Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (46 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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“Bernie!” I cried, jumping up delightedly. “Great to see you! I really hoped you’d be in town. Come and sit down. Have a beer.” Even after all these years, he still had that ability to light up a room with his grin and to put everyone completely at ease. Man, I missed that smile.
 
We hadn’t spoken for a long, long time, and I caught up on what he’d been doing since leaving the band. He’d moved to Hawaii before relocating to Nashville, where he’d had a busy career as a player, songwriter, session musician, and producer. He’d set up a number of successful projects, including a spoof country/rap/bluegrass band, called Run C&W, and a period working as a staff writer for a music publishing company. He’d played banjo on Bruce Hornsby’s Grammy-winning version of “The Valley Road”; he’d coproduced works by Crosby & Nash and by Michelle Shocked; and he’d designed music Web sites. He produced a group called Restless Heart, which had had a bestselling album called
Big Iron Horses,
with Eagles-style hits. That record had preceded
Common Thread,
which, through the Travis Tritt video, brought about the Eagles reunion. Even at this distance, Bernie had inadvertently affected the path of my life.
 
Since moving to Nashville, marrying, and having a son, he’d pretty much withdrawn from my life, which saddened me greatly, as he’d taught me so much and had been the one who’d persuaded me to come to California in the first place. I guess he’d felt there was no place for anyone connected with Glenn and Don in the new career he’d carved for himself.
 
“Have you seen Glenn?” I asked, somewhat nervously.
 
“Yeah, I just bumped into him in the hallway,” Bernie beamed. “He was fine.”
 
“And Don?”
 
“Yup, him too. But it was getting a little crowded out there, which is why I ducked in here.” There wasn’t a hint of animosity or resentment in his voice.
 
“How you doin’, man?” I asked, slapping him affectionately on the thigh as he took a seat opposite me.
 
“Great,” he said, and I could tell from the sparkle in his eyes that he wasn’t lying.
 
“I’m really pleased, Bernie,” I said, genuinely.
 
Looking across at him, I was suddenly filled with envy. Bernie had escaped the treadmill the Eagles had become. He had stood up for what he believed in and walked away from all the crap to do what he wanted. With Run C&W he’d injected some of his unique humor into the country music scene and was clearly never going to take the industry too seriously again. If there was one thing I’d learned from Bernie—and there was so much—it was that his kind of music originates in a very selfless place. There are no egos in bluegrass, which comes from Sunday revivals down by the river and a shared sense of fun and community spirit.
 
His final few months with the band had been an agony of recrimination and hostility, but his contribution had been enormous and his humor desperately needed. Still, until I saw him again, sitting across from me, forgiveness and love in his eyes, I hadn’t realized quite how much I’d missed it. Wishing we had more time before we went onstage, I’d have given anything just to sit and jam with him, like the old days. Worse, I suddenly felt anxious about how he’d perceive my performance that night. Bernie was one of the most gifted musicians I’d ever met and when he left, I took over his pedal steel and mandolin and B-string bender guitar parts, which he’d never heard me play.
 
I needn’t have worried. Bernie had come along not to judge, but to enjoy. All he wanted was to see a bunch of old friends, hear the show, and reminisce, rekindling his own fond memories of his years with the Eagles. I thought I’d learned all I could from the streak of brilliance that was Bernie Leadon. But that night, he proved he had still more to teach me.
 
 
 
 
The final leg of the
Hell Freezes Over
tour
beckoned that fall, and I prepared to leave again for Europe with a slightly lighter heart. Something had changed, and I think it had as much to do with my own acceptance of the situation I found myself in as with a changing attitude in “The Gods,” each of whom had happier things to think about.
 
In May of 1995, immediately after the winter tour ended, Don had married his girlfriend, a Dallas model named Sharon. His bachelor life finally behind him, he splashed out on a lavish wedding reception at a ranch in Malibu, at which Bruce Springsteen, Tony Bennett, Sting, and Billy Joel sang. Susan and I were invited, along with the rest of the band and people like Sheryl Crow, Jackson Browne (whom Susan had always wanted to thank for stepping in for me when Jesse was born), and even David Crosby, to whom I said a cordial hello. Emeril Lagasse, the television chef, was flown in from New Orleans to provide the catering. The media helicopters flying overhead trying to film the celebrities were kept at bay by helium weather balloons floated up to block their view.
 
Don built his new wife a mansion in Dallas. He finally resolved his ongoing legal dispute with Geffen Records, which released a greatest hits album of his work that year. Even though it failed to make much of a mark in the charts, Don negotiated a deal with Warner Brothers for another solo album.
 
Now that Don was married, he seemed to be a happier man—Glenn, too. After his divorce, Glenn had married a dancer named Cindy, whom he met in one of his fitness videos. Both men were discovering for the first time the comfort and security that marriage can provide, something I’d known for years. We all knew that the tour was moving into its final phase and that the feuding would soon be at an end. I’d been forced to accept the deal offered to me, but I was also grateful for the blessing of being allowed to make as much money as I had. Individually, our lives were taking separate paths. Each of us was discovering a new level of maturity.
 
That October, Susan and I were in Santa Monica, on our way home from another session with our couples therapist. We were getting along pretty well, and our trials with Cody seemed to be almost over. (I should have had more faith in my youngest son. Like me, he grew out of his rebelliousness and began to lead a full and relatively normal life.) The issue of my infidelities from fourteen years ago and beyond had been faced and wrestled to the mat, and now we were just struggling with the fact that we’d been together for twenty-four years and had lost a great deal of the fire.
 
Driving back from the therapist, we were talking about how I was going to cope with going back on the road, dealing with the band and the whole business of sexual temptation again. “I’m proud of you, Don,” Susan told me, “I know how hard you’ve tried.”
 
