Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (43 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 came home whenever I could and tried my hardest to make Cody realize the mistakes he was making, but I again found myself echoing my father. “What are you doing with your life, son?” I’d ask him. “Don’t you know where all this is heading?” He’d look at me the way I’d looked at Dad, and I knew that I wasn’t getting through.
 
“How can I make him see?” I’d ask Susan, as we both lay awake night after night, worrying about our son. “What can I tell him that’s any different from what my father and Jerry tried to tell me?”
 
“Maybe you can’t,” Susan said. Her attitude was to let him get through this wild period in the hope that he’d emerge from it eventually, as I had. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of my young son or worry desperately for his future.
 
Jesse, at nineteen,
had rarely, if ever, strayed off the straight and narrow path, but I fought not to make constant comparisons between him and Cody, as my father had done between my brother Jerry and me. Each of my boys was a unique individual, coping with life in his own way.
 
Jesse was a student at San Diego University, dating a lovely girl named Erin, whom he’d met in his first week at school. He was eager to carve out a career for himself in the financial business although he’d learned how to play saxophone in high school, having added it to his guitar talents. When I heard him on that thing, I wondered if he’d made the right choice. Man, he could play.
 
The previous summer, I’d asked Fred Walecki at Westwood Music if he could use Jesse’s help around his store. Fred had become something of a legend in L.A., yet he was still lending out free instruments to struggling hopefuls, as he had once done for me, Bernie, and so many others. Fred put Jesse to work. He was remodeling the store and employed Jesse as a junior laborer to the builders. I loved the idea of my son helping out in a music store, just like I had at Lipham’s in Gainesville.
 
Knowing that I was going back on the road, Jesse asked if he could come with me in some capacity with the crew. My guitar techs were delighted to have a new rookie as their slave. “Work him as hard as you would anyone else,” I told them, “and offer him no privileges.” He put in the long hours in tough conditions without complaint, traveling and sleeping on the crew bus.
 
One day during rehearsals, we were practicing Glenn’s song “The Heat Is On” with a saxophonist and a keyboard player, who were trying their best make up a horn section. It sounded a little wimpy.
 
“Hey, Glenn,” I suggested, “since Jesse’s gonna be on the road with us anyway, why not let him play sax on that part too? It won’t cost you a cent.”
 
Glenn jumped at the chance, and the next day, Jesse arrived with his instrument. He was so nervous, I thought he might pass out. His eyes were huge and his hands so sweaty they left imprints on the sax, but within a few days, he’d learned the parts for five songs in the show and was playing them like a professional.
 
On the very first show, he walked up behind the guitar section and stood a few feet away from me, playing his saxophone. I still savor that moment. All those years of lessons, of driving him to and from band practice, the times when the hair on my neck stood on end while he learned how to play in tune, and now here he was, my own son playing in the Eagles with me. I was so proud I almost forgot what
I
was supposed to be playing.
 
His girlfriend, Erin, waited in the wings for him when he came offstage each night and nearly sucked the skin right off his lips. Ah, that first taste of stardom. After a few weeks, Jesse definitely gained a slight swagger. The confidence he gained from being with the Eagles for a while was worth more than any salary he could have earned.
 
When summer ended, though, and he had to return to college, his golden carriage turned back into a pumpkin. “Dad, I’ve learned something very important from this,” he told me on the last day. “The people with the greatest skills make the most money, and the people with the fewest skills make the least.” When he returned to campus that fall, his grades jumped from C’s to straight A’s. I guess sometimes the best lessons aren’t learned in the classroom.
 
Later in the tour, my daughter Leah came out with us as well. She and Joe Walsh’s daughter Lucy had become inseparable. She and Leah looked like sisters, little blonde bookends, and they had a gas on the road together, shopping, surfing in Hawaii, taking helicopter rides over London, or just standing at the side of the stage during shows, watching their dads strut their stuff. Leah loved to have her own hotel room and order room service and be the daughter of someone famous, not just the offspring of some sweaty old guy in jeans and a checked shirt who was home all the time, tinkering with his old Chevy.
 
I made a personal commitment while we toured that I’d try to do something for a charity in some of the towns we were in, to give something back instead of just taking all the time. My chosen charities usually involved sick children or centers specializing in kids with drug problems. Leah was with Susan and me on the day when we arrived in Toronto, Canada, and were driving from the airport to the Four Seasons Hotel. On our way downtown, we drove by a large building. “Hey,” I asked the driver. “What’s that?”
 
“Oh, that’s a hospital for terminally ill children,” he replied.
 
Turning to my daughter, I told her, “Tomorrow, Leah, I want you to go to the mall and fill this car with toys. You choose which toys you think the sick kids would like, and you take them to that hospital and give them to them.” With her mom, she did just as I said and had one of the most meaningful afternoons of her life.
 
“That was great, Dad!” she told me when I saw her later that day, her eyes bright. “The kids loved everything we bought them. Can we do it again?”
 
With her encouragement, we repeated the exercise often, and she became so committed to the idea that she even called a number she saw on a television appeal in her hotel room one night and made a monthly pledge to another kids’ charity, which I still pay today. I knew then that she would never again take our good fortune for granted. And I don’t think she ever has.
 
