Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  His decline was quite rapid after my visit, and he was admitted to the North Central Florida Hospital, from where Jerry called me. I raced there from the West Coast, and when I arrived, Dad was hooked up to a special machine that sprayed mist to keep his airways clear. It reminded me of the iron lungs of my polio-scarred youth.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, leaning over the bed to kiss him. “It’s Don.”

  “When you gonna cut your hair and look like a man?” he growled through dry lips as my hair brushed his cheek. They were among the last words he ever spoke to me.

  After a week of taking turns with Mom and Jerry in a bedside vigil, I had to go back to L.A. He died a few days later. My third flight to Gainesville in less than a year was for his funeral, but the finality of his passing didn’t hit me until I walked into the Williams-Thomas funeral home, where my friend Jim and I had played Frisbee as kids, and stared down at my father’s emaciated body lying in an open casket. He was dressed in his Sunday suit, a shirt and tie, his arms folded across his chest. I’d never seen his fingernails so clean.

  A flood of sorrow overcame me. There was still so much unresolved. Jerry and I hugged each other and wept. He’d been there for my parents all these years while I was an absentee son, and I felt tremendous guilt about never having a proper, adult relationship with my father. Now it was too late. I was filled with remorse about this loss, not just of his life but so much else. When you lose a parent, the child in you dies. In the space of a year, I’d gained a son and lost a father, and it felt like such a huge transition. Everything had changed, and I was rushing through my life at a furious pace, not doing anything justice.

  Sobbing in my brother’s arms, I mourned the death of my father with an intensity I’d never expected. He was, I realized, the strongest single influence in my life. He’d taught me all he knew about music, bought me my first real guitar, and encouraged me to play. Everything I was, everything I’d achieved, was because of him.

  “God bless you, Dad,” I whispered and promised him silently that, one day, I’d cut my hair.

  In late 1974, we went back to the Record Plant to make a new album. There had been a short lull after the On the Border tour, but then Asylum turned the screws for a follow-up record.

  I wasn’t looking forward to a return to the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the studio, especially not with the added burden of bettering the last gold-selling product. We knew the critics were waiting in the wings, knives sharpened, to cut us up and serve us in little pieces to the public. At least on the road, there had been enough space and time to get along reasonably well, but even out of the studio the differences that had been evident since I’d joined the previous year grew and grew. The band was becoming increasingly divided by the tensions within it, based on the type of music we played. In such a prickly environment, no new songs were immediately forthcoming. Bernie, meanwhile, became increasingly dissatisfied with how the pair of them treated him and Randy. He didn’t like them taking rough mixes back to their house to decide what tracks would stay or go, nor did he and Randy like what they described as Glenn’s ability to “change a word and gain a third”—coming to a song that was in their minds substantially done, with lyrics and music, making what to them seemed to be modest contributions, and suddenly becoming entitled to a third of the songwriting royalties.

  I just wanted to keep my head down and do the best I could, even if the song credits were sometimes out of whack. The new album was provisionally called One of These Nights. The title track originally began life as an R&B song on acoustic piano, but it just didn’t sound right to me when Glenn first played it to us. Randy was stuck in Nebraska, snowed in, and couldn’t get to the studio, so I told Glenn, “Wait a minute, I’ll play bass.” I came up with an introduction and bass figure. We played a couple of demo passes with me playing the bass part over Glenn’s piano, and I wound up writing the entire bass line for the title track. When the weather finally cleared and Randy was able to fly in, I taught him what I’d written, verbatim, and we recorded it for the album. As long as the track came out good, I didn’t care.

  I also wrote a song called “Visions,” for which Don provided some of the lyrics, the only Eagles track I ever sang lead vocal on. I penned that song at my house in Topanga. It was the most up-tempo track of the whole album. I was still not confident about my singing voice, especially not when I had Don’s to compare it with, but I tried really hard, and the fact that Don and Glenn deigned to let me sing it must have meant something, I reasoned, even if the track was sort of thrown onto the album at the last minute and I wasn’t especially proud of the vocals. At one point in the lyrics, Don and Glenn sing, “Play on, El Chingadero, play on.” I learned later that chingadero is Spanish and loosely translates to “motherfucker.”

  Someone once asked me which Eagles songs I wrote by myself. The answer is: not one. It would be interesting to hear what the answer would be if you asked Don Henley and Glenn Frey the same question. Those two would go hibernate somewhere and come up with the lyrics, or the melody, or the chords, or often all three, and only when they’d emerged with finished product would the rest of us help come up with ideas for how it should be performed. “After the Thrill Is Gone” was an idea Glenn had. He loved B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone,” and while working to perfect a particular sound he wanted, he piped up, “Hey, how about calling it ‘After the Thrill is Gone’?” Our work together was almost always like that: a collaborative process, in which each one of us—while not exactly writing the songs—helped shape the final product.

  I’d work tirelessly on pieces of music that came into my head, mixing and tinkering with them at home before excitedly going to Don or Glenn when I thought I might have something. “Hey, Glenn, I’ve been working on some licks, and I’d like to play them to you,” I’d say, guitar in hand.

