Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (31 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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There was never a suggestion we might disband because of Randy’s departure, the assumption was always that we’d continue. Don and Glenn had indicated a band should not keep going on and on, way beyond the time it should, with only a few of the original members, but we were all in our late twenties or early thirties and still felt young and energetic enough to keep going. The only question was, who would replace Randy? We didn’t have to look very far. The logical replacement was someone we knew and liked—Timothy B. Schmit, who’d taken Randy’s place in Poco when Randy had joined the Eagles in 1972. Timothy sang high and played bass. He was perfect—everyone agreed he was the only choice.
 
Timothy, whose nickname became the Wanderer, because he was always wandering off somewhere, was married with kids, a soft-spoken, extremely likable vegetarian, heavily into yoga. He’d been a friend and ally from way back, when he was in Poco and I first joined the Eagles, and we used to sit backstage at gigs, jamming and talking about our kids like the proud dads we were. I never had that kind of camaraderie with Don and Glenn. Tim had spent a lot of time on the road and felt like one of the boys. I have nothing but praise for him as a musician and a human being. He is honest and straightforward, with a great amount of patience and humility. He was an undeniable asset to the band, and, since Bernie’s departure, the only member of the Eagles who actually was born and raised in California.
 
There were now just three shareholders of Eagles Ltd. left—Don, Glenn, and me. Randy had blazed this incredible trail for Timothy, and he was able to step in and take over the extraordinary legacy that had been built up. He made no problems for anyone. Whatever anyone wanted was fine with Timothy.
 
Irving and his staff, lawyers, and business managers took care of everything, and there still seemed no reason to question them. The only time I really started to wonder was when my business manager, Gerry Breslauer, put together property partnerships involving eight or so of Irving’s clients, including people like Boz Scaggs and Danny Fogelberg, along with the Eagles and others. As I looked at the percentages, I saw that Irving, Don, and Glenn owned twice as much as the rest of us.
 
“Hey, Irv,” I said, “How come this isn’t an equal split like everything else?”
 
Irving smiled and explained that those guys earned so much more money from writing and publishing that they had a much bigger cash fund to invest. Seeing that I wasn’t quite convinced, he added, “Remember, Don, those boys are single, and they don’t have kids.”
 
I thought well, OK, that makes sense.
 
But then I began to think a bit more about percentages and income, wondering if it was all just as Irving said. How come he could afford such a big share? And was it normal for the on-tour accountant, employed to keep tabs on everything on the road, to be answerable first and foremost to Irving?
 
I never thought to speak to friends in other bands to see if they were getting the same deal or better. Everyone I knew was equally unsophisticated as far as even understanding how the royalty, merchandising, and tour-accounting side of the business worked, so nobody could have given me any straight answers. Still, I resolved that I’d keep asking questions if something came up that bothered me. After all, I had every right.
 
 
 
 
Hotel California
was nominated for several Grammy Awards,
including Record of the Year, which it won in March 1978. We had become the biggest selling U.S. band of the decade. We were holed up in my little studio out in Malibu, rehearsing and working on some demo tracks for the next album, sitting around drinking beer and watching television, when they announced the award, and Andy Williams stepped up to accept it for us.
 
“Why didn’t we go accept it ourselves?” I asked someone.
 
“We don’t want to be a part of this Hollywood jive business crap,” came the reply.
 
Everyone looked at each other blankly.
 
The following day, there was a spate of heated press conferences, claiming and counterclaiming that Irving had, or had not, told the awards organizers we wouldn’t go to the show to collect our prize unless we were guaranteed to win. I didn’t know anything about it.
 
Later that summer, we challenged the editorial team of
Rolling Stone
to a softball game. If the reporters won, we’d give them a rare interview; if we won, we’d write an article describing how we trounced them. It would, we hoped, finally settle the score between us and Jann Wenner, the magazine’s editor and driving force. The game took place on May 7, 1978, at the University of Southern California and was heavily attended by invited press. Pregame tactics included abusive notes left on Don and Glenn’s doorsteps, calling them sissies and beach bums.
 
