by Don Felder
I thought well, OK, that makes sense.
But then I began to think a bit more about percentages and income, wondering if it was all just as Irving said. How come he could afford such a big share? And was it normal for the on-tour accountant, employed to keep tabs on everything on the road, to be answerable first and foremost to Irving?
I never thought to speak to friends in other bands to see if they were getting the same deal or better. Everyone I knew was equally unsophisticated as far as even understanding how the royalty, merchandising, and tour-accounting side of the business worked, so nobody could have given me any straight answers. Still, I resolved that I’d keep asking questions if something came up that bothered me. After all, I had every right.
Hotel California was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year, which it won in March 1978. We had become the biggest selling U.S. band of the decade. We were holed up in my little studio out in Malibu, rehearsing and working on some demo tracks for the next album, sitting around drinking beer and watching television, when they announced the award, and Andy Williams stepped up to accept it for us.
“Why didn’t we go accept it ourselves?” I asked someone.
“We don’t want to be a part of this Hollywood jive business crap,” came the reply.
Everyone looked at each other blankly.
The following day, there was a spate of heated press conferences, claiming and counterclaiming that Irving had, or had not, told the awards organizers we wouldn’t go to the show to collect our prize unless we were guaranteed to win. I didn’t know anything about it.
Later that summer, we challenged the editorial team of Rolling Stone to a softball game. If the reporters won, we’d give them a rare interview; if we won, we’d write an article describing how we trounced them. It would, we hoped, finally settle the score between us and Jann Wenner, the magazine’s editor and driving force. The game took place on May 7, 1978, at the University of Southern California and was heavily attended by invited press. Pregame tactics included abusive notes left on Don and Glenn’s doorsteps, calling them sissies and beach bums.
We all wore black-and-gold caps, and Irving wore a T-shirt that said, “Is Jann Wenner Tragically Hip?” Joe Smith, chairman of Elektra/Asylum, made the public announcements. The first was that Jimmy Buffett could no longer play on our side, because he’d broken his leg; the second was that we should stand for the “national anthem,” a shortened version of “Life in the Fast Lane.” Governor Jerry Brown was there rooting for us. We brought in a couple of ringers from our road crew, truck drivers and buddies from other bands who were good players, as an insurance policy, because Don and Glenn were pretty thin and puny in those days and not terribly athletic.
I always thought it strange that Don offered them a sports challenge and not a writing one, which he’d have won hands down. Fortunately for us, the journalists who turned up to play us were as out of condition as we were, and after a difficult game, we won. Everyone went to Dan Tana’s afterward for a victory meal, and journalists and band members sat alongside each other, gobbling spaghetti, getting along fine. The feud was officially over.
To hear the songs I’ d helped write or co-written being played on the radio all the time was a real treat for me, especially in the car. There was something about driving around L.A. in my Porsche, with “Hotel California” blasting out and the DJ saying, “Well, that was the classic song from the classic American band.” Don always said the ultimate litmus test for a track was whether or not it sounded good on the car stereo. He’d spend a lot of time driving around, listening to demo tracks and giving them “the test.” He thought up some of his best lyrics behind the wheel. Unlike him, I don’t think I ever tired of listening to our songs being played after they’d been released, but our record company knew that the public soon would. They demanded a follow-up album.
I had something like fifteen or so tracks ready for what was originally planned as a double album, and Irving sent us back to Bill Szymczyk and his Bayshore Recording Studio in Coconut Grove, Florida, to record. Once settled in, our latest addition, Timothy, delivered the first usable song, “I Can’t Tell You Why,” which the band first rehearsed together in my little Malibu studio. It was a great ballad with Randy-style vocals and an opening for me to play some really sensual guitar.
“This is a killer track, Timmy,” I told him. “I’m gonna have some fun working out my guitar parts for this.”
Don and Glenn seemed burned out. They spent hours in stony silence facing each other, neither one able to suggest any new lyrics, each one staring at Don’s trademark cigarette butts, which he left standing around on every available work surface. They appeared to resent our attempts to write more songs, and finally told the record label the album would be delayed until they had what they felt were “acceptable” songs. To speed them along, Joe Smith mailed them a rhyming dictionary.
It wasn’t really surprising that there was a creative lull after Hotel, but the record company’s expectations were unreasonably high. They expected us to deliver an album every year and go on the road. Irving would call or come down in person and tell us what they wanted.
We’d sit and listen to what he had to say, and Don would say quietly, “Don’t rush us, Irving. They’ll get it when it’s done.” He was often the one who stood up to the executives and put them in their place, I think maybe because it took the greatest toll on him. Naturally pensive, he became even more introverted, fretting inwardly about what we were doing and where we were heading musically. He was once reported as saying, “Every minute I’m awake, even when I’m asleep, I’m worried about the next album and what’s going to be written on it and how it’s going to do and how it’s going to be accepted and how my peers are going to react and how we’re going to make it better than the last one and how the record company is on our case about hurry-up-we-didn’t-get-an-album-from-you-in- 1978-and-it’s-not-going-to-look-good-on-our-stock-report-and-what-about-the-profit-sharing-plan.”