Pulling up at an intersection, we were stopped by a speeding blue-light cavalcade of vehicles, complete with police escort. The convoy of limousines and motorcyle outriders was being chased by media vehicles and helicopters swooping low overhead. Switching on the radio, we heard the news that O.J. Simpson had just been acquitted of murder after his extraordinary nine-month trial. For all that time, I’d been following the case from hotel rooms around America, as I struggled with the vicissitudes of the tour and with my own personal demons. Now, flashing past me, a few feet away, O.J. sat, a free man, in the back of his limo. The coincidence seemed uncanny.
 
Back on the road, the tour rolled on like some vast moneymaking machine that none of us could stop even if we’d wanted to. It had become a monster that needed to be fed. It was big business for everyone. Audio recordings of some of our live shows—“made for posterity,” secured in a vault—would appear for sale a week to ten days later as bootleg CDs, for which the band didn’t receive a penny. We couldn’t really complain. We were making more than any of us had ever made before, and I tried to keep sight of the fact that I was being paid very well to do what I loved, play music.
 
At least this time I was seeing the countries we were visiting through clear eyes, unaffected by too many drugs or crazy nights. Japan, always one of my favorite places to visit, had never looked more beautiful, and the sushi never tasted so good. Christchurch, New Zealand, had never been wetter. It was a mudfest, just like Woodstock. I have never seen so many people standing out in torrential rain, soaked right through to their undershorts, having a good time, while we onstage were just concentrating on not getting electrocuted as the rain came slanting down.
 
I knew how lucky I was to be travelling in such exalted luxury, surrounded by such good friends as Joe, Timothy, and the crew. Gigs like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, where we played to ninety thousand people, the biggest gig we’d ever played in L.A., provided some golden memories. It was a cold night and we had heaters on the stage, but we played one of our best shows of that entire tour. We’d matured in terms of our playing and our singing, and every note was perfect. It was like some of the best gigs we’d played when we were at our musical peak in the seventies.
 
The night was clear with stars twinkling in the sky above us, and when each song stopped, you could still hear it and the noise of the crowd echoing through the canyons beyond the stadium. Everyone who was anyone in L.A. was there—musicians, rock stars, and management staff. There were celebrities like Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson, and Sheryl Crow standing on the side of the stage alongside Susan, Jesse and his girlfriend, and the rest of my kids. It was a Who’s Who event, with a huge circus tent set up backstage for hospitality.
 
The last gig the Eagles played together on
Hell Freezes Over
was in Edinburgh, Scotland in August 1996. We’d been around the States twice, as well as to Canada, Japan, Australia, and Europe. None of us really knew if this was going to be the final gig, or whether we’d get another call from Irving in a few months, but Glenn had privately decided that he wouldn’t be doing any more. His attitude toward me that night was different from any other time since the seventies. I think he was genuinely happy to have made it through to the end of the tour with us all in one piece. Despite the undercurrents of unhappiness and the old frictions resurfacing, everything had stayed fairly contained. We’d gone out, we’d played music, we’d made a bunch of money, and—most important of all—we’d gotten through it without killing each other.
 
When the concert ended, at the end of a beautifully warm Scottish night, Glenn and Don actually went around the whole band and hugged everyone.
 
“Good job,” Glenn told me, slapping me on the back. “We made it, buddy.”
 
“Yeah,” I said, somewhat dazed and confused. “Yeah, I guess we did.”
 
 
 
 
Family life occupied me
once we’d come off the road. Jesse finally decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Erin, his girlfriend of many years, which was the smartest move he ever made. Their wedding took place in 1997, and within a year, they’d provided us with an unexpected delight—our first grandchild, Kurt. I had suddenly gone from being a rock-and-roll star to being a grandpa. Strangely, I didn’t mind one little bit. Jesse had become a successful financial advisor, his early passion for the computer games
Lemonade Stand
and
Millionaire
serving him well.
 
Sadly, while Jesse’s marriage took its first tentative steps, mine was faltering badly. After more than two years on the road, the differences between Susan and me had grown. By the time I returned from that grueling tour, my conviction to Susan stronger than ever, the house and my marriage were empty.
 
With no one home most days but me, I found myself rattling around this large decadent property, wife and kids absent. I began falling back into my bachelor routines of fishing, boating, flying, and dabbling in real estate. My children were in their adolescence or early twenties, with all the highs and lows that can bring. Mostly, they were away or out with their friends, and the only time they wanted me was to give them some money or to pick them up from somewhere.
 
I bought myself a sixty-eight-foot offshore boat I called
Wings,
took the necessary advanced navigation exams, and did several seasons of marlin fishing down in Cabo San Lucas, Baja, Mexico, with my old fishing buddies or friends, like Joe Walsh, accompanied as ever by his bodyguard, Smokey.
 
Jesse and Cody would come with me sometimes, and I was never happier than on the flybridge of that beautiful vessel, a cigar firmly planted between my lips, a glass of champagne in my hand, and my two sons beside me. It was a far cry from the little powerboat I used to mess around with up at Lake Alice when I was their age. I knew how fortunate I was to give my children these extraordinary memories and experiences. Life should have been truly sweet.
 
There was, however, a new distance between Susan and me that had never existed before. I blamed myself for being away so long this last time, and for not paying her enough attention. In my absence, she’d become a workaholic and was as addicted to her jewelry business as Joe had ever been to Jack Daniel’s. If I ever persuaded her to take some time out and come with me to Catalina on the boat, she’d bring along her black day planner, full of her accounting, business schedules, and appointments (although never one for me, I noted with dismay), and these huge bags of gems and gold. Instead of hanging out with me, making love and hiking like we used to, she’d sit in Catalina and make jewelry like a woman obsessed. We were like two friends on vacation, one of them working.

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