by Don Felder
Joe delighted in going to toy stores and buying just about every new gadget they had. He’d come back to the hotel with remote control cars or helium blimps that we could steer around in the grand lobby or the rest of the hotel. After the walkie-talkies arrived, he gave everyone a call sign, including himself. His was José, although we also called him Rubber Nose, because he had this great big rubbery nose up which alarming quantities of cocaine would disappear.
“Yeah, that’s a big ten four, Whisky a-Go-Go.”
My call sign for Irving was 411, because that’s the number you dial for information. When someone claimed it was also his height, it stuck.
We spent huge amounts of money on batteries for the walkie-talkies to make sure we could reach each other day and night. The radio would crackle to life at 4 A.M. and a voice would say, “Hey, you still awake?”
“Yup. Am now.”
“You got any left?”
“Yeah.”
“OK, I’ll be right down.”
Joe was not at all confrontational and would acquiesce graciously to whatever Don and Glenn said, even if it meant he had to be virtually glued to the stage to stop him from moving about. However, his general stress of being on the road had to come out somewhere, and the rest of us encouraged him, because it allowed our own rage to be released by proxy. The more frustrated he became, the more pride he took in his “work” offstage—especially playing bumper cars with rental vehicles or throwing televisions out of hotel windows.
Irving joined in the fun by buying Joe an electric chain saw. It had its own special carrying case and was much quieter than a conventional one. You wouldn’t know what old Rubber Nose was up to until the blade started coming through your wall.
Joe and I had become friends long before he joined the Eagles. I’d played a couple of gigs with him, one at Dodger Stadium, and I’d helped him with a live record and a TV show he fronted called Joe Walsh and Dr. John. We played well together. The best lesson he taught me was how to adjust your phrasing so as to play behind someone without detracting from the solo. As a lead guitarist, it isn’t always easy to allow someone to step forward into the spotlight and play while you’re supporting them. Between us, we learned that little two-step, a sort of musical dance.
Joe’s attitude was very laid-back. He’d been in the business long enough to know what was what. He probably thought this was the best gig he could get, and it beat being out there by himself. He’d often complained about being a solo artist, although from my experience, it seemed to me that it would be so much easier than being in a band. He set me straight: “No, man, it’s a pain. You have to do everything yourself—approve all the photographs, set up all the touring dates, go to all the rehearsals, and oversee all the decisions. I’m sick and tired of it.” Now he could be a well-paid sideman in a great rock band and wouldn’t have to bother with that stuff anymore. He stayed out of the fights, only ever adding his five cents’ worth if his opinion was invited.
My only concern with Joe was our transition from a pedal steel and banjo band to one that played stoned-out, blacked-out, chain-saw rock and roll. I really had a difficult time seeing Joe playing what the Eagles did. It was a little like asking Jimi Hendrix to sit in with the Boston Pops.
With all the upheaval going on in the band, plus touring and planning the next album, I didn’t have very much time to spend with Susan, who was in the final stages of her second pregnancy. My visits home were all too short, and I missed her and Jesse more than I can say. I did manage to attend some Lamaze classes in Malibu with her, however, to remind us of the breathing techniques involved, and when I could be I was a totally hands-on husband.
One of the other fathers-to-be in the class was Adam West, who played Bruce Wayne, alias Batman, in the popular television series. He was in his mid-forties and into his second marriage, and I’ll never forget sitting alongside him on the floor, each of us cradling our heavily pregnant wives while urging them on. His looks and voice were so distinctive that each time he said “Breathe!” or “Push now!” Susan and I half-expected the Penguin or the Joker to come flying through the window and attack him with an umbrella.
The band took a couple of weeks off for Christmas in 1975—our second with little Jesse and the first at our beach house in Malibu—so I was there for the crucial part. I remember, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, Susan was so pregnant she could barely walk, but she stripped, put on her bikini, and did a sexy model pose for a photograph, standing in our hallway. We were laughing so much, I thought she might go into labor there and then.
I was home with Susan on the morning of December 31, when her water broke and I drove her to the hospital in Encino. We chose one in the Valley, because we knew the roads would be clearer at holiday time and because they had the best facilities available. It was quite a hippie thing for husbands to be at the birth and involved in the breathing, but the nurses couldn’t have been more accommodating. The labor was pretty straightforward this time. I remained at Susan’s side throughout (without fainting), cut the cord, and welcomed our little girl to the world, before buying champagne for us and the nurses to help celebrate New Year’s Eve. Much to her chagrin, Rebecca Felder will always be a true Valley girl.
My mother was still in mourning over the death of my father, but for Christmas that year, I presented her with a handmade card.
“Open it,” I told her, smiling.
She did so and carefully read the words inside. I promised to buy her any house she wanted in Gainesville.
“I mean it, Mom. Any house you like. I can afford it now.”
“What’s wrong with the one I’ve got?” she asked, confused. I thought of that little shack with its tin roof and no air-conditioning, and winced.