Months passed without any new songs. When it was clear the new album had definitely stalled, we spent the rest of that year on the road, not writing any new material at all. Instead of the moneymaking album they’d hoped for, the record company received one song, a cover of Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas.” It reached number eighteen in the charts. On the flipside was a song called “Funky New Year,” in which we all clinked glasses and made a lot of noise while Glenn played saxophone. He decided he wanted to play sax after hearing Dave Sanborn play, but he was nowhere near as good, and he never played sax on a record again, thank God.
It would have been really smart to take some time off, let everyone spend time at home and rest up after those blockbuster first five years, but instead we ran at a pace we couldn’t possibly endure, especially not with the drugs and the pressure to produce new material. There was a lot of steam building up in the pressure cooker.
Worst, for me, were the long absences from my family. We’d be gone for six or seven weeks at a time, home for a couple of weeks, then back in the studio or on tour. We were working a good ten months out of every year, and it was a long, hard run without much time off. I had little kids who didn’t travel well, and Susan was pregnant again with our third child, but my family needs weren’t really considered by anyone in the band. I resorted to calling home several times a day to talk to Jesse and Rebecca on the phone. I’d send them gifts in the mail, or bring them toys and goodies whenever I came back, but it was no substitute for being a full-time dad. I was painfully aware that I was cheating them out of a normal family life because of my career.
When I did come home, I overcompensated massively. I’d take them to Bass Lake and teach them how to swim or up to Lake Tahoe to ski. I was great friends with Jimmy Pankow from the band Chicago, and we’d rent houses together, his family and mine, for camping weekends. All my kids learned basic survival skills from a very early age. I showed them how to fish, I told them about frog-gigging, and I m
ade them their first aquaplane board so that they, too, could fly under the water as I had once done.
“Did you really see manatees under the water, Dad?” Jesse would ask, wide-eyed.
“Yes, son, and we had to avoid the snakes and the alligators in the water.”
“Wow! Cool.”
Our son Cody was born in October 1978 in a candlelit bedroom of our beach house in Malibu while I held Susan’s hand and the moonlight danced on the waves outside. We called him Little Buddha or the Broad Beach Blubber, because he was so pudgy. Right from the start, he had a mind of his own and was a great kid. “This one’s gonna be trouble,” I told Susan, as he wriggled and kicked his way out of every diaper change.
I jumped at the chance to look after him and cuddle him when he cried at night—anything to make some sort of early connection with him. Susan and I were true “granola parents,” never allowing the kids sugar or candy, red meat, or saturated fat. Instead they grew up on fruit, vegetables, yogurt, and lean white meat. When they went to friends’ houses, I’m sure they ate entire boxes of Froot Loops. Susan didn’t smoke, drink alcohol, or take other drugs. She was a yoga instructor and breast-fed all our children. Thanks to her, I was probably the healthiest drug addict in town. I was determined to be as diligent a parent as she and become a permanent figure in their lives, despite my long absences from home. I went from Rock God to Diaper God overnight. My so-called reclusiveness caused some frustration among the fans, because I was never out partying with Don and Glenn in L.A. or Colorado. I wasn’t photographed as often as they were and seldom was able to sign autographs, so very few were able to collect a full set of Eagles autographs. I just wanted to immerse myself in the humbling, awe-inspiring business of being a father and a husband.
While the others were celebrating New Year’s Eve in their various ways, I was pacing the floorboards, nursing a bawling Cody through colic.
Trouble was, most of the time, Susan and I were furiously treading water trying to keep our noses above the waves. Our lives constantly fluctuated between the times when I was there and the times when I wasn’t. My career was the driving force behind our busy schedules, and there wasn’t very much time for our relationship. We never argued, we just avoided confronting the issues that were eating away at both of us, like when we were going to be able to spend some quality time together. We would do anything rather than bring up difficult or delicate situations that might be explosive, because I’d just been dealing with that sort of conflict every day. When I came home, the last thing I wanted to do was be confrontational or demanding. Nor did I want to offload the turbulence of my relationship with the band onto my wife. I just wanted to relax and be caring and loving. Sadly, in the end, I think we avoided so much that our relationship itself became something of a void.
Glenn was facing other challenges. In the beginning, he’d written or sung most of the hits. He was the voice and face of the Eagles and he was still producing great songs like the number one hit “Heartache Tonight,” but all that was changing. As Don’s creative ability and individual successes surpassed his, Glenn’s input seemed to be inferior. Everyone’s was. Don kept the peace by stepping back as much as he could and letting Glenn believe he was still running the show. Glenn saw straight through that, though. He’d never liked sharing the driver’s seat, but now he was being expected to shift into the back.
