Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (51 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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My attorney,
Barry Tyerman, had penciled a date on his calendar to check back with Irving on the progress of the box-set deal. The date finally arrived in early February, and Barry duly fired off a gentle letter, asking for copies of certain agreements with the record label. A response came back that they were not signed.
 
Two days later, I went out with Kathrin for the evening to see a play about the Notre Dame football team, at the Ahmanson Theatre, with our friend Gordon Davidson, the theater director. We rode back with Gordon in the car afterward, laughing about how awful the play was.
 
“It was so bad, it was funny,” I joked. Gordon dropped us home, and we walked into the house arm in arm, still laughing about our evening.
 
It was eleven thirty when I clicked on the answering machine. There was just one message. It was from Irving, left three hours earlier.
 
“Fingers, call me at home, here’s my number, I gotta talk to you.” The very fact that he’d called me at all was highly unusual, and there was a tone to his voice I didn’t like the sound of.
 
Sitting on the edge of the bed while Kathrin made some coffee, I dialed his number immediately, even though it was late.
 
“Irv, it’s Don Felder,” I said, wondering what was so urgent that he’d give me his home number.
 
“Hi, Fingers,” he said, with a sigh. “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid. The guys have had a meeting, and they’ve decided to go on without you.”
 
My entire body ran cold as his words lingered in the air, their resonance hitting me in waves. “W-w-what?” I stammered, my mind tripping and tumbling.
 
“It’s nothing to do with your playing, it’s nothing to do with you, they just think it’s in the best interests of the band if they let you go.”
 
“Oh, my God, Irving,” I said, blood rushing to my head. “They can’t do this. What do they mean? Why are they doing this? What . . . ?” But the words died on my lips. Tears spurted from my eyes, and I started trembling all over. I felt as if I’d been hit by a truck.
 
Irving told me to calm down and try to get some sleep, but of course I couldn’t. I sat up most of the night with Kathrin, writhing with anxiety. At seven o’clock in the morning, I called Irving back, hoping to catch him before he went to work, but I couldn’t get hold of him until about three.
 
“Yup,” he told me. “I’ve spoken to them, and they’re determined to go ahead with this. They’re gonna send a letter over to your attorney this afternoon, confirming that you’re fired.”
 
I listened in disbelief, still unable to take in what I was hearing. “I just don’t understand,” I said. “I thought we were meant to be in this together. Forever.”
 
“I know, I know,” Irving sighed. “But it just didn’t work out that way.”
 
“Irving,” I said breathlessly, “I’ll do anything, I don’t care. Tell them there’s been a misunderstanding. I signed their agreements and it’s cool. I don’t want to be out of the band.”
 
Kathrin sat with me for the next two hours, while I sat by the phone, anxiously waiting for word.
 
Irving eventually rang back. “Sorry, Fingers,” he said. “You’re still fired.”
 
“Give me Don’s phone number. I wanna speak to Don in person,” I told Irving. The numbers I had for him were obsolete. My distress and fear had turned to anger. “I’m fed up with speaking through you. I want to speak to ‘The Gods.’
 
He didn’t give me Don’s number. In sheer frustration, I dialed all the numbers I had for Don and left messages with his secretary and his business manager, but he never returned my calls.
 
In a last exasperated act, I called Glenn’s studio, and to my astonishment, he came to the phone. Overwhelmed at hearing his voice, I begged him not to get rid of me. “I’ll do anything you say, Roach,” I told him. “But don’t cut me off like this. The Eagles is all I know.”
 
“I never want to get another fucking letter from Barry Tyerman,” he said, gruffly. Hearing the obvious emotion in my voice, he added witheringly, “Try to reach some higher ground on this, Felder.” The phone line went dead.
 
 
 
 
My legs dropped away from under me,
and I slumped to the floor. Kathrin helped me into a chair and did all she could to calm me down. The combined emotions of the last year, of all the years of angst I’d gone through with the band, hit me in the chest like a mallet. I couldn’t breathe properly and I couldn’t speak. I felt physically sick. When I had sufficiently composed myself, the first person I called was Joe.
 
“What the hell’s going on, Joe?” I asked, still distraught.
 
His attitude was decidedly cool. “Well, I dunno, Fingers,” he said lamely, from his home in San Diego. “As far as I can see, those guys have decided that they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. There ain’t much I can do about it.”
 
I’d never been more in need of my old buddy Joe, but he wasn’t there for me anymore. There was no compassion in his voice. There was no offer to “come up and have a beer and we can talk about it.” His response was shattering. Joe had always been my friend. We’d spent the most time together of all the band members over the years, hanging out in his room, taking drugs, drinking too much, sawing up hotel rooms, playing on his ham radio. I’d driven him to rehab, for Christ’s sake. I’d taken care of his daughter on the road. Now, when push came to shove, he was going with the rest of the band and the money. He wasn’t even going to try to fight for me. I felt betrayed.
 
“Well, thanks, Joe,” I told him, angrily. “Right now I feel like blowing my own brains out. If I ever take this nine-millimeter gun out of my mouth, I’ll be sure to call ya.”
 
We’ve not spoken since.
 
The last conversation I had with any of the Eagles was with Tim, whom I’d also considered a good friend for many years. To my utter dismay, his response was similar to Joe’s.
 
“What’s going on, Fingers?” he said, his tone irritable, when his wife, Jean, handed him the phone. “All I know is they sent me some papers, they looked good, and I told my attorney that I’d sign. Why couldn’t you just sign the papers like everyone else so we can get on with this? You keep harking back to some deal you made in the seventies, which is history. I don’t know why you think you’re entitled to more.”
 