By the time she returned home from her visit with us, I thought I’d won her over to the idea, but I never did. She went to look at a few properties at my insistence, but there was always something wrong. She’d tell me, “I don’t know the neighborhood,” or “It’s too far from the church,” or “All my friends live on the other side of town.” Marnie, Jerry’s wife, was extremely patient with her and drove her around to see house after house, but she never liked any of them. It was too much of an emotional wrench for her to leave the family home. It was paid for, and it was safe. For forty years, it was all she’d ever known. I had to content myself with redoing it and buying her a new car instead. She chose a Chrysler New Yorker to replace Dad’s last car—a rusty Oldsmobile Rocket with over 200,000 miles on it.
The record label wanted another album, but a lawsuit made this difficult. In early 1976, David Geffen was in the process of selling his remaining financial interest in Asylum to Warner Communications. Believing that he was including Eagles’ copyrights in the sale, Irving Azoff filed a $10 million suit against Warner for their return. Though later resolved, the action complicated the production of a new album.
Joe Smith, an executive at Elektra, once described Irving humorously at a roast as “a little bundle of hate.” He was well aware that we were becoming Warner’s biggest act and later he was right, when we were selling a million albums a month. Irving’s suit meant Warner might have to wait longer for another album. Joe Smith tried to work things out, but negotiations dragged. We kept touring while the talks stalled.
In March 1976, Joe released a greatest hits album on Elektra/Asylum to buy more time. None of us had a say in the decision. We hadn’t the slightest inkling how successful it would become. A week after its release, Eagles—Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 had sold one million copies. It became the very first album certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It remained on Billboard’s Top 200 for two and a half years and is still one of the best-selling albums of all time. The pressure was on. If our next album didn’t sell more than our greatest hits, fans would think our new material was inferior to what we’d recorded in the past. It was an added pressure we could have done without.
The trappings of success were o
urs by now, especially when we went on the road again for a twenty-six-city tour that summer to introduce Joe to our American fans. We took Learjets the way other people took taxis. We drank champagne like water and snorted almost enough cocaine to finance a small Third World country. Fast cars were bought, mansions were purchased, and jewelry was bestowed. We’d rib each other about what luxuries we had in our hotel rooms, just to wind the others up. It was our way of coping with the absurdity of making all this money but still being able to walk down Sunset Boulevard without being recognized.
In the early days, the desk clerks at the hotels usually assigned rooms at random. They didn’t know one player’s name from another, and most hotels only had a couple of suites anyway. Sometimes I’d get the presidential suite, sometimes Don would. It was a lottery. One day we were all in an elevator in a Holiday Inn somewhere, en route to a gig, when I said, “I really like my room, but the Jacuzzi in my bathroom is noisy as hell.”
The others all stopped and looked at me. “You got a Jacuzzi in your bath? I didn’t get one!”
I grinned. “Well, mine has bubble bath, oil, and everything.”
Glenn’s face was like a thundercloud.
Somewhere else, a few weeks later, we stayed at this beautiful hotel, and my room had a grand piano in the living room. I thought it was fantastic. I sat and played it for a while. During the elevator ride down to the limos that were taking us to the gig, I said, “How’s everybody’s room?”
“Cool,” they all said.
Without a hint of a smile, I said, “Mine’s nice, but that grand piano’s out of tune.”
Everybody groaned, “Yeah, right.”
“No, really, I have a grand piano in my living room.”
“Sure, Felder,” said Don, sniffily, “just like the Jacuzzi in the Holiday Inn.” We all laughed.
After that, Glenn and Don somehow always had nicer suites and cars. I told myself, “You know what? I don’t give a shit. All you do is sleep in the room for a night or two and then move on, anyway.”
One of the earliest causes of disagreement was the number of hired hands Don and Glenn took on. Joe and Randy and I had virtually no one, apart from the odd guitar tech, to help with our stuff, but Don and Glenn hired lots of people, including a masseuse who traveled with Don for his bad back. Glenn’s tennis coach was on the payroll (of which I was paying a fifth) to help handle luggage. He’d never been on the road before and was inexperienced. On one tour, he lost a fifteen-hundred-dollar leather suitcase of mine with about three thousand dollars’ worth of Italian suits in it. Man, I was pissed. I was paying this guy, and yet he wasn’t even looking after my interests properly.
My only assistant was my guitar tech, Jimmy Collins, who lived in Boston. When we came off the road, he’d go home to Boston and would receive a very small retainer to be on call. Don and Glenn’s guys remained in L.A. and were given titles like transportation manager and ground transportation manager, in charge of rental cars and limos. They even had a van, paid for by the Eagles, with which Don Henley’s guy ran errands for him and Glenn. I lived out in Malibu and had no help whatsoever. Once I got out of the airport and put my luggage in a rental car, that was it. I was on my own.
I once dared to complain about it to Irving. I was paying for all these lackeys, and I thought it only fair to confront Irving for my sake and for those in the band too afraid to say anything. I asked Irving, “When these guys are off the road and aren’t actually working for the Eagles, just for Don and Glenn, shouldn’t they pay for them, not the rest of us?”
Irving told me in no uncertain terms that this was the way it was going to be. “Stop complaining and stop being so cheap,” he snapped.
