by Don Felder
Groupies were a common feature of the wild early parties, but Don’s discrimination and discretion increased with his wealth. He began dating high-class, high-profile women and would arrange to have them come out on the road one after another, because the quality of groupies for the 3E parties was very inconsistent from town to town. For what he considered the weakest part of the tour, he’d import girls from L.A. Glenn did this too. That really was a step too far.
After two serious relationships ended with the woman leaving him, Don began a two-year, on-off relationship with Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, the band that was our major rival in the charts, and who were on the road as much as we were. He began paying for her to be flown between Eagles and Fleetwood Mac gigs in a Learjet, engendering the band’s new catchphrase, “Love ’em and Lear ’em.” They eventually split up.
None of us ever really bothered to make friends with Don’s women. There were so many, it wasn’t possible. You’d just get friendly with one, and she’d dump him or he’d dump her and another would come along—the latest Bond girl or a newer model. He didn’t poke his nose into my marriage, and I didn’t interfere with his relationships. Stevie and I became friends later, and have remained friends to this day. I’ve done some work with her, but our friendship was always separate from her relationship with Don. Some of Don’s best songs came out of his various heart-breaks. In fact, J.D. Souther and Glenn would almost root for him to break up so we could get some more good songs.
I didn’t socialize with Don and Glenn very much—not that they ever asked me to. I went out with Randy and Joe occasionally, and the three of us often rehearsed over at Randy’s, putting a few licks together, but the concept of us being best buddies never materialized. Apart from Randy and his long-distance marriage, I was the only one married with kids anyway, and I wasn’t into hanging around the Troubadour night after night or attending their home-based 3E parties. Once I came off the road, I embraced the family life I had in Malibu and hung up my Eagles persona of a hard-drinking, drug-taking rock star, leaving it like a costume waiting for my return.
I often tried to break the ice with Don and Glenn, but it always felt like a professional relationship. When we first met, anyone could say or do anything, and there was a sense of all being in it together. As the fame and the stakes got bigger, the rest of us were less included in any of the decisions, until it got to the point where we became intimidated and didn’t like to ask. It was like being at the office party when your boss is there, all the time. You just couldn’t relax.
Among the crew, the word went out that Don and Glenn were in charge now. Nobody would do anything to challenge that, least of all the poorly paid crew members, only too happy to be affiliated with such a successful band. The band members became known as “the Gods.” Larry “Scoop” Solters, our PR guy, was the first to use the expression. I started referring to just Don and Glenn as “The Gods” and even Irving picked up on it and called them that behind their backs. The lines were drawn, and Randy, Joe, and I were definitely mere mortals.
Drugs had always been a feature in our dissension, but by now we could buy as much as we liked whenever we liked. Cocaine was the drug, adored by many in the film and music industry.
It became increasingly difficult to be in the recording studio with four guys who were snorting so much cocaine. It would be late—one or two in the morning—and they were all still raring to go. To keep up, or in some instances lead them, I sort of fell into that level of use and abuse. Before I knew it, my consumption had spiraled, and I was doing half a gram a day. I’m not sure how many grams some of my fellow band members were up to, but I would guess nearly two.
I blame the drugs more than anything for what happened with the Eagles. It was fine when we were all just having a few beers or smoking weed, but hard drugs corrupt and distort and magnify paranoia and self-doubt. The great gifts we had had as a musical unit were being horribly abused. The spiraling use of cocaine caused us to waste incredible amounts of time obsessing over things we couldn’t even really hear. It became hard to tell if a note was actually sharp or flat, but in the drug-induced fog, we’d decide this detail simply had to be resolved. We’d spend countless hours doing stupid stuff, overworking ourselves, and pushing already strained relationships still further.
There was this running joke: It would be three or four in the morning, and someone would say, “Well, I’m gonna do this last line, then I’ll go right to bed.” Which was ridiculous: One more line, and the last place you’re headed is bed. Soon, it would be five in the morning, then six, and before we knew it, another day had dawned.
The next day, I’d feel real bad. I’d wake up with a headache and a hangover, especially if we’d mixed it with booze. I’d immediately want to make myself feel better by doing more blow. I’d do just enough to get a mild buzz, then drag my ass back to the submarine atmosphere of the studio, where everybody else felt equally burned and singed around the edges. In this way, we’d all try to cope with a stressful creative environment combined with all the physical and emotional problems that too much cocaine use can produce.
The music we made had always been the one good thing we did together. Now even that was in danger. We finally decided as a group to try to remain as close to clean and sober as possible while we were playing and tracking our songs. To maintain some continuity from take to take and day to day, we just had to.
While coke sometimes had a positive impact, inspiring lyrics and so on, it ultimately had a negative effect. Don and Glenn publicly projected unity, but privately they had a huge breakup. Both of them, meanwhile, began to fall out with Randy. The Eagles went from a bunch of young guys hanging out together, smoking weed and drinking a few beers, to five men who couldn’t stand each other. Everything was reeling out of control.