 
 
 
Hell Freezes Over
went on to be a very profitable and successful album. But the carrots that had been dangled in front of us turned out to be much less juicy than some of us had been led to believe. Furthermore, when the video and DVD came out, a large percentage of the camera footage was of Don and Glenn. For much of it, you’d think the Eagles were a two-man band. Even for the introduction of “Hotel California,” you only see my hands playing it, rarely my face. Joe had more airplay than Timothy or I, presumably because of his own solo status. The black and white mannequins on the miniature stage suddenly made sense. The limelight belonged to “The Gods” and “The Gods” alone.
 
That feeling was reinforced by the credits on the album. “Hotel California” was mine. It was my chief claim to fame, and I’d written most of the music at my beach house in Malibu. It was my understanding that, when it came to the credits, the person who contributed most to the song was listed first, followed in descending order by those who added something later, like lyrics. Thus, on the original
Hotel
album, the credits read, “Written by Don Felder, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey.” Suddenly, on
Hell Freezes Over,
the credits changed. After “Hotel California,” it said, “Written by Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Don Felder,” relegating me to the final position.
 
Furthermore, not a single song by Bernie Leadon or Randy Meisner appeared on the new album. The classics they’d written and contributed so much to, like “Witchy Woman,” “On the Border,” “Try and Love Again” and “Take It to the Limit,” had been excluded. Neither of those founding members of the Eagles would earn a penny from our latest success. Faced with such pettiness, the antagonism between us increased. Everything started to become an issue, especially Joe and me larking around onstage with cardboard cutouts and some gimmicky tricks, providing much-needed comic relief but unintentionally drawing the camera away from “The Gods.”
 
Don would spend hours agonizing over publicity photographs, trying to decide if he looked too old or too wrinkled, or if his hair was just right. These were images for T-shirts or for photos to be signed and given away, not to be etched in stone in Mount Rushmore. We accepted his fastidiousness and appreciated that it was sometimes a good thing, both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that he set new standards that we all had to strive to achieve. If you expect greatness of people, they often rise to greatness. The curse was that it all took time and energy.
 
The issue of how many people were on the payroll reared its ugly head once more. Don and Glenn had lackeys around them all the time—personal assistants, secretaries, press agents, attorneys, accountants, and various hired hands, even when they were in L.A. My new guitar tech was hired out of Nashville, where he returned between tour legs. On the road, the homeboys would share Don’s and Glenn’s enormous presidential suites. A constant presence at their side, they would escort them down in the elevator when it was time for the limos to take us to the gig. By contrast, I was given a walkie-talkie and was called up by one of the security people when it was my turn to come down.
 
These might seem trivial and insignificant matters compared to the bigger picture of being back together again and on the road and doing what we did best, but added to the sense of being taken for a ride financially, these individual digs added up, causing a permanent feeling of dissatisfaction and apprehension—like when you’re breaking up with someone and everything they do suddenly annoys you.
 
Sometimes, I admit, I let it eat me up too much inside. It was truly a case of this could be heaven or this could be hell, depending on how I was feeling on any particular day. Mostly, I was genuinely delighted to be on the road, playing music with the band that I loved. I’d close my eyes, let go, and play from my heart, which was what I enjoyed doing the most. When I was up there on the stage, I’d try to radiate that purity out of me and my music in a positive force that counteracted all the bullshit and gave the fans their money’s worth for the three hours they had us to themselves. The audience just wanted to be entertained. That’s what they had paid an exorbitant amount of money for.
 
Behind the scenes, I’d try to work with “The Gods” as much as I could, and not let the tensions destroy me. “Just think about the money, Fingers,” Don would say, grabbing my arm if ever he saw me getting upset with Glenn.
 
“The music is what it’s all about,” Joe would remind me. “That and the fans are all that matters.”
 
If the stress became too much, I’d take a deep breath, hang out with Joe, have some fun, and try to cool off. Now that he was sober, he’d become a computer nerd and radio ham. All the time he’d have previously devoted to drinking, taking drugs, or playing practical jokes he now spent tuning in to fellow hams all over the world. You could always tell which room Joe was in, because out on the balcony some weird contorted antenna would be set up, and you could hear muffled voices with foreign accents through his bedroom door.
 
Joe and I had already rebonded as friends in the “guitar camp” to which we had been relegated. He was great at shoring me up. While the new divisions between us and the singers’ camp eroded support, confidence, and the willingness to be spontaneous musically or speak our minds, Joe and I grew closer and closer. Without him, Don and Glenn would have sucked
all
the fun out of what should have been the best time of our lives.
 
Susan was always telling me that I’d never be rid of my stomach problems unless I accepted things more, and I knew she was right. I already had serious back pain, originally caused by a surfing accident in Malibu and exacerbated by so much time sitting in cars and planes. It had flared up on the road, requiring Glenn to have a doctor flown out to treat me. I also needed a different vehicle from the others, just to be more comfortable. Every cloud has a silver lining, however. I began to have daily sessions with Don’s personal Pilates instructor, a wonderfully spiritual woman named Isa Bohn, who was already on the tour for him. Isa was in her seventies, with the body of a twenty-year-old. She corrected my guitar player’s slump and taught me a great deal about being positive and calm and in touch with my inner self.

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