We all wore black-and-gold caps, and Irving wore a T-shirt that said, “Is Jann Wenner Tragically Hip?” Joe Smith, chairman of Elektra/Asylum, made the public announcements. The first was that Jimmy Buffett could no longer play on our side, because he’d broken his leg; the second was that we should stand for the “national anthem,” a shortened version of “Life in the Fast Lane.” Governor Jerry Brown was there rooting for us. We brought in a couple of ringers from our road crew, truck drivers and buddies from other bands who were good players, as an insurance policy, because Don and Glenn were pretty thin and puny in those days and not terribly athletic.
 
I always thought it strange that Don offered them a sports challenge and not a writing one, which he’d have won hands down. Fortunately for us, the journalists who turned up to play us were as out of condition as we were, and after a difficult game, we won. Everyone went to Dan Tana’s afterward for a victory meal, and journalists and band members sat alongside each other, gobbling spaghetti, getting along fine. The feud was officially over.
 
 
 
 
To hear the songs I’ d helped write or co-written being played
on the radio all the time was a real treat for me, especially in the car. There was something about driving around L.A. in my Porsche, with “Hotel California” blasting out and the DJ saying, “Well, that was the classic song from the classic American band.” Don always said the ultimate litmus test for a track was whether or not it sounded good on the car stereo. He’d spend a lot of time driving around, listening to demo tracks and giving them “the test.” He thought up some of his best lyrics behind the wheel. Unlike him, I don’t think I ever tired of listening to our songs being played after they’d been released, but our record company knew that the public soon would. They demanded a follow-up album.
 
I had something like fifteen or so tracks ready for what was originally planned as a double album, and Irving sent us back to Bill Szymczyk and his Bayshore Recording Studio in Coconut Grove, Florida, to record. Once settled in, our latest addition, Timothy, delivered the first usable song, “I Can’t Tell You Why,” which the band first rehearsed together in my little Malibu studio. It was a great ballad with Randy-style vocals and an opening for me to play some really sensual guitar.
 
“This is a killer track, Timmy,” I told him. “I’m gonna have some fun working out my guitar parts for this.”
 
Don and Glenn seemed burned out. They spent hours in stony silence facing each other, neither one able to suggest any new lyrics, each one staring at Don’s trademark cigarette butts, which he left standing around on every available work surface. They appeared to resent our attempts to write more songs, and finally told the record label the album would be delayed until they had what they felt were “acceptable” songs. To speed them along, Joe Smith mailed them a rhyming dictionary.
 
It wasn’t really surprising that there was a creative lull after
Hotel,
but the record company’s expectations were unreasonably high. They expected us to deliver an album every year
and
go on the road. Irving would call or come down in person and tell us what they wanted.
 
We’d sit and listen to what he had to say, and Don would say quietly, “Don’t rush us, Irving. They’ll get it when it’s done.” He was often the one who stood up to the executives and put them in their place, I think maybe because it took the greatest toll on him. Naturally pensive, he became even more introverted, fretting inwardly about what we were doing and where we were heading musically. He was once reported as saying, “Every minute I’m awake, even when I’m asleep, I’m worried about the next album and what’s going to be written on it and how it’s going to do and how it’s going to be accepted and how my peers are going to react and how we’re going to make it better than the last one and how the record company is on our case about hurry-up-we-didn’t-get-an-album-from-you-in- 1978-and-it’s-not-going-to-look-good-on-our-stock-report-and-what-about-the-profit-sharing-plan.”
 
Months passed without any new songs. When it was clear the new album had definitely stalled, we spent the rest of that year on the road, not writing any new material at all. Instead of the moneymaking album they’d hoped for, the record company received one song, a cover of Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas.” It reached number eighteen in the charts. On the flipside was a song called “Funky New Year,” in which we all clinked glasses and made a lot of noise while Glenn played saxophone. He decided he wanted to play sax after hearing Dave Sanborn play, but he was nowhere near as good, and he never played sax on a record again, thank God.
 
