Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (49 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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I faced the Millennium concert rehearsals just after Thanksgiving with a heavy heart. They would, in some ways, be a welcome distraction. When I arrived at Culver Studios, I quickly gathered that there was much that had to be redone and relearned. Hours were spent in discussion with the lighting designer and the monitor crew, and for some time, we were unable to concentrate on the music at all. For us old-time rockers, the move into the twenty-first century, with its high-tech wizardry, was not always easy.
 
As well as worrying about the technical side of the gigs, we were running back and forth between the studio and the rehearsal hall near Pico and Sepulveda. When we did try to make music, none of us seemed to be playing very well, and there was even more friction than usual between Don and Glenn, who’d completely abandoned any ideas of writing together. Part of the problem was, I think, that they simply ran out of words. With more than fifty Eagles songs under their belts between them, not to mention their individual solo efforts, their vocabulary, like their patience, was running thin. Their broad-sweeping panorama had always been Los Angeles, and there were only so many ways you could describe the people and the desert and the paradoxes of this extraordinary city before drying up.
 
 
 
 
On December 7 , 1999,
a couple of weeks before the gigs, Irving set up a press conference in the rehearsal hall so that we could receive official plaques commemorating record sales for
Greatest Hits, 1971
-
1975
, the album the record company had released almost as a stalling tactic while we finished
Hotel California.
 
“You’ll just have to stop rehearsing for a few minutes, come out, say hello, play a song and then you can get right back to work,” he told us confidently.
 
We were right up against the wire, time-wise, and could have done without the interruption, but we did as we were told and conducted a quick sound check before the press conference. The five of us wandered out into the rehearsal hall with cups of coffee and our instruments and sat on five stools in a row, playing a few verses of “Tequila Sunrise” to a half-empty room while some stagehands set up chairs in readiness.
 
A few hours later, when we walked back out onto that stage, we were faced with a barrage of flashbulbs and a flurry of activity. There were many television cameras, about forty still photographers, and maybe fifty international press reporters, their notepads in hand. The numbers of chairs put out was woefully inadequate. There was a live broadcast on CNN’s
Showbiz Today
with Jim Moret, and we were also live on the Web. It was the largest press conference we’d ever faced. I think we all realized then how important this award was. It wasn’t just Irving blowing smoke up our ass.
 
Hilary Rosen, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, had flown in from Washington to present us with the plaque and to declare
Greatest Hits
the biggest-selling album of the twentieth century, with 26 million units sold. It even outsold Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
, which was close behind us and which many considered to be the album of the epoch.
 
Don told the assembled media that as he couldn’t remember much about the seventies, it was nice to have the plaque to remind him what he’d been up to. He added, “I think the real award is that we’re all alive and well when so many of our colleagues aren’t.” We all echoed that.
 
In answer to a question about the effect the Eagles had on people’s lives, Glenn replied, “The music you play is the soundtrack of your life. It’s your life movie. . . . In the seventies, people did things to the Eagles. They broke up with their girlfriend. They broke up with their boyfriend. They got in a car and drove across America. They went on a fandango. We seemed to be the soundtrack . . . people like having our music in the background of their movie.”
 
I told the reporters, “This is beyond my wildest imagination. It’s an amazing award and one none of us really expected. It is a testament to the songwriting of these two guys right here. Those songs stood the test of time.”
 
Asked about ongoing friction between band members, Glenn replied, with one-hundred-percent honesty, “We’re putting up a front for you, you know. We’re on TV.” When the laughter died away, he added, “I think any worthwhile relationship has its peaks and valleys. This band’s had some valleys, but we’re probably in pretty good shape right now.”
 
Of the Millennium gigs, he added, “I think the nostalgia and the feelings that are associated with a band like the Eagles are going to be amplified to a degree that we’ve never experienced. To stand in southern California on New Year’s Eve and play all these songs, which are so much about California, so many of them written in California, where we lived, I think I’m looking forward to a pretty emotional evening myself. I’m going to cry.”
 
Hilary Rosen assured me privately that Bernie and Randy would each be given a copy of the plaque. In my opinion they should have been there to receive it in person. They were as much responsible for that album as Don, Glenn, or me, and certainly more than Joe or Tim, who were not even on any of the tracks on this album, but “The Gods” would never have allowed it. When we’d received our award and posed for photographs, we picked up our guitars and sat on the stools we’d practiced on earlier and played “Tequila Sunrise.” As always, it was a brilliantly convincing performance of unity.
 
I have to say, that award really blew me away. Don described it, very aptly, as musical Viagra. I’d been completely oblivious to how well that album had actually done. I knew it had sold consistently over the years but didn’t realize exactly how well until that moment. Never in my wildest childhood dreams did I expect to surpass my idols Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and His Comets, or B.B. King in record sales. I thought of the time I’d jammed down in Colored Town or stood in that barn watching B.B. play, and I had to pinch myself to believe what we’d achieved.
 
It seemed amazing to me, at the age of fifty-two, that I could have made my living doing what I’d always wanted to do ever since I swapped my cherry bombs for my first guitar. My marriage had all but survived the rigors of years on the road, even if it was in its death throes now, and I had four fantastic kids, a grandson, and a beautiful home. Whichever way I looked at it, I was rich beyond the dreams of Gainesville and would never have to work again. I think even my father might have been proud.
 
The Millennium concerts—dubbed by fans the Eaglennium—went ahead, despite a serious dose of the flu that left me barely able to stand. It began a few days before the first show and lasted all the way into January. I was so sick. I had a high fever, was clogged with mucus, and couldn’t speak without coughing up fluid from my lungs. There was never any suggestion of canceling. We had a multimillion-dollar performance bond, and New Year’s Eve, 1999, was not a gig you could cancel and just reschedule. I knew I had to go on, no matter what.
 