  Glenn would look up from whatever he was doing and say something that became the catchphrase of that whole recording phase: “I’ll tell you when.” Then he’d go right back to his work.

  “Maybe we could schedule some time for you to listen to them?” I’d push, ever hopeful.

  “I’ll tell you when,” came the gruff reply.

  When the Eagles first started, Bernie had been the proverbial fair-haired child. He was by far the best instrumentalist and played most of the great guitar, banjo, mandolin, and pedal steel parts. With On The Border, the band had deliberately shifted away from that direction. By One of These Nights, that shift had been graven in stone.

  To Bernie, life was pretty much black and white. He didn’t like rock and roll; he liked country. That’s really where his soul was and what he did impeccably well. He could play anything with strings, but that sound wasn’t what Don and Glenn wanted anymore. They did try to accommodate his tastes sometimes. For example, there’s a definite attempt to maintain a country sound to “Lyin’ Eyes,” but for Bernie it was never enough. He and I would jam together all the time in hotel rooms and in between studio takes, just for fun, playing all those Smoky Mountain tunes he’d taught me back in Gainesville, but bluegrass didn’t sell millions of albums. When Bernie repeatedly resisted the attempt to shift gears, personalities clashed and the arguments became even more explosive.

  As much as we were friends, he didn’t want the band to head in the direction Bill Szymczyk and the introduction of my guitar work was taking it. In fighting to win his point, he lost friendships, especially Glenn’s. I felt Glenn was the type of person who felt you were either with him or against him. If you didn’t agree with him one hundred percent, you were his enemy. Bernie had seemingly argued his way out of Glenn’s camp.

  Bernie was living with Patti Davis, the daughter of California Governor Ronald Reagan. He’d first met her over at Fred Walecki’s Westwood Music. She’d even come on the European leg of our last tour, much to her father’s disgust, especially as he was planning to run for president and the story made People magazine. Feeling left out now, Bernie insisted that Patti attend our studio sessions a
nd be given a writing credit on the album for his song “I Wish You Peace,” something the rest of the band weren’t at all sure about. It was only much later that I realized that that song was Bernie’s farewell to us all.

  Tired of the constant bickering and madly in love with Patti, Bernie began to lose interest. One night, we gathered in the studio to hear what we’d recorded that day. For one track, we really wanted his input, but he stood up, threw his hands in the air, and said, “I’m going surfing.” He didn’t return for three days. It was at a crucial time in the recording process, and his absence caused serious problems for the rest of us.

  There was so much strife and conflict during this time, it was wearing everyone down. Cocaine became my salve, and I went from being so disinterested that I’d given my coke to a truck driver, to being a man obsessed. It was Bernie who first took me to one side and warned me of the dangers. I’d asked him if he had any and he gave me his small vial, like the ones we all used to tap onto our thumbnails, but I tapped so hard that much more than the normal quantity came tumbling out. I couldn’t put it back, so I just snorted it all up while Bernie stood watching.

  “Hey, man,” he said, alarm in his eyes. “You gotta be careful with this stuff! It’ll run away with you, you know. Don’t fry your brain.” I stopped and stared at him, my eyes and nostrils still smarting, and realized that maybe he was right. I’d always managed to avoid being hooked on anything before, and now wasn’t the time to start.

  The arguments simmered on, while I did what I could to mediate. “The band’s moved on from the early days,” I told Bernie over and over. “We’ve evolved. Don and Glenn have formed the strongest songwriting team, and that’s best for the band. They’re entitled to have the final say.” Despite all the promises of equal shares, I still felt like the hired hand, the session man who’d been invited in to hang around and take what crumbs I could get, but Bernie had been a founding member and refused to accept that.

  “You weren’t there in the beginning,” he’d tell me, “when the Eagles were a band and everybody got two songs. That’s all been forgotten, and it stinks.”

  He was headstrong and stubborn. He felt Glenn didn’t have the authority to dictate what should or shouldn’t be on an album—especially when he and Don decided that they didn’t want Bernie to sing solo at all, that they didn’t like his B-string bender guitar or the abstract, banjo-driven sound of his instrumental number, “Journey of the Sorcerer,” and that they hated “I Wish You Peace.”

  Bernie and I had always been close, but I knew he had a short fuse. So did Glenn. If not about the songs, then they began to fight over everything, from where we should tour to what the merchandising should look like, until none of us knew where to put ourselves. I continued trying to play a diplomatic role between the two factions. I’d go to Bernie to support and encourage him and try to give him confidence in his writing and playing, and then I’d remind the guys what a key player he was in the band. I found myself constantly trying to help this thing stay together, but it seemed like Don and Glenn had already decided that Bernie wasn’t suited to the band anymore, chiefly because they were so dissatisfied with the struggle he presented. It was always Bernie against the two of them. They unified against his writing, playing style, lyrics, voice, and guitar tone. No matter what he did, it was no longer good enough.

