of a summer cruising chicks in a convertible. The Eagles’ chart rivals, like Harry Nilsson, Don McLean, and Roberta Flack, didn’t stand a chance.
 
I kept hearing “Take it Easy” on the car radio, in shops, diners, and gas stations, before anyone had ever really heard of the Eagles. Bernie’s distinctive banjo playing filled the background, and every time I heard it, I smiled, I felt so proud. On “Witchy Woman,” his eerie guitar chords sounded like something the Hopi Indians would have performed a ritual dance to. When the Eagles came to Boston in 1972, as an opening band for Yes, Bernie called me up.
 
“Hey, Don,” he said. “I’m coming to town next week, playing at Boston University for one night only with this new band. Why don’t you bring Susan over and come and meet the guys? We can have a bit of a jam. I’ll put your names on the guest list.”
 
“Sounds great,” I said, delighted to hear Bernie’s voice again and to know that my old buddy hadn’t forgotten me. “See you there.”
 
If Susan had any reservations about my going to see yet another old friend doing so much better than me, she didn’t say a word. We traveled to the university campus in our trusty Volvo, and sure enough, Bernie had pulled it off so that we walked straight in past the security guards.
 
“Hey, man, good to see you!” he beamed, that same old grin lighting up his whole face as he patted me warmly on the back at the dressing room door. He hardly looked a day older than when he had met me off the Greyhound bus nearly ten years earlier.
 
Turning to Susan, he embraced her. “Hey, Mrs. Felder! Congratulations. You finally snared him, then?” Susan kissed Bernie almost shyly, and they talked for a while about old times and whether either of them still heard from Bernie’s old flame, Judy Lee.
 
Stepping inside the dressing room the band shared, we came face to face with a bunch of young, fresh-looking guys, likeable, bright-eyed, with trademark long hair, jeans, football shirts, and cowboy boots. They were exactly like most of the musicians I hung out with every day in the studio.
 
“Hey, everyone,” Bernie announced, “I’d like you to meet Don Felder, the man with the lightest fingers I know on a Stratocaster.”
 
“Hey, Fingers,” said a square-jawed man I was introduced to as Glenn Frey. He shook me firmly by the hand and introduced me to curly-haired Don Henley, who seemed a little uptight (I put it down to preshow nerves), and Randy Meisner, who looked like a shy, baby-faced boy. There didn’t seem to be a clear leader, although I noticed that Glenn seemed the most confident and was the one who stepped up to make the introductions. They were just a young band, starting out, playing to crowds of one or two thousand, driving themselves around in rental cars between various indoor facilities like college campuses and small, old theaters.
 
They seemed to be having a lot of fun while they were doing it, too, from what Bernie had told me. All but Randy were single and were clearly enjoying the drink and the drugs and the girls that seemed to go with the territory. They played marathon poker games, knocked a basketball around on weekends, had pet nicknames for each other, and often socialized together. At the time, it felt to me, there was no special aura about them, no sense that they were going to do any better than any of the other bands we’d all tried our hand in. They were just a bunch of guys making music together. I felt completely at ease. As it turns out, later, they had three hits on their first album.
 
“Want to jam?” Bernie asked, passing me an electric guitar that was leaning against a table in the corner.
 
“Sure.” I grinned, sitting astride a packing case next to him while Susan settled down on a cushion on the floor.
 
Bernie opened with a piece of bluegrass he and I had played in Gainesville together a hundred times before, and I fell right in. It felt good to be playing with him again. Up until that moment, I don’t think I’d realized how much I’d missed his incredible musical gifts.
 
Pulling a worn bottleneck from my pocket and placing it over my left middle finger, I played some slide on the next number we did, and before long, everyone in the room was foot-tapping and clapping their hands in time. The room was filled with longneck Buds that were drained in quick succession. We were having a good time. Susan sat looking up at me with such love and admiration as Bernie and I went into a rousing finale. I felt truly blessed to have her for my wife and him for my best friend. This was what it was all about. The ability to sit down and create something out of nothing, to be surrounded by friends and people you love, and to fill the room with music. I never wanted to lose sight of that.
 
