by Don Felder
“Sure,” I said, gulping down my excitement.
For a few short months, the band became Crosby, Nash & Felder. I’d play my set with David Blue, come offstage for the intermission, then return to play with Graham and David. They paid me double wages, once for each show, but saved a fortune by only having to pay expenses for one guitarist instead of two. Still, I wasn’t complaining.
One night we were playing in Denver when, unbeknownst to me, they invited Stephen Stills—who was living in Colorado—to come and jam with us onstage during the show. It was a last-minute thing, arranged as a surprise for the audience. He was a successful solo artist now, but he sometimes missed the camaraderie of being in a band, and he jumped at the chance. We’d just finished “Marrakesh Express” when Graham suddenly introduced Stephen to uproarious applause, and he strolled onto the stage. We took one look at each other in mutual surprise. “Don!” he said, astonished, as the audience waited for us to begin, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Being you,” I replied with a smile. He took his place, and we all jammed together and blew the crowd away. It was the once-in-a-lifetime only performance of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Felder. After the show, Stephen told Graham that we’d been in a high school band together in Gainesville and had known each other since we were teenagers. I’d never mentioned our connection; it never seemed to come up, and in any event, when I’d tried to see Stephen backstage in Boston, I’d been given the brush-off, so I wasn’t sure how I stood.
Graham was flabbergasted. “I can’t believe you never said anything or tried to use your friendship with Stephen to your advantage,” he told me. I think he took another view of me after that.
David Crosby was completely the opposite. He was the first person I’d ever met who used excessive amounts of cocaine, and the energy that came off him in consequence was paranoid, tense, and fearful. I remember walking down the hallway in a motel we were staying in one night and seeing David’s door open, so I strolled in. We were working together, after all, and I had hoped we were friends.
“Hey, how you doing?” I said, thinking I could walk into his life the same way I could with Graham. On the bed, his suitcase was lying open, and inside was a bag of cocaine. David was really high, and the look on his face was one of paranoia. He’d been caught red-handed and there was no telling what he might do.
Stiffening, I said, “Oh, I forgot something, I’ve gotta go.” I only worked with him for a few months, but there was always a distance between us, and I never stopped being slightly wary.
The tour ended and, with it, the fun. There were plans for a second leg early in 1974, and Graham and David asked me to go out again with them then. I agreed without hesitation. I returned home to Susan, who was happily pregnant and working full-time, and we set about looking for somewhere else to live until I went on the road again. Culver City was no place to bring up a child.
We found a place for $175 a month at Fernwood Drive in Topanga, near Bernie. We shared it with his younger brother Tom and Tom’s girlfriend, Cathy. Topanga was so beautiful, with its mountains and woods, and it attracted an artistic community of singers, actors, writers, and instrumentalists, many of them known as “canyon musicians.” Our neighbors, past and present, included Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Alice Cooper, the Mothers of Invention, and a singer named Taj Mahal, who had a big hit at the time called “Take a Giant Step,” cowritten by Carole King. There was a bar called the Topanga Corral, where bands like Spanky and Our Gang, Canned Heat, and Spirit regularly honed their musical skills. We fit right in. Best of all, our cabin had a yard for Kilo, who rediscovered the pleasures of outdoor living.
The place we found was like a summer cabin, with screened windows and a hammock out back. There was one proper bedroom, which we had, and a little sewing room for Tom and Cathy. I installed a washer-dryer so Susan didn’t have to go all the way to the coin-op in the Valley, and I made a dining table out of a giant wooden telephone cable spool I bought at a junkyard for fifteen bucks. Our bedroom was too small for a crib, so the baby would have to sleep with us for a while. Susan was getting further and further along, and blossoming with it. I loved watching our child grow inside her.
She was still driving the Volvo, which never once gave up the ghost, and I bought a faded blue ’51 International Harvester pickup truck to run around in. It was truly horrible. You couldn’t see your reflection in any part of the paint, and there was nothing left that resembled chrome either. It had six cylinders and you could hardly hear the clunk and grind of the engine over the clatter of the fenders and the noise the body made while in motion.
I fully expected to be home for a few months, barring any session work I was invited to do, and I planned to spend it getting the house ready for our new arrival. David Blue had been well received, and Graham Nash seemed to have no intention of taking his old guitarist back, but they both wanted a rest. If the timing worked right, I might even be home with Susan when our baby was born.
Bernie was back in town after the Desperado tour with the Eagles, who had started recording their third album, On the Border. It felt to me that the band was at something of a crisis point. Desperado hadn’t done nearly as well as their first album, not even breaking into the top forty, despite great ballads like “Tequila Sunrise,” written by Don Henley and Glenn Frey as one of their first collaborative efforts. The album was considered too country for rock aficionados and too rock for the country fans. Compared with current theatrical artists like David Bowie or Alice Cooper, who put as much into the spectacle of their shows as into the music, the Eagles were considered boring. The gigs they were playing were smaller than the venues I was playing with Crosby & Nash. They concentrated on theaters and college gigs, while we were playing clubs like the Fillmore West.
