by Don Felder
High on adrenaline and music, I wandered backstage. There was so much we had to catch up on. I wondered if he’d remember our mad night in Palatka, drinking Jack Daniel’s and bouncing on the bed, or whether he was still in touch with Jeff, the drummer from the Continentals.
A gorilla in a security jacket stopped me in my tracks. “What do you want?” he growled.
“Oh, I need to speak with Stephen Stills.”
“Why?”
“I’m an old friend of his.” I grinned.
He looked highly skeptical.
“We were in a band together in Florida.” Still no sign of movement. “Listen, just go tell him Don Felder would like to see him, OK?”
After much persuasion, the guard did as I asked. I stood waiting by the door along with a few other hopefuls, confident that at any minute my messenger would return with an apology and a backstage pass.
Finally, he came shuffling back to his post, his face as blank as it had been before. He didn’t say a word.
“Well?” I asked, impatient now.
“Well nothing,” the ape said. “Mr. Stills is too busy to see you right now.”
I sank to an all-time low over the next few months and began to wonder if my father was right. I was married, nearly twenty-five, and if I hadn’t made it by now, I probably never would. Maybe there was no future for me in music, and maybe I should have gone to college as Dad had always wanted. At least I’d have had something to fall back on. Then a friend of mine I’d met in New York, a great electric bass player, called me up one day.
“Hey, Don, I’m in Boston,” he told me on the telephone. “I’m opening for Delaney & Bonnie, you know, that husband-and-wife band who worked with Clapton and George Harrison. Why not come and hear us? We’re playing at the college campus.”
I was impressed. Delaney Bramlett and his wife, Bonnie, had been linked with some pretty legendary names in the music business, and although they hadn’t done so well since Clapton left the fold, I was still interested to hear their unique mix of vocals, brass, and percussion. At my friend’s request, I arrived a little early and went backstage to jam with him first. I found him sitting with the bass player from the band, who was softly strumming to himself on an old Gibson. At the same time, I spotted an electric guitar leaning up against a wall.
“Mind if I join in?” I asked.
“Not at all.”
I was so used to sitting and jamming with musicians in the studios, I thought nothing of picking that guitar up and starting to play with this man I’d never met before. I was fearless like that; there was really nothing anyone could throw at me that I couldn’t deal with. I figured I had nothing to lose, other than someone grabbing me by the seat of the pants and throwing me out the door.
The bass player could play very well, and we had a good time. One by one, the other band members drifted into the dressing room, drawn by the music. After a while, somebody lit a joint, someone else opened a few beers, and we kept on having fun.
“Hey,” Delaney finally said when we came to a natural conclusion and everyone broke into spontaneous applause, “why don’t you come out and sit in with us onstage tonight?”
“What?” I said, amazed.
“Yeah, come on, it’ll be fun,” his wife added. She was a pretty pixie of a woman with short blonde hair.
“Oh, OK. I mean, sure,” I said, smiling and shrugging my shoulders. Later that night I was introduced as Delaney & Bonnie’s “new discovery” and brought out to play blues with them. It was a great gig, really spontaneous and fun, like the best days of Flow, and it did a lot to lift my spirits. Music was what I was good at, I reminded myself. From my earliest days playing Chet Atkins in my bedroom, I’d never been happier than when I was playing my guitar, and it was never better than this. After the show, the band surprised me by inviting me to go on the road with them.
“When?” I asked, suddenly excited by the prospect. If touring with them for a couple of weeks was half as enjoyable as that gig, then I couldn’t see why not. I was sure Susan wouldn’t mind my being gone for a while, and I could probably get some time off from the studios.
“Tomorrow morning,” they replied brightly. “We’re leaving on the bus at four A.M. for a three-month nationwide tour.”
My heart sank. I knew I couldn’t leave on such short notice, and three months was much longer than I could bear to be apart from Susan.
“Sorry, guys,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “I’m married. I have responsibilities. I just can’t do it.”
Clearly dismayed, they told me they understood, and for the second time in my life, I watched a great opportunity slip through my guitar-playing fingers.
SEVEN
Bernie and I kept in touch as our lives and careers followed very different paths. By 1971, he’d split from the Burritos and was working with a series of bands, including one gig he did with Linda Ronstadt. He liked Linda and her producer John Boylan, and he was glad for the work. For this one gig, at Disneyland in Anaheim, his fellow musicians were three young men he’d met at various locations including the Troubadour in L.A. Bernie had the best track record of them all, after his experiences with the Scotsville Squirrel Barkers and the Burritos; the others were relative unknowns—Randy Meisner, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey—Henley and Frey being the driving force and the ones who were later to recognize what a rare combination of talent their group had.
Randy Meisner, known to all as “Meis,” was a shy young singer and bass player from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, the son of sharecroppers. He’d married his childhood sweetheart at fifteen and had a son. In 1963, he kissed them good-bye and moved to L.A. with a band called the Soul Survivors, later renamed the Poor, because that is what they became. Randy joined up with Richie Furay and Jim Messina of the recently disbanded Buffalo Springfield and formed Poco. Randy passed the audition that a young bassist called Timothy B. Schmit failed, but Schmit later replaced Randy when he quit Poco over musical differences.
