Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (40 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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I was staggered. It was so unlike Glenn to give credit to anyone. I will never forget that night, sitting there after everybody else left, snorting some cocaine together while he expressed his sincere appreciation of me and acknowledged what I’d done. How could it have gone so wrong—or was it just the drugs talking?
 
 
 
 
Later in 1993,
Irving Azoff rounded up some of America’s biggest country stars in Nashville and issued an album of covers of Eagles songs. It was called
Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles
and featured stars such as Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt, Trisha Yearwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Clint Black. Irving had resigned from MCA, and had set up Giant Records. Don Henley, one of his first new clients after splitting from David Geffen, again, was intimately involved in the Nashville project, and a portion of the proceeds of the album sales were to go to the Walden Woods Project.
 
Common Thread
was like the remake of a favorite old movie, and it sounded great. After years and years of hearing those songs sung in the same old way, without a single note altered, it was good to hear fresh voices with a new take. I was impressed. The album sold three million copies in its first six months and rose to number one on the country chart and number three on the pop chart. It was even named Album of the Year by the Country Music Association. The first single was “Take It Easy,” written by Glenn and Jackson Browne, sung by Travis Tritt.
 
To promote the single, Travis wanted to come up with something really different, an eye-catching video to be released for Christmas 1993. He suddenly suggested getting the Eagles back together again. When everyone stopped laughing, someone said, “Why not?” The record company asked Don first and then the rest of us, and, amazingly, Glenn agreed.
 
The original idea of the shoot was that Travis would be singing in a seedy bar in downtown L.A., and we’d be his backup band, shooting pool and hanging around behind him. There were to be a couple of shots of all of us, walking along a road five abreast, arriving and leaving the bar together.
 
The filming was all very secretive. Streets were blocked off, and everyone was sworn to silence. A funky Spanish-looking bar in North Hollywood was selected, and for the first time in thirteen years, we were all going to be in the same room together. There had been a lot of nervous anticipation in the days leading up to it, and when we arrived for the shoot, I felt the way I had on my first day at F. W. Buchholz High School in Gainesville, watching all the other kids arrive in their parents’ cars, wearing brand new clothes. Fortunately, Joe was there early, and he and I fooled around and he made me laugh, instantly defusing an extremely tense situation.
 
When Glenn arrived, we said hello politely and then hugged.
 
“Good to see you, man,” I told him.
 
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s good to be here.”
 
The atmosphere worsened, though, when everyone arrived except Don. We knew of old that he was always late, but the forty-five minutes he made us wait that day seemed like a hundred and forty-five. Was he coming? Or was he gonna piss Glenn off by not showing, as Glenn had in 1990? By the time Don eventually walked through the door, I felt so brittle, I could have snapped in two. They said hello and hugged each other and began rehearsing “Desperado” almost right away, a song for which Joe and I weren’t required.
 
In urgent need of some light relief, the two of us did something we used to do in the old days, which was sit at the back, not miked up, and look as if we were singing harmonies, when actually we were singing “Desert Rat Hole,” “Avocado,” or “El Dorado,” anything but “Desperado.” It had started as a childish way of keeping ourselves entertained and awake during the long periods in an Eagles set when only ballads would be played, but it helped break down the tension of that sizzling day.
 
Within a few hours, though, we were shooting pool together, jamming, and actually having fun. It was like a high school band getting back together for a twenty-year reunion and playing “Louie Louie.” There was even a mock-up of us lined up against the wall outside the bar, being arrested by a highway patrolman, which brought back some old memories of a few close calls. It felt good to be back together and making music again. Glenn and I spoke to each other quite cordially and even hugged again at the end.
 
“We should do this more often,” I told him, trying to resume my old diplomatic role in the band as a sort of marriage counsellor between the warring factions.
 
“Yeah,” he nodded. “We should.”
 
The planets were aligning.
 
The video was a great success and sparked what one leading rock journalist described as “Eaglemania.” The ever-resourceful Irving attempted yet another reunion. After the Northridge earthquake destroyed Don’s L.A. home and he decided to return to his native Texas, Irving quickly organized another lunch in Aspen, to which Don, Glenn, and Joe were invited. Timothy and I weren’t. The numbers being thrown around this time for a resumption tour were too tempting for any of them to refuse.
 
The Eagles had never originally been about making music for money, but suddenly it became the main focus of interest. Irving called everyone, conducting a litmus test to see how we felt. Word came back that, if the money was right, there might be a possibility. It’s amazing how a few zeros on the end of a check can make you forget how much you dislike someone and justify your putting up with them again after all these years.
 
After more than a decade of silence and inactivity, everyone agreed to try again, to rehabilitate, get back into shape, relearn old skills, and put away our differences. Glenn had first come up with the word “resumption.” We weren’t reuniting, he insisted, just resuming. We honestly didn’t know if we could pull it off, and nobody knew how long it would hold together if we did—six months was the initial estimate—but $300 million can sure put a smile on a person’s face. The resumption tour was on.
 
Irving faxed the media a four-word message to announce the news. It said simply, “Hell has frozen over.”
 
SIXTEEN
 
Despite such momentous news
and the effect it was about to have on my life, my family had become the main focus of my concern, chiefly my second son, Cody, the most free-spirited of all our children. Sweet, sensitive, gorgeous to look at, he had all the confidence of a third child and spent his childhood with scabby knees and scuffed hands. He looked just like I did as a kid, only he was ten times more accident-prone. He became such a regular visitor to the emergency room at the local hospital that they were on first-name terms.
 
