by Don Felder
I gestured to her to come closer to the phone so she could listen in.
“We had a discussion last night after you left and decided that we all want you to join the band,” Glenn was saying. “We never thought there’d be more than four Eagles, but we’ve had a band meeting and we’ve decided we’d like you to join us. You’d really fit in. Will you, Don? Will you join the Eagles?”
Susan and I looked at each other in silence. It was a lot to consider—giving up what I was doing with David Blue and Crosby & Nash—but this was a firm offer to be a member of an established band, not just a hired hand in somebody else’s. It didn’t take long to decide.
“Sure,” I said, not letting on how excited I felt.
“Great. Well, will you come back to the studio at two o’clock tomorrow, so we can start working on recording the rest of the album?”
“No problem. I’ll see you there,” I replied, as calmly as I could.
Putting down the phone, I turned to Susan, her belly bulging, and said just one word—“Wow.”
I thought joining the Eagles would mean less money than I was getting doubling for David Blue and Crosby & Nash, and it probably wouldn’t come as a weekly paycheck, either. I’d also be playing smaller gigs. Nevertheless, I really liked the idea of being a full-time member of a band again, especially one that was to be an equal partnership, so I gladly relinquished all my other commitments. I even remember saying a prayer that night:
“Thank you, Lord, for your good timing. Here I am with this child on the way, and you’ve given me this great blessing, which is much appreciated.”
My most difficult task would be telling Graham Nash and David Blue. They’d both been so kind to me, and I didn’t relish having to break the news that I was leaving them just as they were about to go on tour. I knew they were flying into L.A. that very day, in preparation for rehearsals the following week, so I went to see them later that night at the rock stars’ hotel, the Continental Hyatt House (known to all as the Riot House after Led Zeppelin rode their Harley-Davidsons down the corridor). Knocking on the door of Graham’s room, I found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, hanging out and discussing the tour with a couple of other guys.
“Hey, Graham, can I have a word with you?” I asked, and he stood up in one fluid movement and led me out onto his balcony overlooking Sunset Boulevard.
“You’re not coming on tour with us, are you?” He preempted me in his English accent, a thin smile on his lips.
“How did you know?” I asked, aghast. I hadn’t told a soul about the Eagles yet.
“I heard something from Elliot,” he replied, patting me on the arm. “What’s come up?”
“The Eagles,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “They’ve asked me to join them, and, although I really appreciate all the help and the breaks you’ve given me, I’ve agreed.”
“Smart move,” he said, nodding his approval. “Better than being a sideman. I don’t blame you. Anyway, we had some fun, didn’t we?” Not once did he berate me for leaving him and David in the lurch.
His continuing kindness only made my unexpected desertion seem worse. I apologized profusely for letting him down on such short notice, came up with a couple of names of possible replacements, and fled, shamefaced, into the warm Californian night.
The next day I arrived at the Record Plant as agreed, feeling unusually nervous, and was greeted warmly by all the band members.
“Welcome aboard,” Glenn said, patting me on the back.
“Good job,” said Don, giving me a rare smile.
“Nice to have you with us,” Randy, with that chipmunk grin of his, added. “We sure could do with some sanity around here.”
“Hey, buddy,” Bernie said, hugging me. In my ear, he whispered, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I wondered privately how truly comfortable my old friend was with my arrival, which surely represented a change in the band’s chemistry and a decision to lean toward rock and roll instead of his beloved country.
The plan was for me to spend the day getting to know the guys better and to lay down some more solo guitar tracks on “Already Gone.” Money hadn’t even been mentioned, and I didn’t yet have any clear idea of what my stake would be. I’d asked if Susan could come and sit in for the fun of it, and she turned up a few hours later, glowing in her cheesecloth maternity dress, and took a seat in the control room to remind me that I was doing this for her and our future together.
My nickname, Fingers, was soon added to the others—Baby Face or Chipmunk for Randy, Marty Martian for Bernie, because of his curly hair that looked like two antennas were sprouting from it, Roach for Glenn, because of his fondness for pot, and Guano or Sonic Bat for Don, because of his ability to hear an ever so slightly wrong note at five hundred paces. Despite the jocular terms, I soon came to realize that the first session at the Record Plant the previous day had been like a Thanksgiving dinner where everyone has been on their best behavior for the first few hours, until some little dispute gets blown all out of proportion and they lose it. In other words, it truly was a good day in hell.
Now I stood a few feet away from Susan, behind glass, holding my guitar and trying to play this heavy rock while Bernie bickered endlessly with Glenn, Bill tried to mediate, Don had his nose buried in his legal pad or sat with headphones on obsessively replaying the last track, and Randy sat strumming a guitar disconsolately in a corner. Turning to my wife, watching her confused expression, I prayed silently. “Oh Lord, what have I done? Please help me through this.” Smart move indeed.
A reporter from Rolling Stone once quoted me as saying I felt I’d joined a band that was just breaking up. “Bernie was bouncing off the wall and Randy was threatening to quit,” I told him. “It was like walking with a keg of dynamite on your back with the fuse lit, only you don’t know how long the fuse is.”