Not that I was going to complain. I only had to look around, at my house, my wife and kids, my Mercedes and my Porsche, to know that I was onto a good thing. Regardless of the bad times, nothing I had yet experienced was going to make me blow this scene. I was gonna work as hard as I could, play my best, write as many songs as possible, be the first at rehearsals and the last to leave the studio, and be as diplomatic and easygoing as I possibly could—anything not to have the wrath of “The Gods” focused on me.
I honestly didn’t know how much I had in the bank back then. As far as I was concerned, until I got a call to tell me I was broke, I didn’t want to know. I’d made it. I was a rock-and-roll star, and the business managers could see to the cash flow.
TWELVE
The afternoon was perfect. It was July, and I was home for a few days, spending time with my family at our beach house in Malibu while Jesse splashed about in an inflatable wading pool nearby. I’d just been for a swim in my cutoff shorts and was still wet, sitting on a couch in the living room, looking out at the sun glittering on the water, and thinking how incredibly lucky I was.
Susan and I had produced two healthy, beautiful babies. We were rich beyond our wildest dreams and still very much in love. No matter what happened when I was on the road or in the studio, I never stopped wanting to come home to her and the children, and I fully intended to spend the rest of my life with her. She knew that, and whatever she may have suspected about what went on when I was away, she never once asked. Our wedding vows in Boston five years earlier had spoken of cherishing each other and nurturing what we had. Nothing had changed, including how I felt inside. To me, she was still the pretty little blonde with the angel face I first met outside the Howard Johnson motel in Gainesville. I’d fallen for her then and had never quite picked myself up off the floor.
Now, here I was, sharing this beautiful life with her, playing music and being paid handsomely for it too. Regardless of the infighting, what we had achieved as a band was pure and bright and true. We’d created something far bigger than who we were or how we felt individually. The music we made really touched people. I promised myself never to lose sight of that and to try my hardest to make the others
remember it too.
Feeling inspired and picking up an acoustic twelve-string guitar I had lying around, I started strumming absentmindedly while staring out at the ocean, inhaling the fresh salt air, and before I knew it, a few opening chords just kind of oozed out. I played with them, teased them, pushed them further than they’d ever intended to go, and suddenly had something that sounded pretty cool. It was about thirty-two bars long, with a verse and a chorus—a sparkling little gem that fell out of the spectacular view before me. When I had finished playing, the musical vibrations hung suspended in the air before fading into silence. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end. Duane Allman was right. If your spine tingles, it’s working.
I had a little TEAC four-track studio set up in the spare bedroom, and I ran back there to put the idea down before I forgot it. I wanted a reggae-sounding backbeat, but the closest I had on my drum machine, an old Roland Rhythm Ace, was the cha-cha, so I played the twelve-string on top of that. It sounded OK, but I knew I needed to leave it for a while, so I went off to play with my kids and came back to it later. Over the next few hours, I kept tinkering around with it. The tempo was right, but it needed another section and a chorus, the payoff. I tried three or four different chord progressions and then finally I went back down and put a bass track with a reggae feel on it.
“If Joe and I had to do this,” I thought, “how would we play it?” I was working to an exact cast, thinking of each band member’s strengths and weaknesses, trying to find just the right arrangement. With Joe on board, it was a new challenge for me to come up with parts that would outdo him, against which he could retaliate and come back with something that was equal to or one up on me. I knew I couldn’t write a complicated drum track for someone who was singing, too, but I could write a song that suited Don’s voice, and one that Randy could provide a good bass backbeat to. Joe, Glenn, and I could take center stage and blow the audience away with some haunting guitar solos, I thought, so I wrote two guitar parts in descending harmony, a hornline sort of thing, until I got to the end, alternating them the way my dad had taught me when he had me count one, three, five, seven, then two, four, six, eight on my little Voice of Music tape recorder.
By the end of the afternoon, when I’d mixed the whole thing to mono, there was a little bit of everything that had ever happened to me in that song. There was some Maundy Quintet bass, some basic Paul Hillis classical phrasing, some free-form Flow-style solos with a bit of Miles Davis thrown in, and some good old Elvis Presley rock-and-roll guitar. I could imagine the harmonies that would go with it would be very Crosby, Stills & Nash and sounded positively sun-kissed. It was, I later realized, the soundtrack of my life.
The record company was pushing us to get going on the new album. We relocated to a ranch out near Calabasas, just outside Los Angeles, to listen to what new material everyone had and to rehearse. The actual recording was to be done and mixed later by Bill, the Soul Pole, at the Record Plant in L.A. and at Criteria Studios in Miami.