Randy then joined his musical hero Ricky Nelson in the Stone Canyon Band and did some session work on James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James album, before getting homesick and giving up music altogether to work at the John Deere tractor plant so he could be with his wife and family. In 1971, Rick Nelson invited him back to L.A., and he decided to give his career one last try.
Don Henley moved to L.A. from Texas with his band Shiloh, bankrolled by country singer Kenny Rogers. After a false start with Amos Records, the band broke up. The fuzzy-haired Henley, with his sandpaper voice, soon became part of the furniture at the Troubadour, a former folk club on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Doheny in Hollywood. It was a magnet for rock musicians, folksingers, and songwriters, where the likes of Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt would regularly hold court in the corner and plot their dreams.
Glenn Frey, a natural R&B guitarist and singer, whose idol was Bob Seger, had moved to L.A. from Detroit and teamed up with a talented musician and songwriter named John David (J.D.) Souther. They wrote songs together and in 1969 formed the duo Longbranch Pennywhistle. Their first album, put out on Amos Records, flopped. They shared an apartment complex with singer/songwriter Jackson Browne for a while, and by 1970, Frey decided he wanted a solo career. A huge Elvis fan, he dubbed himself the Teen King. David Geffen, an up-and-coming promoter and future record company executive with people like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, urged him to stick with a group.
Recalling the Anaheim gig with Ronstadt and hoping to recapture the magic of that night, Frey and Henley approached Meisner and Bernie Leadon about forming their own group. The move was, one of them once said, born of a mix of “desperation, fear, and insecurity.” They realized they played well together, but they only knew each other socially over a few beers and had no idea how they’d all get along. They signed up with David Geffen and his newly formed record label, Asylum, created as the antithesis of the cigar-smoking men in suits who’d previously run the record industry.
What they needed fi
rst and foremost was a name. The Doors, the Byrds, and the Beatles had all done well with something short and concise. Glenn Frey, the Detroit-born, would-be “James Dean” of the band, wanted something that sounded punchy, like a teen gang out of West Side Story. On a combination of peyote tea and tequila out in the Mojave Desert one night, Bernie recounted from a Carlos Castaneda book that the Hopi Indians revered the eagle above all other animals, because it flies closest to the sun and has a great moral spirit. The Eagles were born.
They may have barely known each other, but by the spring of 1972, just when I was at my lowest ebb in Boston, they were in England recording their debut album, Eagles, with Glyn Johns, the producer of classic works by the Rolling Stones, the Who, Traffic, Led Zeppelin, and Steve Miller. It was an uneasy relationship, made harder by Johns’ perfectionism, his antidrug stance, and several differences of opinion as to how much of a country flavor the music should have. Despite the early tensions, within a few months, their special mix of country and rock gave them a record in the Top 10.
That summer, they toured with an odd assortment of British bands, including Yes, Jethro Tull, and Procol Harum, and they dominated the Top 40 with three hit singles: “Take it Easy,” written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey, “Witchy Woman,” written by Bernie and Don Henley, and “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” by songwriter Jack Tempchin. Each number captured the laid-back, “anything is possible” culture of the time and found emotional resonance with every idealistic teenager who’d ever dreamt of a summer cruising chicks in a convertible. The Eagles’ chart rivals, like Harry Nilsson, Don McLean, and Roberta Flack, didn’t stand a chance.
I kept hearing “Take it Easy” on the car radio, in shops, diners, and gas stations, before anyone had ever really heard of the Eagles. Bernie’s distinctive banjo playing filled the background, and every time I heard it, I smiled, I felt so proud. On “Witchy Woman,” his eerie guitar chords sounded like something the Hopi Indians would have performed a ritual dance to. When the Eagles came to Boston in 1972, as an opening band for Yes, Bernie called me up.
“Hey, Don,” he said. “I’m coming to town next week, playing at Boston University for one night only with this new band. Why don’t you bring Susan over and come and meet the guys? We can have a bit of a jam. I’ll put your names on the guest list.”
“Sounds great,” I said, delighted to hear Bernie’s voice again and to know that my old buddy hadn’t forgotten me. “See you there.”
If Susan had any reservations about my going to see yet another old friend doing so much better than me, she didn’t say a word. We traveled to the university campus in our trusty Volvo, and sure enough, Bernie had pulled it off so that we walked straight in past the security guards.
“Hey, man, good to see you!” he beamed, that same old grin lighting up his whole face as he patted me warmly on the back at the dressing room door. He hardly looked a day older than when he had met me off the Greyhound bus nearly ten years earlier.
Turning to Susan, he embraced her. “Hey, Mrs. Felder! Congratulations. You finally snared him, then?” Susan kissed Bernie almost shyly, and they talked for a while about old times and whether either of them still heard from Bernie’s old flame, Judy Lee.