What I didn’t say was that it felt like this all the time. Not a day passed during the recording of that album when someone didn’t blow his top, throw something, or stalk out, slamming the door behind him. Each was fighting for control of the band and the musical direction it was taking. Glenn wanted to speed things up and Bernie wanted to slow them down. As the Johnny-come-lately, and the one Bernie understandably viewed as edging him out, I stood on the periphery and wondered how long it would be before the fuse reached the keg.
Susan sensed it too. “Why don’t you call up Graham Nash and see if there’s any chance of going back on tour with him and David Blue?” she suggested, but I knew it was too late.
When the Eagles first formed, I was told, their goal was to divide the writing and singing equally. That way, they reasoned, nobody would become a star or feel like a sideman. That had happened in their previous bands, and they didn’t create the Eagles to go through all that again. For whatever reason, the plan simply didn’t work. Maybe the ego it takes for someone to step up on stage in the first place ends up destroying everything else. Maybe there was just too much talent, or the personalities and musical tastes clashed.
I often felt that if it hadn’t been for the band, we wouldn’t have had much in common. Glenn’s hero was Bob Seger from industrial Detroit; Texas boy Don was from the Ray Charles R&B school; Bernie was pure West Coast country; and Randy, from Nebraska, idolized Ricky Nelson. I was from the Deep South, and my heart was somewhere between B.B. King and Clapton. Everyone brought something special to the group, be it guitar playing, singing, or songwriting, but the edgy creative tension that made the music sound so good when it was put together kept getting in the way of everything else.
Don and Glenn shared writing credits (sometimes with other writers) on no less than nine of the fourteen tracks of On the Border. Bernie had just two, and Randy one. J.D. Souther, who wasn’t even in the band, had three. Don sang lead on five of the songs and Glenn on four, while Randy sang on two and Bernie on only one. None of this made Randy and Bernie—suddenly relegated to the George and Ringo positions in Bernie’s Beatles analogy—very happy.
Th
ere was one explosive argument after another, usually while I sat silently in a corner, tuning my guitar and watching out of the corner of my eye. Never once did I feel, “Hey, I got it made. This thing’s gonna last for years.” I was committed but always kept an ear to the ground for other work. I watched Graham Nash and David Blue go out on the road with a new guy and hankered after the fun times we’d had together. I still did sessions for other people, just in case. I felt that the slightest bump in the road would cause the keg of dynamite to go off and blow us all sky high.
There were a few times when things went really well and the pressure lifted, especially if Don and Glenn were happy with the way a track was going. Bernie’s pedal steel guitar and Don’s singing on Bill’s remix of “The Best of My Love” reminded us that this band could make great music. When the bickering stopped and they all got along, it was so great that it almost made the bad times recede in the memory. With that song in particular, there was no drum track, so for the first time, Don picked up an acoustic guitar and sang. Bill had always called him the Eagles’ “secret weapon,” and now I understood why. This new voice that emerged made the hairs on the back of my neck tingle.
The Record Plant was designed as a place for bands to have a good time in between takes, with three or four studios, Ping-Pong and pool tables, themed bedrooms for exhausted artists to crash in, a Jacuzzi, and plenty of places to sit and get stoned. The Jacuzzi was known as the “scum pond,” because it always had this frothy sludge on the surface of the water. Nobody would ever go in it if they were sober, and the rumor was that if girls went in by themselves, they’d get pregnant.
I don’t know how many nights I drove in all the way from Topanga to the Record Plant and home again in the small hours, my eyes red-rimmed. The rest of the band lived much closer. Sometimes they would pile back to Glenn’s house in Coldwater Canyon, a place that used to be owned by James Cagney. Copious amounts of Acapulco Gold or lime-green Maui Wowee were smoked, and cocaine became the best way of pushing on through the night when every muscle in your body told you to lie down and get some sleep. It was no good if just one person took it and the others didn’t; then one would be up all night, pressing on, while the rest of us would be lying around, yawning, resentful of the late hour.
I soon realized that it wasn’t such a good idea for me to drive home so late at night, especially not after a few joints and some beers, so I started sleeping over at the studio. The first night I stayed, I can’t even remember going to bed, but when I woke in the morning, I thought I’d died and gone to hell. The particular room I’d crashed in had an S&M theme, with a leather headboard, whips, chains, and a cage hanging from the ceiling. I stared up at it all, blinking hard. “What on earth did I take last night?” I asked myself.
During that sojourn at the Record Plant, I also came to understand, for the first time, that being in a band as successful as the Eagles brought with it a tremendous amount of prestige as far as beautiful young women were concerned. There was no shortage of them around the studio, waiting in the wings to alleviate the tensions for my musical colleagues. Bernie had told me some wild stories of life on the road during tours, which almost made my hair curl as much as his. From what he said, I realized I was a complete novice when it came to women, by comparison with these guys, and felt slightly embarrassed by the relatively small numbers of sexual encounters I had enjoyed.