With Don ever more prominent, Glenn appeared to feel the need to focus his discontent on someone else. It didn’t matter if it was a roadie or guitar player, Glenn often made someone the target of his abuse. We called them his “random victims.” From one day to the next, he’d pick someone at random then humiliate them in order, I suppose, to make himself feel superior. He gave us all nicknames that seemed to be calculated to bring out our insecurities. David Sanborn, who had a withered hand, was called Flipper. When my hair started to thin slightly at the back, he started to call me Spot. One of the sound engineers was dubbed Larry, because Glenn decided, unfairly, that he looked like Larry from the Three Stooges. Tommy Nixon, Glenn’s right-hand man, usually took the brunt, but when Glenn grew bored with baiting Tommy, he’d focus on someone else. Tommy was a nice guy, absolutely dedicated to Glenn after starting out as his guitar roadie in the seventies, and he was totally dependent on him for money and a job. I’m ashamed now that I stood by for all those years watching another human being so humiliated.
One of us should have stood up for Tommy, but taking on Glenn when he was in that kind of mood wasn’t easy. Some of his victimization was done in the name of humor, but it was usually done at someone else’s expense, allowing him to play his power card and keep everyone around him subservient. It was an emotional problem that should have been addressed with therapy of some kind, and maybe Prozac, not more cocaine. We were all finding it increasingly difficult to operate at our level of success with such heavy drug use, struggling through severe hangovers every day.
My turn to be a random victim would come whenever I asked awkward questions about management. Glenn saw this as an annoyance. “You shouldn’t be bothered with all that, Fingers,” he’d tell me, crossly. “Irving’s in control.”
For whatever reason, Glenn began to make me feel like I was the chief focus of his anger. I don’t think I ever did anything directly to piss him off, except maybe not kowtow to him like some other people; it was just my turn. Besides the nicknames, Glenn seemed to delight in mimicking people in a humiliating way. He’d amplify something in your voice or character and act it out for an admiring, laughing audience. That’s fair game, I guess, but then he found my Achilles’ heel.
I’d never been overly confident singing onstage. If I stepped from the back of the line up to the microphone, I would never march up to it like him, the Teen King. I’d walk up, in step with the music, in a sort of stilted gait. My reticence was clear. I’m not a singer, I’m a guitar player, and I was always reluctant about singing, especially with Don glaring at the back of my head with eyes like lasers. I knew he was behind the drum riser, scrutinizing every note, which was very intimidating.
During one particular rehearsal, Glenn sarcastically announced, “And let’s hear it now, gents, for Fingers Felder, singing his Number One hit, ‘Hotel California.’ ” He then mimicked how I stepped to the microphone in my hesitant way. Everyone in the road crew and band, even the stagehands, was laughing. Normally I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, but for some reason, that day I lost it completely, instead of letting it wash over me. In fact, I was so angry that I followed him into the bathroom afterward, grabbed him, and threw him up against one of the metal partitions between the urinal and the toilet.
“You ever talk to me or humiliate me like that in public again, Roach, and I’m gonna break your fucking nose,” I told him, holding him by his shirt collar, my fist balled. I was sick and tired of his abuse, not only of me but many others.
He seemed shocked. “Er, no, Fingers, I’m sorry. It was just a joke, man. Cool it,” he said. I somehow managed to reel myself back in and walk away.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a point of no return.
In the summer of 1979, we were back to the grindstone in Miami. Don’s vocals on “The Long Run” made us think we might finally be able to finish the album and have our title track, but the days of Don and Glenn sitting down and happily writing songs together, and of us actually believing we could deliver a double album, had ended. Of ten songs, seven were collaborations with people like J.D. Souther or Bob Seger. One was Joe Walsh’s solo work, “In the City.” My contribution was two songs, “The Disco Strangler,” and “Those Shoes,” although there were at least three other tracks I’d brought to the album that Don had started to do something with but was never able to finish.
I remember sitting in the studio and playing one track that I’d written and was especially proud of, called “You’re Really High, Aren’t You?” We’d started to record it, and Don sat there and suddenly said, “I see it. I know what I gotta do with that track.
” Everybody thought, “Oh great, we’ve got another one,” but sadly, he never followed through, and the track was consigned to the cutting room floor. It was very disheartening, and the frustration was immense. I put that track carefully to one side in the hope that maybe for the next album, Don’s inspiration would return.
For “Those Shoes,” which was accepted, I wrote most of the music—drum parts, bass, and guitar parts—except the solo, which was Joe’s. I wrote it as a demo and gave it to Don and Glenn, and we added talk-box guitars and beefed it up a little. The concept behind the song was, I believe, how high heels turn a man on. Don took my basic track and ran with it. At the end, he sang, “Merci, Monsieur Jourdan,” a tribute to the shoe designer Charles Jourdan.
“Disco Strangler” was designed as an antidote to the Bee Gees- discotheque craze that was going on at the time, after the success of the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, with John Travolta. The one thing the Eagles agreed on was that we all hated disco music. It seemed so unmusical and repetitive to us ballad boys. There was no melody to it, just four-on-the-floor, straight quarter-note, bass drum beats, so I took that as a basis and played with it. Don sang the lyrics after coming up with the concept of a woman dancing in the spotlight, urging people to look at her and how beautiful she is. The disco strangler, who’s been waiting in the wings all along, “the fiddler in your darkest night,” is ready to slide his hands around her pretty throat. I had a good time recording that one cut.