Jackson Browne opened for us with his usual professional set, featuring his classics such as “Doctor My Eyes,” “The Pretender,” and “Running on Empty.” My old rival David Lindley played with him, and David Crosby joined him onstage for the song “For Everyman.”
 
Then it was our turn. Standing in front of the top half of a giant clock face with Roman numerals, beneath huge stained-glass chandeliers, flanked by a scarlet curtain, we opened with “Hotel California,” which the fired-up audience of twelve thousand of our most dedicated fans was well programmed to receive, then continued with the usual playlist: “Victim of Love,” “New Kid in Town,” and “Wasted Time.”
 
I could hardly stay upright on stage and couldn’t see beyond the lights because of my flu delirium. The music we were playing seemed to roar like the sea in my ears. I’d had four different doctors give me different prescriptions. I was dosed up to the eyeballs with injections and pills. Susan and the kids were there to give me support as I lay down on the floor of my dressing room, shivering, between sets. Thankfully, there was a twenty-minute intermission, during which a film, coproduced by Glenn, was shown on giant video screens. It was a montage of music and images of the century, run with a score Glenn wrote with songwriter Jay Oliver, and a series of spoof interviews, with each of us claiming the credit for naming the band and writing “Hotel California,” in a misjudged attempt to make us look like humorous best buddies. After the intermission, I staggered back out onto the stage. I tried to keep my voice from breaking during a rendition of “Seven Bridges Road,” and then I tried to rock. I was having a really hard time under the hot lights and never received a flicker of sympathy from “The Gods.”
 
In my view, our performances on those interminable three nights weren’t great, especially bearing in mind how much people had paid to hear us play. Glenn sang Randy’s “Take It to the Limit,” but without his uniquely soulful voice, it simply didn’t work. Thankfully, the crowd sang along to almost every song, bolstering us through our weakest moments. Our only really good number was a new rhythm-and-blues version of “The Best of My Love,” which sizzled. For that song, we were on fire.
 
To appease those who wanted to hear new or different material, we included some seldom-heard numbers like Tom Waits’ “Ol’ 55,” “Those Shoes,” and “Please Come Home for Christmas,” saving “Funky New Year” for the fireworks-spitting encore, snippets of which were broadcast live on CNN shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve as the chosen celebration for the West Coast of America. Bang in the middle of “Funky New Year,” Don for some reason sang a “Millennium Rap,” trying to sound like some New York rap artist and failing badly. “We got back together, we broke up,” he said, clicking his fingers in time. “We got back together, we broke up, we broke up, we got back together.” Nobody, least of all us, found it terribly amusing, except him.
 
As the clock struck midnight and Joe played “Auld Lang Syne,” I slumped over my guitar with relief. The ordeal was over. I searched for Susan at the side of the stage to give her a kiss, but she was nowhere to be found.
 
 
 
 
Back home after New Year’s Eve, I
gradually recovered from the flu and gained my physical and mental strength for what I knew was to come. Susan and I were communicating largely through notes left on the kitchen work surface. I felt starved of affection and horribly lonely in my own home. Finally, one day in late January, I took off to Palm Springs to escape what had become an untenable situation. I’d tried to reach her during the day but eventually left her a note, which said, “Gone to the Palm Springs Film Festival and to play golf.”
 
When she called me at my hotel later that night and asked me why I had just taken off, I blurted out all that I was feeling about my marriage.
 
“It’s over, Susan,” I told her, the words sticking in my throat. “I know this probably isn’t the kindest way to tell you, but I’m afraid that’s the truth. We’re not in love anymore. I’m so sorry.”
 
I know I didn’t handle it very well and that I should have had the courage to break it to her personally, but I was just so tired of waiting for her to find a window in her busy schedule so I could tell her we were through.
 
I honestly thought she would have seen this coming, but her response was far from expected. She was absolutely devastated and refused to communicate with me, dealing only with our family therapist. In an atmosphere of bitter recrimination, I moved out onto my boat, and within a week I was served with divorce papers. The kids were shattered. One by one, they came by the boat, and we held each other and cried together.
 
“I will always love your mother. I just can’t live with her anymore,” I told them. If I could have taken away any of the hurt, I would have, but it was too late. The sense of cold isolation I felt left me unable to sleep or eat. I felt as if a piece of my heart had been cut out. Thus began a long, sustained period of darkness that crept over every aspect of my life and plunged me to new depths of despair.
 
Never once did Glenn or Don call me up and offer any support or sympathy over the breakdown of my twenty-nine-year marriage. Not once did they phone to ask, “Hey, man, are you OK?” Glenn had been divorced; he knew what it was like. Joe, Timothy, even Irving called up. Many other people, including some I least expected, offered their support. When you’re going through such a shitty time, you come to realize that the ones who step up are your real friends. The rest no longer count.
 
 
 
 
Work became a welcome distraction.
“Let’s go into the studio and finish the record from the Millennium gig,” Irving told us.
 
“But we don’t even have a record deal yet,” I pointed out.
 
“Don’t worry,” he assured me, that smile of his ever more unnerving. “The negotiations are well underway. Just go in and do this on a ‘good faith’ basis, and we’ll fine-tune the details later.”
 
The venue was preset: Glenn’s Dog House, and Elliot Scheiner as the producer, no questions asked. The recording needed a great deal of post-production work, all of which was done with each member separately and Glenn as an invisible producer, so that he never actually had to work directly with any of the other band members. He’d spent the five months since the gigs deciding which recording of which song to choose from which night. Once he’d made his selection and completed his own vocal and guitar parts, he set dates for each of us to go in separately and fix our own parts.

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