I’d put together a demo cassette with about ten or fifteen different tracks, including that glorious summer day’s offering, fully expecting most of them to be dispatched to outtake heaven by “The Gods.” Some had been milling around in my head that whole summer; some were even older. I was always tinkering around with sounds, singing into a Dictaphone in the car, laying down half-tracks, stray chords, or melodies that ran through my head, hoping that one of them might develop into something. More often than not, when I listened to them later, they were stillborns. The original concept had evaporated, the feeling had gone, and so had the glimpse of inspiration, so I’d erase them and start again. Some people work very methodically at creating music, putting in regular hours, but I can’t work that way. I need to feel like it’s a lover I haven’t seen for a while and be excited and enthusiastic about our reunion. You can’t force inspiration. If there’s something in there to be released, it’ll find its own way out.
We were at the Calabasas ranch, with old wagons in the yard. Photographer David Alexander was taking our photos for the new album sleeve, when Don, the Sonic Bat, put my demo tape onto a little blaster he had and started listening. Song after song came and went without much reaction from the bat cave, and I was beginning to feel a little dispirited.
When the one I wrote that fine day in Malibu came on, however, Don sat up, listened carefully, stopped the tape, rewound, and played it again. I’d pretty much worked out the entire arrangement. I’d added some harmony and electric guitar parts, and the whole thing was underscored by this reggae beat. At the very end, I had two guitar solos, trading between a Stratocaster and my favorite ’59 Les Paul Starburst, as if Joe and I were going toe-to-toe. I could tell from Glenn’s face that he liked that part the best.
“Hey, I love this track, Fingers,” Don said, with a rare smile. “It sounds Spanish, like a matador or something. Very Latino.”
Glenn nodded his approval. “Yeah.”
“Oh, good,” I said, feeling like a puppy that had just been patted for peeing outside.
“Let’s call it ‘Mexican Bolero,’ ” Don said.
“OK,” I said, grinning. The fact that Don had granted it a name was a very good sign.
I originally recorded the track in E minor, which was great. The electric guitars were big and fat, and the twelve-string sounded nice and full. We continued playing it in that key right up until Don had to sing the lyrics and realized it was too high for him. “It’s in the wrong key,” he announced.
Disappointed, I replied, “Oh, OK, what do you need? D?”
“No,” he replied, scratching his head. We sat down and eventually decided on B minor, although that’s one of the worst possible keys for guitar. I struggled manfully with the new key, hating every second of it at first, because it sounded so thin and flat compared to the killer E-minor sound.
The only trouble was, the song was six minutes and change, with its unusual chromatic progression and its sudden shift from a minor key to the dominant major key for the chorus. Years of free-form jazz phrasing at jam sessions in Boston had made me slightly overindulgent when it came to track length.
Nobody seemed to notice. Best of all, Glenn had a germ of an idea while he was listening to it. He was great at conceptualizing and was listening to a lot of Steely Dan at the time. “This could be about the fantasy of California,” he said. “I can see this guy driving down a desert highway at night in a convertible and seeing the lights of L.A. way off on the horizon.”
We all knew that feeling; we’d all driven into LA from our respective homes and been overwhelmed by the awesome spectacle of the city, with its twinkling lights spread before us. Don snapped the image in his mind and took it from there, expanding it to the guy seeing a hotel in the distance and deciding to rest for the night. There, where he is served pink champagne under mirrored ceilings, a woman walks in. “It’s such a lovely place,” he muses with that uncanny gift of his, as he absentmindedly adds his smoldering cigarette butt to the dozen he already has lined up in front of him. “This could be heaven or this could be hell.”
Don was very private about his lyrics. After he’d come up with a basic concept, he’d take it away and work on it secretly, and we wouldn’t hear the finished product until we were ready to record it in the studio. No one had any problems with this. After all, he was the Lyric King, and we all knew it. The only time I can ever remember all of us daring to jump in and tell him something was wrong was when, in recording “One of These Nights,” he sang that he’d been “searching for the daughter of God.”
Bill Szymczyk suggested Don might want to change that.
Thinking of my mother’s devout fellow churchgoers in the Deep South, I agreed he should change it unless he wanted every religious zealot in the States after him with a gun. The line was later changed to “I’ve been searching for an angel in white.”
We finally figured my new song out, although it took weeks of demos and rehearsals, recording, dubbing, and overdubbing.
I taught Randy how to play the complicated bass part, and Don picked up the reggae-style cha-cha beat on his drums. Joe worked out the other guitar solo that he’d play against mine at the end, and Glenn learned the rhythm part.
When Don first sang his lyrics for us all the way through at the Record Plant, we were completely stunned. I mean, that guy could sing the New York phone book and I’d buy it, but this was really something.
When the track was finally finished and laid down, and given its new name—“Hotel California”—Don said quietly, “I think this should be the single.”
“Are you crazy?” I cried, as Glenn, Joe, and Randy looked up in mutual astonishment. “This thing’s over six minutes long! We might have got away with “Lyin’ Eyes,” but AM radio won’t play anything over three minutes thirty seconds, and never anything slow. They also won’t play something that stops in the middle, then starts again, with a minute and a half of guitar solo. It ain’t gonna happen.”