It would have been really smart to take some time off, let everyone spend time at home and rest up after those blockbuster first five years, but instead we ran at a pace we couldn’t possibly endure, especially not with the drugs and the pressure to produce new material. There was a lot of steam building up in the pressure cooker.
 
Worst, for me, were the long absences from my family. We’d be gone for six or seven weeks at a time, home for a couple of weeks, then back in the studio or on tour. We were working a good ten months out of every year, and it was a long, hard run without much time off. I had little kids who didn’t travel well, and Susan was pregnant again with our third child, but my family needs weren’t really considered by anyone in the band. I resorted to calling home several times a day to talk to Jesse and Rebecca on the phone. I’d send them gifts in the mail, or bring them toys and goodies whenever I came back, but it was no substitute for being a full-time dad. I was painfully aware that I was cheating them out of a normal family life because of my career.
 
When I did come home, I overcompensated massively. I’d take them to Bass Lake and teach them how to swim or up to Lake Tahoe to ski. I was great friends with Jimmy Pankow from the band Chicago, and we’d rent houses together, his family and mine, for camping weekends. All my kids learned basic survival skills from a very early age. I showed them how to fish, I told them about frog-gigging, and I made them their first aquaplane board so that they, too, could fly under the water as I had once done.
 
“Did you really see manatees under the water, Dad?” Jesse would ask, wide-eyed.
 
“Yes, son, and we had to avoid the snakes and the alligators in the water.”
 
“Wow! Cool.”
 
Our son Cody was born in October 1978 in a candlelit bedroom of our beach house in Malibu while I held Susan’s hand and the moonlight danced on the waves outside. We called him Little Buddha or the Broad Beach Blubber, because he was so pudgy. Right from the start, he had a mind of his own and was a great kid. “This one’s gonna be trouble,” I told Susan, as he wriggled and kicked his way out of every diaper change.
 
I jumped at the chance to look after him and cuddle him when he cried at night—anything to make some sort of early connection with him. Susan and I were true “granola parents,” never allowing the kids sugar or candy, red meat, or saturated fat. Instead they grew up on fruit, vegetables, yogurt, and lean white meat. When they went to friends’ houses, I’m sure they ate entire boxes of Froot Loops. Susan didn’t smoke, drink alcohol, or take other drugs. She was a yoga instructor and breast-fed all our children. Thanks to her, I was probably the healthiest drug addict in town. I was determined to be as diligent a parent as she and become a permanent figure in their lives, despite my long absences from home. I went from Rock God to Diaper God overnight. My so-called reclusiveness caused some frustration among the fans, because I was never out partying with Don and Glenn in L.A. or Colorado. I wasn’t photographed as often as they were and seldom was able to sign autographs, so very few were able to collect a full set of Eagles autographs. I just wanted to immerse myself in the humbling, awe-inspiring business of being a father and a husband.
 
While the others were celebrating New Year’s Eve in their various ways, I was pacing the floorboards, nursing a bawling Cody through colic.
 
Trouble was, most of the time, Susan and I were furiously treading water trying to keep our noses above the waves. Our lives constantly fluctuated between the times when I was there and the times when I wasn’t. My career was the driving force behind our busy schedules, and there wasn’t very much time for our relationship. We never argued, we just avoided confronting the issues that were eating away at both of us, like when we were going to be able to spend some quality time together. We would do anything rather than bring up difficult or delicate situations that might be explosive, because I’d just been dealing with that sort of conflict every day. When I came home, the last thing I wanted to do was be confrontational or demanding. Nor did I want to offload the turbulence of my relationship with the band onto my wife. I just wanted to relax and be caring and loving. Sadly, in the end, I think we avoided so much that our relationship itself became something of a void.

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