When he was eleven, he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and after a battery of tests, we were advised to place him on the now-controversial amphetamine Ritalin, then commonly prescribed for ADD kids to help them focus. Having had plenty of personal experience with amphetamines myself, I didn’t approve of Cody taking pills at such an early age, but we’d tried everything else, and this was a last resort.
 
By the time he was in seventh grade, I realized we may have inadvertently given him a lifetime taste for drugs. Some kids at school introduced him to pot and speed. The first time I noticed the telltale glazed look in his eyes my stomach did a flip. Memories of my own unhappy encounters with my father flooded my brain. I was suspended in an agony of indecision. Part of me wanted to yell at him, grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and tell him how stupid he was being. I could almost envision the effectiveness of using my belt.
 
The other part of me wanted to buckle under, drop to the floor, and cry like a baby. I, of all people, knew what drugs could do, and I had a dreadful sense of foreboding that this was the start of something serious. In all the years I’d been in the music industry, I’d seen dozens of promising young people fall by the wayside. Not just famous rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, but personal friends like some of the guys from Flow, and friends like John Belushi, lying cold in his grave. I didn’t have a clue what to do.
 
In my young son, I saw echoes of myself, of Joe Walsh, of all the people I’d known who were addicts, and I felt physically sick. I began driving him to and from school and picking him up from his friends’ houses. I tried to talk with him, reason with him, and explain that I wasn’t saying this just because I was his dad.
 
“I know the temptations, son,” I told him. “I know what it’s like to be persuaded into trying things by your buddies, but you’ve got to fight it, stand up for yourself, and say no. If this sort of behavior carries on, we’re gonna have to take you to see someone, to get some professional help, and you don’t want that, do you?”
 
Cody would stare up at me with those big blue eyes of his and promise never to try anything again. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he’d say. “I only tried it once and I didn’t like it anyway.” His answers stuck in my craw, because they were the same I would have come up with.
 
Even more poignantly, at the same time I was dealing with young Cody’s problems, I had to drive my old buddy Joe Walsh to a clinic in Santa Monica for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, after Don and Glenn decreed that unless he was sober, he’d remain in the fires of hell.
 
Susan and I and Cody underwent some searing encounter sessions and family therapy. It was an extremely salutary experience. I seemed to be to blame for just about everything that had gone wrong in his life. I was either never there, or when I was, I wasn’t paying him enough attention. Maybe he was right. In the hope that Cody might find some release in music, I bought him a guitar. The next time I saw it, the guitar was leaning up against his bed with the words I HATE DAD scratched deeply into its mahogany veneer. Tears pricked the back of my eyes.
 
I knew I was to blame. I’d failed as a father and as someone with experience of drugs who’d, luckily, never felt the barbs of addiction. I’d been absent for much of his young life, following my dream at the expense of his. The guilt nearly killed me. Cody had always had that wholesome, kid-surfer kind of look, with his blond hair and bright eyes. Now his eyes had lost their sparkle, and he seemed like a different child. It broke our hearts, not least because it felt like we were losing him.
 
Amazingly, one of the people who helped Cody during this difficult time was Graham Nash’s son. He’d gone through similar experiences the previous year but had come out the other side. I’d hardly seen Graham since 1974, when I told him I was joining the Eagles and wasn’t going back on the road with him and David Blue, but now he and I were attending parent-support sessions and family therapy meetings together, often at his house, to try to help our children find their way through the labyrinth of their youth.
 
“Hey, buddy, you were once my big brother, and now your son’s doing the same for mine,” I told him one night, as we hugged each other warmly and tried not to break down. We leaned on each other a lot during that hellish nightmare, and once again, my respect for him as a person increased tenfold.
 
 
 
 
I arrived to resume work
with the rest of the band in January 1994, at the very beginning of our troubles with Cody, Now there was the added worry of what it would be like to be an Eagle again. Glenn and Don had been up to their old tricks. This time, I was told, there would be no attempt to sit down and try to write great new material together, as we had in the past, for fear of opening up old wounds. Instead of a whole new album, they’d decided independently that we were going to record a live album, along with three songs the pair had written with collaborators, plus a fourth new song. The remaining eleven numbers would be a rehash of old hits like “Hotel California,” “Desperado,” “Tequila Sunrise,” “Take It Easy,” and “Life in the Fast Lane,” sprinkled with songs like “New York Minute” from Don’s solo albums and “In the City,” written by Joe Walsh. Elliot Scheiner was to be the producer.
 
Before, we had tried our hardest to recognize our strengths and limitations, but this album found us tolerating weaknesses, especially in those members who couldn’t bring in any worthwhile songs. If we hadn’t let them slip something mediocre onto the disc, they wouldn’t have anything on the album at all. This was especially true of Glenn’s “Girl from Yesterday,” written with his old friend and collaborator Jack Tempchin, which had everybody’s eyes rolling. Don remarked, when Glenn wasn’t in the room, that his song was not his best work and that any country singer from Nashville could sing it better. I agree, the song didn’t sound very good, and it went down badly at our later gigs, so we eventually dropped it from our set.
 
Most irritating, the fourth new song on the album was to be “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” the number written by Paul Carrack with Jim Capaldi and Peter Vale for the “Malibu Men’s Choir” demo album that he and I put together. That which Irving had so scathingly rejected as “not strong enough” was suddenly deemed worthy of inclusion in the new Eagles LP. It actually became the single with the biggest airplay from the album.

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