Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (21 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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Many of us still smoked a lot of pot and drank longneck Buds, but we’d rarely refuse some blow. We were generally well coked up before we even appeared on stage, but our roadies had instructions to leave lines of blow on our amps so that between songs we could go back and bend over as if we were adjusting the knobs, when actually we were snorting in front of an entire live audience. The drugs must have affected our performance, but at the time, I thought we sounded just great.
 
I doubt we could have continued at the pace we were being driven, unless we’d had some chemical help. Cocaine offered us the chance to keep going, pushing ourselves to the absolute limits, when all we wanted to do was stop for a while and catch our breath. Then, in April 1974, something happened that let me do so.
 
The tour was going full tilt, with five or sometimes six shows a week, but one of our final gigs of the first six-week stretch was in a theater in Phoenix, Arizona, an amazing venue with a revolving stage. You’d play to a different part of the audience every few minutes (and the other band members could closely inspect the girls who’d be invited backstage afterward).
 
I was quite literally in a spin after that gig and the backstage party that followed, where the usual amounts of drugs and tequila were consumed. We caught the last flight back to L.A. and landed around one thirty in the morning on April 6, almost too exhausted to leave the comfort of our seats. The plan was to jump in a fleet of rental cars and drive that night to Ontario Motor Speedway, about an hour east of the city. We were due to perform at one of the biggest gigs we’d ever played, the California Jam, in front of 300,000 people. The show was billed as “the Woodstock of the West Coast,” and fellow artists included Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Black Oak Arkansas, and Earth, Wind & Fire.
 
I was walking through LAX, feeling that bone-weary exhaustion that only a cocktail of drink, drugs, and sleep deprivation can bring, wishing I could just curl up and go to sleep in some quiet corner, when a message came over the paging system.
 
“Mr. Felder. Mr. Don Felder, please come to the information desk immediately, where there is an urgent call waiting for you.”
 
My heart began pumping hard again, stirring up all the stuff I’d taken the previous night. Susan, could it be Susan? She wasn’t due for a week or so, but as I ran over to the desk, I feared the worst. Grabbing the phone, I spoke into it breathlessly.
 
“Hello?”
 
“Don? It’s Susan. The contractions have started and they’re getting real bad. I need you to come home.
Now.
”
 
Without hesitating except for a quick word to the rest of the band, I grabbed my suitcase off the baggage carousel and ran to one of the waiting rental cars.
 
“Go for it, man!” I heard Bernie scream behind me.
 
“Tell Susan good luck from us,” yelled Randy.
 
I drove out to Topanga at breakneck speed, my eyes smarting with tiredness, my body being kept awake on pure adrenaline. Susan was in bed, breathing hard. I helped her get up and drove her to the Santa Monica Hospital on Wilshire and Fourteenth Street. I didn’t even have time to take my suede tassel-sleeved jacket off.
 
We’d agreed on natural childbirth, but it was a long and painful labor, and Susan really went through hell. There was a window right next to her bed, which looked out over the roof and the air-conditioning ducts. From where I stood, and in my hazy mental state, suffering as I was from chronic sleep deprivation, it seemed as if the building was in labor too, wheezing out steam in time with Susan’s heavy breathing.
 
Back at the Ontario Motor Speedway, the band waited for word. They were due to go on at two o’clock that afternoon, and Irving had arranged for a helicopter at the Santa Monica heliport a few miles away, to fly me to the gig if the baby was born in the morning. My deadline was one o’clock, and I was watching the time and urging this child to hurry up, not wanting to miss such an amazing gig.
 
“Come on, Jesse,” I’d urge the baby through Susan’s convulsing tummy. I was convinced he was going to be a boy, and I’d already named him in honor of my kindly Uncle Buck. “Any time up to 12:45 would be fine. Just come out and meet us, son.”
 
“Don!” Susan hissed through the pain. “Don’t you think I want him out as soon as possible too?”
 
“Sorry, honey.”
 
One o’clock came and went, and I called Irving up. “You’ll have to go ahead without me,” I told him. “This baby must be a Jackson Browne fan.” Jackson, recently a father himself, had agreed to stand in and play for me. By the time Susan had dilated and was ready to go to the labor room for an assisted birth a few hours later, I was almost delirious with a combination of exhaustion, excitement, and nerves. I felt so faint, I could easily have blacked out, but when our baby was born and handed to my wife, bloody and bawling, I somehow found enough strength in my legs to stand up and kiss them both.
 
The physician let me cut the cord, and as I did so, I realized I was crying. Great droplets splashed down my face as I cradled our child in my arms. “Welcome to the world, Jesse Felder,” I told him, wetting his face with my tears. Looking up at Susan, her own face wet, I’d never felt happier in my life.
 
TEN
 
I was only able to spend a couple of weeks
settling Susan and Jesse in, while the rest of the band reacquainted themselves with the inside of the Troubadour club, before we went back on the road for what turned into a nine-month tour.
 
While I was home, I changed diapers, fed and washed Jesse, babysat when Susan needed a break, and enjoyed spending quality time with my new son. We had a Mexican matrimonial hammock in the backyard and I rigged up a clothesline from it to the house, so that I could sit on the couch watching baseball in the living room while rocking Jesse gently to sleep outside. As soon as I stopped, during a particularly engrossing part of the game, he’d exercise his lungs and yell just to remind me.
 
I’d maintained polite long-range contact with my parents ever since moving to L.A., sending them the odd card from on the road and calling them once in a while, but I hadn’t seen them since my wedding, two years earlier, and they’d never seen Jesse. My brother, Jerry, who had two kids with Marnie and was living and working in Gainesville as a partner in a law firm he’d joined after college, called to tell me that Dad had finally quit working at Koppers, due to ill health. He’d never officially retired and was still being paid, but he had congestive heart failure and lung problems, probably exacerbated by years of smoking and inhaling toxic fumes.
 