“You don’t understand,” I told him. “I’m not doing this just for me, you know. I’m doing it for you and Joe and Randy, and Bernie, too. My Lord, don’t you realize? If Irving was representing us against Don and Glenn, he’d never let us anywhere near these contracts.”
 
Timothy sighed. “You should have just signed the damn papers and sent them back,” he said, before hanging up.
 
My next call was to Susan. After all the years she’d endured of me being an Eagle, I felt she had a right to know. She listened in silence as I told her what had happened and then said something unexpected.
 
“You know, Don,” she told me, “this is probably the best thing that could have happened to you. You’ve been in that unhealthy, abusive environment for far too long. It’s affected your health, and it’s indirectly caused the death of our marriage. I’m glad you’re out of the whole nightmare. You’re a free man. Use that freedom wisely.”
 
My respect and admiration for the mother of my children and the woman I had shared my life with grew enormously. To her eternal credit, her support and sympathy was unequivocal, despite all I’d done to break her heart. I was hurting far too much at the time to realize just how true her words were, but I came to understand afterward that she was right.
 
The official termination notice sent to my lawyers stated that “the company’s board of directors decided that the needs and goals of the company were better served on an ongoing basis” without me. They added that it was “in the best interests of the company” to “terminate” my employment. But there was something else. They wanted my shares in Eagles Ltd. They even sent my business manager a check to buy them back. They had another think coming. On my instruction, he sent it right back.
 
TWENTY
 
I dreaded reading the official announcement
of my departure from the band in black and white. When I did, in a small newspaper article two weeks later, it was as if someone had taken a baseball bat and hit me in the solar plexus. Up until that moment, my attorney had still been trying to negotiate on my behalf, and I’d held a small, flickering candle of hope that it was all some terrible mistake and that I’d still be able to reach out to Don and Glenn in some way. When I saw the announcement in print, it stuck to the flypaper of my brain. I knew then that hell would never freeze over again.
 
For months afterward, I was left gasping for breath. I walked around in a daze, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do with my life. My foundations had been shaken, not just with the breakdown of my marriage, but the end of my career. Everything I’d known was gone. For twenty-nine years of my life, I’d been married and for twenty-seven years of my life, I’d been an Eagle. I didn’t know anything else. Being an Eagle was my identity. To lose it felt like a bereavement, and I went into mourning for well over a year. I worried that I might collapse under the weight of my grief. Now I knew how Susan felt, I realized with humility, to have had the world ripped out from under her. I suddenly missed everything about being in the band: the hours in the studio, the times on the road, the gigs, the friendships, and the fun. My mind rewound and replayed my times with them, quickly fast-forwarding over all the bad stuff and the long months of hell. If I pressed pause and allowed myself a tiny glimpse, I convinced myself that even those times would be better than this sense of utter desolation and emptiness.
 
Kathrin was an absolute godsend. I’d wake in the early hours with a panic attack, and she’d comfort me. I’d sit with a cup of coffee, staring into the fireplace late into the night, wallowing in self-pity. Sometimes she’d just sit with me, her hand in mine, soaking up the silence and allowing me to cry. I felt like I was dying inside. There wasn’t a single hour of my day when I didn’t mourn my loss.
 
“How could they treat me so badly after all we’ve been through together?” I’d ask her, my throat closing around my vocal cords. “Don’t I deserve better than this?” I felt helpless in the face of their cruelty, their actions cutting through me like a knife.
 
It took months and months, but very slowly, Kathrin taught me how to accept what had happened and reinvent myself completely. She made me put the whole event into perspective, to see that I was still extraordinarily lucky and to realize that I had to decide what I was going to do and how to rebuild my life.
 
With her help, I tried to concentrate on the positives. “Count your blessings,” as my mother would say, whenever I’d complain as a child about not being able to afford a new bike or a new pair of shoes. I came to see that although being an Eagle hadn’t been the easiest of roads, it had enabled me to have innumerable moments of pure exhilaration and unadulterated joy. I’d started as the new kid in town, with long blond hair, a beard and mustache, in a brown leather jacket, driving a battered old Volvo, looking for some session work. Thanks to Bernie’s generous introductions, I was a guitar player who got lucky and wound up in a band that, for thirty years, remained in the fast lane of rock’s superhighway. After years of the kind of life most guitar players would give their favorite Les Paul for, I had weathered the most savage of storms and come through unscathed—well, maybe a little battered and graying at the edges—but I’d somehow survived to tell the tale.
 
Whatever else I’d achieved, I know I helped make some great music, arguably some of the most enduring of the twentieth century. It was widely agreed that my guitar playing had been a cornerstone of the Eagles’ success. My defining moments had been standing on the stage in the spotlight playing the first few chords of the best song I ever wrote. Between us, we’d made the music that a whole generation had grown up with. They’d laughed and loved and lived and cried to our songs. Some of our older listeners might not be able to remember what they did yesterday, but they can still remember every word of “Hotel California.” We still have an estimated 100 million fans worldwide.
 
But, my Lord, I paid my dues for the privilege. I spent years on the road away from my family, missing my wife and kids; I suffered stress-related health problems and spent sleepless, drug-fed nights wondering if it was all worth it. I endured untold emotional abuse from people who should have been my best friends. We’d been through so much. We’d laughed and loved and lived and cried to the same songs as our audience, but the bottom line is, we never really got along. I realize that now. From the first day I walked into the Record Plant studio, that band was breaking up. Everyone was at each other’s throat, emotionally and artistically. We just never clicked the way some bands did. A self-destruct mechanism was constantly ticking away. Beneath a rigid code of silence that hid our fractured, contentious side from the public and allowed our mythical peaceful, easy image to continue, our dream of stardom and togetherness slowly morphed into a Hotel California-style nightmare. Terrified of speaking out in case I made things worse, my years of acquiescence meant that I could check out but I could never leave.

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