The band had just been in England for the third time, working with producer Glyn Johns, but things hadn’t worked out. Johns was very hard on them with time, drug, and budget constraints, and there’d been further clashes over which musical direction they should be taking. Glenn wanted to do more R&B but Johns preferred Bernie’s West Coast country sound.
After firing Johns and filling out the time with an eight-week tour of Europe and the States, they’d come back to L.A. to try to finish the album. They had just two usable tracks—“The Best of My Love,” written by Don, Glenn, and J.D. Souther, and “You Never Cry Like a Lover,” written by Don and J.D. This time they enlisted a young producer named Bill Szymczyk (pronounced “sim-zick”), who’d done some great work with Joe Walsh and had been largely responsible for the success of “The Thrill is Gone,” a groundbreaking track by my hero B.B. King.
In a separate, unexpected move, David Geffen sold his new record label, Asylum, to the record and film giant Warner Communications for $7 million. Warner merged it with Elektra Records and put him in charge. Glenn was particularly unhappy that Geffen had “sold out” to the cigar-smoking men in suits he’d so railed against, without giving the Eagles any warning of the imminent merger or any credit for the part they might have played in the deal. Disillusioned, the band decided to leave what Geffen once described as his “benevolent protectionism” and switch to the ever-enthusiastic Irving Azoff, who’d left Geffen to set up his own management company called Front Line. Irving’s other key clients were Joe Walsh, Dan Fogelberg—known to us as “Junior Bucks” until he made it big and became “Major Bucks”—and a relatively unknown band called REO Speedwagon. He soon added new artists Steely Dan and Boz Scaggs to the list.
Whenever I saw Bernie, he seemed increasingly unsettled. He’d been in several bands that had broken up after an initial flurry of success, and he thought he could see the writing on the wall with the Eagles. I knew from the past that he had a short fuse, and I felt he was brewing for something.
“Oh, man,” he told me one night over supper at our spool table, “these guys never stop arguing.”
“Who?” I asked, surprised.
“Glenn and Don. It’s like being back at home aga
in with eight siblings, always squabbling. Talk about creative tension! They think they’re the new Lennon and McCartney. The whole concept of the band was equal partners with equal shares in writing, singing, playing, and royalties—we were no longer sidemen. Don and Glenn couldn’t get along with this English guy, Glyn Johns, or decide which direction they wanted the band to go—rock or country.
“Nothing Randy or I wrote was ever good enough, and now we’ve left Geffen, Irving’s in charge, and he and Don seem to be very thick. I’m seriously beginning to wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.”
I sympathized and passed him another beer. At least I was free of all that in-band politics nonsense, I reminded myself, grateful once again for the benevolence of David Blue and Graham Nash. From what Bernie said, it certainly didn’t sound like the Eagles were going to survive much longer, which was a shame, because I thought they really had something. I wondered what he’d do next.
A couple of days later, one morning in early January 1974, the telephone rang just as I was about to fix the squeaking screen door at our house out in Topanga.
“Don? It’s Glenn, Glenn Frey of the Eagles,” the husky Detroit voice announced on the other end of the line.
“Oh, hi Glenn. How you doin’?” I put down my tools and sat on the edge of the table.
“Good, thanks. Hey, listen, we were wondering if you could come into L.A. tomorrow, to the Record Plant, and help us out with a song we’re recording for this new album. We need someone who can play some real dirty slide on it, and we obviously know you can play and thought you might be interested.”
“Sure, Glenn,” I said, happy for the extra session work, grabbing a pen. “Love to. What time do you want me?”
I scribbled down the details on the back of a supermarket bill and stuffed it in my back pocket without giving it a second thought. Putting on my tool belt, I got down to the more important business at hand.
NINE
I was twenty-seven years old when I arrived at the Record Plant in West Los Angeles, on Third and La Cienega, with my newly mended Les Paul guitar, an amp, and a few foot pedals. “The Plant” was, at that time, one of the coolest places to record in L.A., with its psychedelic fabrics, raw wood surfaces, and living room environment. Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground, and the Woodstock soundtrack had all been recorded there. Everybody was waiting for me in the studio as I walked in with my instruments and a tasselled leather shoulder bag full of my wah-wah pedals, cables, and other toys.
“Hey, guys, how you doin’?” I said, as I set my stuff down. “Nice to see you again.”
The producer, Bill Szymczyk, introduced himself. He was a huge bear of a man, of Polish extraction, with a handshake that could crush cans. Later I heard it was he who’d decided that the band’s attempts to play rock music needed stronger guitars, to compete with the big rock bands like the Rolling Stones, the Who, and Led Zeppelin. Critics had accused the Eagles of being too laid-back, even of “loitering” onstage. Fans simply couldn’t rock to “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” and commercial success was slipping through their fingers. Bill, whose nickname was “The Soul Pole,” had asked the band if they knew any good incendiary guitar players.
The reply was apparently unanimous—Don Felder.
Joe Walsh had been considered briefly, but he had his own successful career as a solo artist and was considered a little too wild for the mellow Eagles.