Having come from such a dirt-poor background, I’d always been the least extravagant member of the band. Something inside my head warned me that I could lose my wealth as quickly as I’d made it. Even sending my kids to private school seemed excessive. The most I’d ever spend my money on was a guitar. I once paid $3,500 for a 1959 Les Paul, just like the one Mr. Lipham had sent to be remodeled and then sold out from under me to that customer from New York. One day, after flying home for a visit, I drove past a Porsche showroom in Beverly Hills and decided, on impulse, to stop. Strolling in, wearing jeans and sneakers, my long hair lank, I smiled at the clean-cut salesman and pointed to the 911 S in the window. “I’ll take it,” I said.
He looked up at me with a smile. “Sure,” he said, disdainfully.
“No really,” I said. “I’ll take it. Can I drive it away?”
It took half an hour and a fax from my business manager before he believed me. I drove away that afternoon in the sixteen-thousand-dollar beauty, feeling almost ashamed. It was a far cry from my ’59 Volkswagen Beetle in Gainesville. What would my father have said?
What would he have said, too, about my drinking? The man who only ever had the occasional beer wouldn’t have approved of my new habit. I never really drank that much until I was in the Eagles and discovered tequila and peyote, a psychedelic cactus used by the Indians since ancient times for spiritual purposes. Made famous by the man who’d inspired the band’s name—Carlos Castaneda—especially in his 1974 book Journey to Ixtlan, it generally produces nausea before its transcendental effects begin. One night, we played somewhere like God’s Hole, Indiana, and we had a party after the show. I took some peyote and drank much more than usual before ending up back in my hotel room. I was so unbelievably drunk that I crawled into my bathroom on my hands and knees and threw up. It was about two thirty in the morning and the phone began to ring while I was leaning over the toilet bowl, my face pressed against the cold porcelain. I couldn’t move. The phone stopped, rang again, stopped, and rang again. Eventually I crawled back to the bed and lay partly on it, with my knees on the floor, and picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” Susan said, waiting for me to say something.
All I could manage was “Aaaarrggh.”
“Don? Don? Are you OK?”
“No.” Slurring the words, I said, “I drank too much tequila. I’m really sick.”
At that point, I passed out and collapsed onto the floor. I woke up, I don’t know how much later, and heard her shouting, “Don are you OK? Don, speak to me.”
I managed to reassure her before collapsing again, this time into sleep. When I woke the next morning, I had a hangover I could have sold to science. For three days, I felt poisoned. I’ve hardly touched tequila since.
Joe, whose nicknames included Meathead, was a legendary drinker before he went straight. He drank anything that didn’t drink him first—mainly gin or Jack Daniel’s but also Tullamore Dew whiskey and Courvoisier brandy. “Just a wee drop of the dew,” he used to say in a phony Scots accent while pouring another three fingers. Courvoisier was like rocket fuel. It burned my throat every time, except after a few snorts of cocaine—then it slid down real smooth. It was so strong, though, that I’d start getting drunk and need more blow to even out the buzz. It soon became a constant juggling act between the two. With Joe’s help, I discovered that midway between a coke high and a brandy high was a very happy place to be. This became my combo of choice.
Apart from the damage to my liver and my nose, the chief change that success brought to my life was that suddenly everybody wanted to be my friend. People came out from under every rock. They’d try to get to me through my brother, mother, or old high school friends in Gainesville. People I hadn’t seen or heard from in years appeared on my radar.
Someone would call my mom and claim to be an old high school buddy of mine who needed my telephone number. Or Jerry would get a call at work from someone who claimed I’d asked them to keep in touch but they’d lost my address.
Each had “great investment ideas” for my money and kept trying to find unique ways to take advantage of my generosity, kindness, or naïveté. Even peripheral family members tried to get something from me. They had a newfound enthusiasm for our relationship. Before the fame and money, none of them paid much attent
ion to what I was doing. I suspect they shared my father’s view that I was a complete waste of time. Disillusioned and disenchanted by the shallowness of success, I tried to associate with those who knew me before I’d made it. I began to wonder about people’s sincerity. Who was reliable? What were their motives? Who should I trust? Paranoia began to set in.
Between tours, in preparation for the next album, Don and Glenn rented a house together. It had once belonged to Dorothy Lamour and was located high in the Hollywood Hills, the whole of Los Angeles spread below it. They lived like the odd couple, one tidy, one a slob. The cloud had definitely lifted since Bernie left, and Don and Glenn became closer than ever. They were writing buddies and drinking buddies. On occasion, they’d even go out and try to get laid together. It was all about success and excess—too much too fast. Glenn spent a lot of time drinking longneck Buds or red wine. He prided himself on his appearance and preferred the mean, broody look, with his trademark Mexican moustache, to reel them in. Don, sporting an Afro haircut, a gold chain, and shirts wide open so you could see his chest hair, had dated just about every L.A. model or actress on the circuit. Decadence led to ruthlessness and ultimately a sense of paradise lost, a recurring lament in the songs they wrote together.