“Irving came with us on the last one and said he thought he’d died and gone to heaven,” Bernie laughed. “These girls just come crawling out of the woodwork and they’ll do anything, I mean anything, to please you.”
Amazed and more than a little jealous at witnessing some of it firsthand, I had to constantly remind myself that Susan was waiting for me at home, our baby growing inside her. “No thanks, honey,” I’d say to girl after girl who threw herself at me, “I’m really flattered, but I’m a happily married man.” It was a supreme test of my willpower.
Despite the continual infighting while we recorded it, On the Border became the Eagles’ fastest-selling album, going gold two months after its release in March 1974. I was listed as a “late arrival” on the liner notes. The small contribution I made to the guitar section helped drive it up to number seventeen on the U.S. charts. It broke us internationally, and pushed the previous two albums, Desperado and Eagles, past the half-million sales mark. “Already Gone,” on which I played lead with Glenn, reached number thirty-two on the singles charts. Even better, “The Best of My Love,” as remixed by Bill Szymczyk, soared to number one and sold over a million copies.
The first band meeting we ever had with me as a member, shortly after the record had been cut, took place in Irving Azoff’s office. “His Shortness has summoned us,” Bernie told me. “We’d better not be late.” I wandered in, bemused by and more than a little fearful of the idea of a regular meeting at which all could air their grievances. I stood silently at the back, waiting for the fuse to be lit.
Irving explained that we’d set up a corporation called Eagles Limited, and would each own a fifth of it. All monies from touring, merchandising, and recording royalties would come direct to Eagles Ltd. and be divided equally.
We looked at each other for a moment, and there were a few murmurs of discontent. Bernie, as usual the most vocal, was the first to speak.
“When I came into this band, it was meant to be a four-way split, and now that Don’s arrived, the profits from this new album are gonna get split five ways. I don’t think that’s fair, when he only arrived at the last minute and didn’t put in the hard time like the rest of us.”
I agreed with him entirely, but was surprised and a little hurt that it was my old Gainesville friend who’d first raised the subject.
“There are no sidemen in this band,” Glenn said firmly, with his gruff voice. “We’ve all been there and we know what that’s like.” I was pleased and relieved to hear it.
There were some general murmurs of discontent, and Irving made a suggestion. “Well, I think the way we can work this out is if Don only gets paid a fifth of the profits on the cuts he played on and a fifth of all other profits from here on. How does that sound?”
“Seems fair to me,” I piped up, knowing what hell they’d all gone through in England with Glyn Johns and each other before I’d joined. The last thing I wanted at this stage was to rock the already unsteady boat still further. We all agreed to that arrangement and moved on to other business. Everything was done on a handshake and a promise. The common understanding was that the band, as a legal entity, was a joint, mutually owned, equally shared venture designed to make us more efficient in the industry. We appointed Glenn president and Don secretary. Later, at a lawyer’s office, we all signed the piece of paper making Eagles Ltd. a reality.
I listened to the subsequent fine-tuning of the deal and marveled at Irving’s mastery of all matters fiscal. I’d never been in a band at this level before, and I didn’t yet have a business manager. Irving recommended a guy named Gerry Breslauer. In the past, the only official document I’d had was a gig contract drawn up for me by a Gainesville attorney in return for guitar lessons. It would specify which dates, how many hours we’d play, and for how much. I’d sign it and the organizer would sign it, so if there was a dispute, we had a written agreement to refer back to. I used that contract until I signed with Creed Taylor when I was in Flow, a document I never even properly examined.
It was the same with the Eagles. I can remember sitting in the office of the attorney Irving hired to draft the contracts for Eagles Ltd., and he kept watching me as everything was being explained. “I can see the wheels turning, son,” he said. “You’ve got some questions, haven’t you?”
I didn’t even know what to ask, never mind being sophisticated enough to negotiate for myself. I think I inquired as to what publishing was and if he could explain record royalties, but I’m not sure I really understood his answers. I had no legal representation other than that which Irving had arranged, and I just had to trust that he and Ir
ving were looking after my interests fairly. I was a musician, not a businessman, and I had no reason to doubt them. I couldn’t have afforded a lawyer, even if I’d realized I needed one. I could have called my brother Jerry and asked his advice, but I didn’t think it was necessary.
Come what may, Eagles Ltd. was born. I was an equal partner with Bernie, Randy, Don, and Glenn in a chart-topping band. There had been surprisingly little disagreement during the process, and the new album went on to be a big hit, so I kept my fingers crossed and hoped for the best.
However unstable the band was, I was suddenly a major player in one of America’s up-and-coming rock bands. It had taken some pain to get here, but the hard times were finally over, for a while, anyway. Best of all, they were over just as my first child was expected. Once again, my prayers had been answered.
Susan and I bought our first little house together with the money we made in those early days. We found a small three-story property set on two acres in a remote part of Topanga Canyon, on a road called Everding Motorway, with spectacular views of the ocean. Marvin Gaye had rented it before we paid the princely sum of seventy thousand dollars, and it was ours.