I felt entirely comfortable that day. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh my God, it’s the Eagles.” They were friends, the same age as me, and although they’d had considerable chart success early on, their bubble was in danger of bursting and I was very happy with the way my own career was going. This was just another session as far as I was concerned. I hoped it would buy a few extra things for the baby.
Everyone was as friendly as usual. Bernie seemed pleased to see me, although he was a little quiet. I put it down to some of the tensions he’d already told me about, and the constant jockeying for position among band members. I heard Don and Glenn ask each other, “Whose songs are we gonna work on next?” but there was nothing at that initial session that made me suspicious or uncomfortable.
Each of the guys had his own unique character. Glenn Frey was a rebel without a cause from the Motor City, with his reflector shades, flipping an unlit cigarette in his hand and catching it, offering quick one-liners while constantly flicking his hair back off his forehead. Later I heard that his mother once said he was so ambitious he reminded her of a rattlesnake. That made him witty and beguiling, if a little unpredictable.
Don Henley, the son of the manager of a Texas auto-parts store, was more of a soft-spoken, introspective songwriter. He was an English literature major and wrote wonderful prose. He could take little snapshots of life in just two or three lines. Whenever he read out something he’d written, it sounded profound, especially to someone like me, who’d barely made it through high school. He’d sit scratching away at his legal pad, constantly listening to the last track or editing what he’d just penned. He was always absorbed in literature of some sort and carried at least one book around in his shoulder bag. He was fair, rational, and levelheaded, if a little moody sometimes. I liked him from the outset.
Randy Meisner, of Nebraskan farming stock, was the nicest guy I ever played with in a band. No matter what went down, you could hang with “Meis” and have a laugh. Of German descent, he’d been turned on to music by his father, a classical violinist. Naturally shy and quiet, he hated it when the attention was focused on him or his playing, but there were few occasions when I saw him unhappy or not putting a bright face on a situation. He looked very young and continually attracted the ladies with his cute looks. Randy’s sole purpose in life was to have a few drinks, roll a few joints, and make everybody laugh. He was a wonderful Midwestern guy with a great heart and a loving soul.
Bernie, meanwhile, was so brilliant musically that you could forgive him almost anything. The only original member of the Eagles to actually hail from California, he could play bluegrass, rock and roll, or country music on any acoustic instrument. He was also high-strung and extremely headstrong. Being the oldest of so many kids had left him with an ingrained belief that he always had to fight for what he wanted. With that many people around the dinner table, if you didn’t fight, you didn’t eat. His argumentative nature and lack of diplomacy sometimes made him unpopular with those who didn’t understand or know how to handle him. In a group situation, it could be explosive.
Another person in the studio that day was J.D. Souther, probably the coolest person who wasn’t in the Eagles, and one of the band’s main ghost-writers. He should really have been the sixth member. He was a good singer, great to hang out with, warm, and funny, and he could fill a pad with great lyrics, right there on the spot. He started with the title “New Kid in Town,” for example, and had a large part of that song written before Glenn and Don got involved. J.D.’s name appears in the credits, but he also co-wrote other stuff and helped refine many of the tracks. If J.D. was credited on a song, it was because it had originated with him or he had made a real contribution, and he always came through.
As for me, I was still Don “Fingers” Felder, the long-haired hippie in patchwork jeans with the Deep South accent and a laid-back attitude. My wife was expecting our first child, and I was primarily there to play some good music, take the money, and meet up with some old buddies. Music was my life. It was what had helped lift me from the grinding poverty of my childhood, and after years in the musical deserts of upstate New York and Massachusetts, I felt lucky to be doing what I loved and getting paid for it. I guess I was still trying to prove my father wrong.
I suppose we looked the part—young, fit, tanned, scruffily dressed, and adorned with fashionable turquoise jewelry in that endless Californian summer idyll. As one commentator put it later, we looked “like Jesus Christ after a month in Palm Springs.” We had every reason to be friends, make great music together, and have a whole lotta fun doing it too. It
all seemed so promising to a boy from Tobacco Road.
That first day, I was asked to play slide on a song called “Good Day in Hell,” which Glenn and Don had written. Glenn, who was singing lead, liked what he heard of my guitar playing. He apparently told Bill Szymczyk afterward that I was Duane Allman reincarnate. It was the highest compliment anyone could ever have paid me.
We cut the record after just six takes, which seemed a good omen. The results seemed to impress the band so much that later they asked me to lay down a fiery guitar line on another song, a punchy rock-and-roll number called “Already Gone,” playing toe-to-toe with Glenn in what became the first song on the album. At the end of the session, we played it back, laughing and having a good time. Someone cracked a few beers and we enjoyed listening to the playback of the day’s work. It felt good. When it was over, I reluctantly packed my amp and guitar, placed them carefully in the back of my rusty old pickup, and drove home to Topanga.
The very next day, I was sitting having breakfast with Susan when the telephone rang. She watched as I took the call and tugged at my sleeve. “Who is it?”
“Glenn Frey,” I mouthed.
“What’s he saying?”