  I only got through that difficult time because I had Susan and Jesse waiting at home for me. I tried not to bring the bad stuff home and unload it onto her, because I knew she was struggling with the demands of being a new mother. She helped me sort it out anyway, and her common-sense attitude always brought me down to earth. Better still, because of my new responsibilities, I rarely if ever took drugs at home, which probably saved my life.

  I remember coming home one morning at about 5 A.M., when Jesse was six months old, after another long session at the Record Plant. I was still cranked out on coke, sniffing and grinding my teeth, and had somehow managed to drive my pickup all the way back to Topanga. Instead of joining Susan in bed, I sat out on the balcony and watched the clouds roll in from the ocean as the sun came up above them. I was soaring like an eagle, literally way above those clouds, zoned into another cosmos. I sat there for almost an hour until I heard Jesse’s first morning cry. I heard Susan get out of bed and tend to him, I listened to her moving around, and I wanted to go in and say hello, but I couldn’t pull myself together enough to move from my chair.

  When I finally managed to get my legs working and staggered inside, I was met with the sobering reality of a wife and baby. The look on Susan’s face was not something I ever wanted to see again. “Look at the state you’re in!” she said. “Don’t you ever come home this stoned again.” She drove the point home that this was not acceptable behavior for the father of her child. I got the message. More and more, I didn’t come home at all, sleeping over in the S&M room at the Record Plant instead, a place that suddenly seemed very appealing. In many ways, I think Susan was as happy with the arrangement as I was. The little sleep she was getting wouldn’t be disturbed by my crashing in at 5 A.M., and she was relieved I wasn’t driving home alone, with coke in my pocket and paranoid delusions that every set of headlights behind me was a cop car.

  It was different when I went back on the road, though, and was away all the time. Off we went that summer, and Susan was left by herself in Topanga, feeling increasingly isolated. Her parents had retired to Florida; mine were there too; the friends she’d made in the Valley lived miles away; there were no other Eagles wives to be friendly with (Randy’s was in Nebraska); I was on the road with Bernie, her nearest neighbor; and she had few friends locally to talk to or help her care for the baby.

  One day, she took Jesse outside and laid a blanket on the grass so he could get a little sun while she cleaned the house. The area around the property was rough bush, full of coyote, and she was always cautious. Looking down, she was just about to lay him on the blanket when she spotted a small rattlesnake, coiled right beside him. It was one snake too much for a Boston girl.

  I was out in the boonies somewhere, in a crummy hotel late at night, when she found my number from the itinerary. “We’ve gotta get out of Topanga,” she said, crying. “There’s far too many critters. I want to sell the house and find us somewhere else, Don. Somewhere with neighbors we can talk to.”

  “Oh, OK, honey,” I said, half-asleep and more than a little bemused. It felt so strange having her telling me where we were going to be living, while I was thousands of miles away. She arranged everything and sold our house to the actor Will Geer, who played Grandpa in The Waltons television show. She found us a pretty 1950s Cape Cod-style house, painted pink inside and out, right on the sand at Broad Beach at the furthest point of Malibu, just before it becomes Ventura County. The first time she took me there, I inhaled the fresh, salty air and looked at the deep powdery sand, several hundred feet wide to the shore, and knew she’d made the right decision. Susan had erected a little swing set and an inflatable pool for Jesse in the front yard, which was like a giant sandbox. My only complaint about the house was the color. Some of the rooms were so shockingly pink you had to wear sunglasses to enter them. The actress Ali MacGraw, famous for the hit movie Love Story, had been the last tenant. Miss MacGraw moved three doors down with her boyfriend, Steve McQueen, next door to Keith Moon. Our other neighbors included Jack Lemmon, Joe Cocker, Goldie Hawn, Dick Martin, and Donald Sutherland.

  I didn’t suddenly feel incredibly rich, living alongside such people. On the contrary, I felt incredibly in debt. I was laboring under the delusion that being in a rock band would automatically make me fabulously wealthy. Without paying a great deal of concern to the dollars and cents, I just went along with what was offered. My new business manager, Gerry Breslauer, along with his partner, Joel Jacobson, both recommended by Irving, kept all the accounts and told me what I could or couldn’t do. I was young and carefree, happy with the way my life was going. As long as there was cash in the bank, I didn’t feel t
he need to doubt anyone. That was the way the rest of the band operated too, and probably most of our famous neighbors.

  “Business managers take care of all that stuff,” Keith Moon once reminded me. “Relax. That’s what you’re paying them for, man.”

  I was still driving the International pickup truck when I was in L.A., but I wanted Susan and Jesse to have something better than the old Volvo with a million miles on it, so I went to see my business manager.

  “Can I afford to buy my wife a new car?” I asked Gerry.

  “Sure,” he replied, smiling. “What do you want?”

  With the authority vested in my pen and a phone call from Gerry’s company, I was approved for the purchase of a brand-new Chevy Vega family station wagon. Chevrolet out of loyalty to my father, but it turned out to be one of the worst automobiles I ever bought. The first thing it did was break down on the freeway with Jesse in the baby seat. Susan took it to the shop and had it fixed, but it broke down again. The Volvo had never once let us down, and as we hadn’t yet sold it, she went back to driving that.