Stepping inside the dressing room the band shared, we came face to face with a bunch of young, fresh-looking guys, likeable, bright-eyed, with trademark long hair, jeans, football shirts, and cowboy boots. They were exactly like most of the musicians I hung out with every day in the studio.
“Hey, everyone,” Bernie announced, “I’d like you to meet Don Felder, the man with the lightest fingers I know on a Stratocaster.”
“Hey, Fingers,” said a square-jawed man I was introduced to as Glenn Frey. He shook me firmly by the hand and introduced me to curly-haired Don Henley, who seemed a little uptight (I put it down to preshow nerves), and Randy Meisner, who looked like a shy, baby-faced boy. There didn’t seem to be a clear leader, although I noticed that Glenn seemed the most confident and was the one who stepped up to make the introductions. They were just a young band, starting out, playing to crowds of one or two thousand, driving themselves around in rental cars between various indoor facilities like college campuses and small, old theaters.
They seemed to be having a lot of fun while they were doing it, too, from what Bernie had told me. All but Randy were single and were clearly enjoying the drink and the drugs and the girls that seemed to go with the territory. They played marathon poker games, knocked a basketball around on weekends, had pet nicknames for each other, and often socialized together. At the time, it felt to me, there was no special aura about them, no sense that they were going to do any better than any of the other bands we’d all tried our hand in. They were just a bunch of guys making music together. I felt completely at ease. As it turns out, later, they had three hits on their first album.
“Want to jam?” Bernie asked, passing me an electric guitar that was leaning against a table in the corner.
“Sure.” I grinned, sitting astride a packing case next to him while Susan settled down on a cushion on the floor.
Bernie opened with a piece of bluegrass he and I had played in Gainesville together a hundred times before, and I fell right in. It felt good to be playing with him again. Up until that moment, I don’t think I’d realized how much I’d missed his incredible musical gifts.
Pulling a worn bottleneck from my pocket and placing it over my left middle finger, I played some slide on the next number we did, and before long, everyone in the room was foot-tapping and clapping their hands in time. The room was filled with longneck Buds that were drained in quick succession. We were having a good time. Susan sat looking up at me with such love and admiration as Bernie and I went into a rousing finale. I felt truly blessed to have her for my wife and him for my best friend. This was what it was all about. The ability to sit down and create something out of nothing, to be surrounded by friends and people you love, and to fill the room with music. I never wanted to lose sight of that.
When we were through, the room went wild. Several people had wandered into the dressing room from down the corridor to listen to us play, and the place was packed. Bernie threw his head back and laughed at the sheer pleasure of it, and I felt happier than I had in months. Glenn Frey came over and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Man, you’re good,” he said, clearly impressed. “You should come to L.A. We could use a few more players like you out there.”
Bernie interjected, “You’re onto a loser there. I’ve been trying to get Don to head west for ten years. I keep telling him that’s where it’s happening. But he won’t listen, and he won’t leave his lady.”
I said nothing. I just shrugged my shoulders while Susan watched us pensively, a few feet away.
When it was the band’s turn to go onstage, she and I stood in the wings, watching them play. They were very good, really tight together as a classic four-part harmony band, although maybe a little bit too static and country for me—no movement, no gimmicks, no political messages about Nixon’s reelection or the latest atrocities in Vietnam or the quest for world peace. They just stood and played their music. If there was any talking to be done, and there wasn’t much, then Glenn did it. He was up front, behind the mike, his long hair swaying, singing lead. Don sat way at the back, hidden behind the drums, singing at the same time as drumming, which is a phenomenally difficult double act to carry off in terms of physical coordination. Only Levon Helms from the Band had really done it well before. Just once, on “Witchy Woman,” Don sang lead, and he was surprisingly good. He had a clean, clear rasp to his voice that cut through the air like a knife.
Overall, I decided that I liked them better personally than I did musically. Where I came from, country music was considered rather inferior, a backwoods sort of thing that the rednecks from the Deep South listened to with their rifles and shotguns in the back of their pickup trucks and the coon dogs on the front porch. Although I’d grown up on a diet of the Grand Ole Opry, I felt I’d moved beyond tha
t, into a combination of free-form jazz, rhythm and blues, and good ol’ rock and roll. I was still very interested in English music and was far more eager to hear Yes than I was the Eagles. I would never have rushed out and bought an Eagles album. Instead, I’d have spent my hard-earned cash on the latest by Fleetwood Mac, Hendrix, or Eric Clapton.
To give the Eagles their due, there was something spine-tinglingly magical about their sound. And I liked the fact that they all sang. Other than the Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, there were few other bands really doing that. Even in the Beatles, Ringo barely sang, and George was just sort of in the background. What these boys did in its simplicity and uniqueness was really cool. It was intelligible; you could understand the lyrics very easily, and each of them brought something to the party. Glenn was the lead singer, and Don sang great harmonies and played drums way behind the beat, giving an anticipatory tension to the music. I don’t think it’s something he did consciously or willingly, it was just where he felt the beat, and it became part of the Eagles groove.