When we were through, the room went wild. Several people had wandered into the dressing room from down the corridor to listen to us play, and the place was packed. Bernie threw his head back and laughed at the sheer pleasure of it, and I felt happier than I had in months. Glenn Frey came over and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Man, you’re good,” he said, clearly impressed. “You should come to L.A. We could use a few more players like you out there.”
 
Bernie interjected, “You’re onto a loser there. I’ve been trying to get Don to head west for ten years. I keep telling him that’s where it’s happening. But he won’t listen, and he won’t leave his lady.”
 
I said nothing. I just shrugged my shoulders while Susan watched us pensively, a few feet away.
 
When it was the band’s turn to go onstage, she and I stood in the wings, watching them play. They were very good, really tight together as a classic four-part harmony band, although maybe a little bit too static and country for me—no movement, no gimmicks, no political messages about Nixon’s reelection or the latest atrocities in Vietnam or the quest for world peace. They just stood and played their music. If there was any talking to be done, and there wasn’t much, then Glenn did it. He was up front, behind the mike, his long hair swaying, singing lead. Don sat way at the back, hidden behind the drums, singing at the same time as drumming, which is a phenomenally difficult double act to carry off in terms of physical coordination. Only Levon Helms from the Band had really done it well before. Just once, on “Witchy Woman,” Don sang lead, and he was surprisingly good. He had a clean, clear rasp to his voice that cut through the air like a knife.
 
Overall, I decided that I liked them better personally than I did musically. Where I came from, country music was considered rather inferior, a backwoods sort of thing that the rednecks from the Deep South listened to with their rifles and shotguns in the back of their pickup trucks and the coon dogs on the front porch. Although I’d grown up on a diet of the
Grand Ole Opry
, I felt I’d moved beyond that, into a combination of free-form jazz, rhythm and blues, and good ol’ rock and roll. I was still very interested in English music and was far more eager to hear Yes than I was the Eagles. I would never have rushed out and bought an Eagles album. Instead, I’d have spent my hard-earned cash on the latest by Fleetwood Mac, Hendrix, or Eric Clapton.
 
To give the Eagles their due, there was something spine-tinglingly magical about their sound. And I liked the fact that they all sang. Other than the Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, there were few other bands really doing that. Even in the Beatles, Ringo barely sang, and George was just sort of in the background. What these boys did in its simplicity and uniqueness was really cool. It was intelligible; you could understand the lyrics very easily, and each of them brought something to the party. Glenn was the lead singer, and Don sang great harmonies and played drums way behind the beat, giving an anticipatory tension to the music. I don’t think it’s something he did consciously or willingly, it was just where he felt the beat, and it became part of the Eagles groove.
 
Bernie played mean five-string banjo, mandolin, and pedal steel, while Randy played bass and contributed the most edgy high-pitched harmonies with his angelic voice. It was a combination that worked, although I’m not sure how truly appreciative the crowd that had come to see Yes was about an all-American, all-singing country-rock band. It seemed like a slightly odd pairing to me.
 
Yes were mind-blowing. We watched their progressive rock symphony from the wings and were mighty impressed. They had such a distinctive sound, and the crowd went wild. Jon Anderson’s voice was crystal, Steve Howe was a fine guitarist, and Rick Wakeman was amazing on keyboards. I felt privileged to have been able to hear them play.
 
Susan and I went back to Bernie’s hotel room after the gig and hung out with him for a couple of hours. The band was leaving early the next morning in their fleet of rental cars, heading for the next town. Their road manager, Richie Fernandez, would sit in the lead car with a map, navigating his little convoy across America. Bernie had to be up at dawn, and Susan and I were both working the next day, so we didn’t stay late.
 
“I’ll see you around, pal,” I told Bernie, with some sadness, as I shook his hand.
 
“Yeah, sure. Maybe even in California, huh?” he joked, knowing how I stood on that particular issue. Giving Susan a squeeze, he mumbled into her hair, “You should let Don go to L.A., you know, just to prove to himself that he can do it. You’d never look back, either of you.”
 

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