“You might want to fly down and see him, Don,” Jerry advised, long distance. “He’s not doing very well.”
 
Having a son had considerably mellowed my resentment toward Dad, making me realize how hard it was to be a parent. During a lull in the tour, when I had a week off to spend with my family before we went back on the road, I decided to fly to Florida and reacquaint myself with the old man.
 
We flew to Gainesville and rented a brand-new car, which I knew would impress Dad. The house looked just the same, although even smaller than I remembered it. Jesse was just a couple of months old, and when Mom opened the front door of that old clapboard house with the tin roof that Dad had built with his own hands, I felt so proud to hand her my son. She looked a little older, but she was very pleased to see us and to meet her new grandson.
 
“Hi, little Jesse,” she said, cradling him in her arms and beaming down at him. “I’ve waited a long time for this.” Jesse gurgled and wriggled on cue and gave her one of his winning smiles.
 
Dad was sitting in an armchair in the lounge, an oxygen tank by his side, a clear plastic tube from it hooked around his nose. He was thin and gaunt, with sunken eyes, and his whole body seemed to have shrunk and caved in as he slowly drowned in his own lungs. Gone was the granite mountain of a man who’d serviced the machinery at Koppers for fifty years, the Dad who’d driven us around America, his tanned muscular arm protruding from the driver’s window. He was so diminished, he looked as if he could barely stand, let alone clamber onto a roof and fix the most high-tech television antenna in Gainesville.
 
His appearance shocked me to the core. He was only sixty-four, but he looked fifteen years older. Shakily, he got to his feet, clinging to the arm of his chair.
 
“Hey, Dad,” I said, holding out Jesse. “Meet your grandson.”
 
“I can’t hold him, I’ve gotta sit down,” he said, collapsing back into his chair. It was summer and the house was like an oven. I could hardly breathe myself.
 
Looking up at me weakly, he managed a half-smile as I lowered Jesse into his lap. He looked down at his grandson and then up at me, a shine in his watery eyes.
 
“Well, hello, Jesse,” he said. “I’m your Grandpa Felder.” Looking up at me again, studying my straggly beard, handlebar moustache, muttonchops, and shoulder-length hair with a frown, he complained, “Don’t you think it’s time you went to the barber’s, Doc, now you’re a father?”
 
 
 
 
Within a year, he was dead.
I’d spent some time with him on that initial visit, buying an air-conditioning unit to keep him cool and help him breathe (which he refused to switch on for fear of the electric bills). I offered him money, but he was too proud to accept. I’d taken some Eagles records and played them to him on his old music center and tried to explain to him how successful the band was, but I don’t think he ever really understood. All he said about the music was, “There’s no horns. I like horns.”
 
His decline was quite rapid after my visit, and he was admitted to the North Central Florida Hospital, from where Jerry called me. I raced there from the West Coast, and when I arrived, Dad was hooked up to a special machine that sprayed mist to keep his airways clear. It reminded me of the iron lungs of my polio-scarred youth.
 
“Hey, Dad,” I said, leaning over the bed to kiss him. “It’s Don.”
 
“When you gonna cut your hair and look like a man?” he growled through dry lips as my hair brushed his cheek. They were among the last words he ever spoke to me.
 
After a week of taking turns with Mom and Jerry in a bedside vigil, I had to go back to L.A. He died a few days later. My third flight to Gainesville in less than a year was for his funeral, but the finality of his passing didn’t hit me until I walked into the Williams-Thomas funeral home, where my friend Jim and I had played Frisbee as kids, and stared down at my father’s emaciated body lying in an open casket. He was dressed in his Sunday suit, a shirt and tie, his arms folded across his chest. I’d never seen his fingernails so clean.
 
A flood of sorrow overcame me. There was still so much unresolved. Jerry and I hugged each other and wept. He’d been there for my parents all these years while I was an absentee son, and I felt tremendous guilt about never having a proper, adult relationship with my father. Now it was too late. I was filled with remorse about this loss, not just of his life but so much else. When you lose a parent, the child in you dies. In the space of a year, I’d gained a son and lost a father, and it felt like such a huge transition. Everything had changed, and I was rushing through my life at a furious pace, not doing anything justice.
 
Sobbing in my brother’s arms, I mourned the death of my father with an intensity I’d never expected. He was, I realized, the strongest single influence in my life. He’d taught me all he knew about music, bought me my first real guitar, and encouraged me to play. Everything I was, everything I’d achieved, was because of him.
 
“God bless you, Dad,” I whispered and promised him silently that, one day, I’d cut my hair.
 
 
 
 
In late 1974,
we went back to the Record Plant to make a new album. There had been a short lull after the
On the Border
tour, but then Asylum turned the screws for a follow-up record.
 
I wasn’t looking forward to a return to the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the studio, especially not with the added burden of bettering the last gold-selling product. We knew the critics were waiting in the wings, knives sharpened, to cut us up and serve us in little pieces to the public. At least on the road, there had been enough space and time to get along reasonably well, but even out of the studio the differences that had been evident since I’d joined the previous year grew and grew. The band was becoming increasingly divided by the tensions within it, based on the type of music we played. In such a prickly environment, no new songs were immediately forthcoming. Bernie, meanwhile, became increasingly dissatisfied with how the pair of them treated him and Randy. He didn’t like them taking rough mixes back to their house to decide what tracks would stay or go, nor did he and Randy like what they described as Glenn’s ability to “change a word and gain a third”—coming to a song that was in their minds substantially done, with lyrics and music, making what to them seemed to be modest contributions, and suddenly becoming entitled to a third of the songwriting royalties.

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