Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  When I arrived home the following day, expecting my usual warm greeting, I found myself ducking a machete. She wanted to decapitate me. Slowly. To her eternal credit, she did a brilliant job of publicly pretending everything was normal for my mother’s sake and that of the children, but when we were alone, she talked to me endlessly about what I’d done and why.

  “I can’t believe you’d be so stupid! To jeopardize everything we have for this.” She waved the letter accusingly at me. “Nine years we’ve been together. Nine years. We have three small children. What were you thinking?”

  There was nothing I could say to appease her. I’d been caught red-handed and I knew it. All the years of guilt and angst conspired against me. I’d managed to persuade myself that none of the women mattered, that my infidelities were insignificant compared with the depth of feeling I had for Susan, but the pain I saw in her eyes made me realize how wrong I’d been.

  “I honestly never set out to hurt you, but you must have known what was going on,” I said lamely. “I was thrown in with Don and Glenn and Joe, with all that alcohol and drugs, you couldn’t possibly have expected me not to crack after all these years.” Even as I spoke the words, I knew how shallow they sounded.

  Whether she’d suspected or not before didn’t matter. The letter she held in her hand made our situation temporarily irredeemable. We started therapy, as a couple and separately, and I came to realize just how much distress I’d caused. I also realized how close I was to blowing my marriage. I’d almost lost her before, when we’d separated in the sixties, and my good fortune at finding her again in Boston after Flow had always been such a blessing. I knew then, as I knew now, that she was the only woman I had ever truly loved, and the thought of losing her snatched the breath from my lungs.

  It may have been a little late, but I decided there and then that I’d done all I needed to do in terms of exploring sexual experiences with other women. The breakup of the Eagles had made me realize that what really meant the most to me in my life wasn’t the band, it was Susan and the kids. I would do everything within my power to keep them.

  My heinous crime wasn’t a bear I could fully wrestle to the mat and forget, however. Susan might be able to forgive me eventually, but she could never forget. I’d created a fissure in our relationship that would reside there permanently, irreparably. Even though I tried my hardest by apologizing profusely and telling her how much I loved and admired her, and promising never to touch anyone else, the bear was always there, between us. In therapy, I became dogged with guilt, which I found impossible to purge. I’d been wracked with it enough on the road, but this was in a different league. This was true remorse. I begged forgiveness both from Susan and from a higher being for the sins I’d committed, the damage and suffering I’d caused, not only to my family but to all those women I’d used and abused.

  A great many other beasts were awoken by the therapy too, as they so often are. One was the issue of control. Because I was away so much, Susan had understandably assumed control of the house and the kids and the Mexican maids and our three pet dogs. It was she who chose and bought the furniture and the drapes, disciplined the children, and decided where they should go to school and how they should dress. When I came home and tried to impose a different regime, or make a suggestion about something she might like to consider, my input was largely ignored or overlooked. The kids knew that when Dad was home, things were suddenly more ordered, but as soon as I was gone, they could all relax and go back to their normal lives. The effect had been to make me feel less and less involved in family life and more and more on the periphery, which, our therapist explained, had helped push me into the arms of other women.

  “Don needs to feel a part of his family and this home,” she told Susan. “He needs to feel that the little authority he does have isn’t constantly undermined. Until he does, he’ll never be able to come to terms with the two very separate parts of his life. Or worse, he’ll start to feel more comfortable with the on-the-road persona than he does with the home one, and you may lose him altogether.”

  The therapist made a lot of sense, although she still made me feel like a complete failure as a husband and father. She also made me realize—too late—that being a rock star wasn’t a horrible thing to be. I’d learned to cope with the negatives and savor the positives, like the money and the fame and the ability to play music. There was a thrilling element to my life that allowed me to walk out onto a stage in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans and do my stuff. But when I came home and wanted real intimacy, to counter the increasing isolation I felt on the road, despite or perhaps because of the women I slept with, I was faced instead with control issues and a distancing between Susan and me that only fed my guilt. Often, she made me admit, it was a relief to go back on tour, to a life that was more familiar and easier to deal with.

  If I could have turned back the clock and been a better person then, I would have done so. Susan, Jesse, Rebecca, and Cody were my life, and there was, I knew, a very real danger that I might lose them. And for what? To satisfy the carnal beast? To impress my fellow band members and not be regarded by them with suspicion and contempt? I prayed for extra strength to help me through the many trials I was now facing. Was this how I was going to end up?—an embittered, unemployed guitarist, divorced from his wife, a weekend dad, living in some apartment alone somewhere? I prayed not.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, within six months of the band splitting up and the start of my problems with Susan, I was hospitalized with chronic diverticulitis, inflammation of the colon, which erupted within me like a burning spear. I’d been trying to deal with the stress of my life in a very self-healing way, but internally my body was eating itself alive. I spent a week in the Santa Monica Hospital on intravenous antibiotics, feeling utterly wretched about myself and the path my life seemed to be taking.

  A nurse brought me a telephone one afternoon. “Felder, it’s Irving,” the voice on the line said.

  I was touched at the thought of Irving calling to see how I was. I should have known better.

  “Just to let you know,” he said, without asking a single question about my well-being. “Joe Walsh is putting together a solo album, and he’s recorded one of the songs you wrote for the last album which didn’t make it. It was the one called ‘You’re Really High, Aren’t You?’ He’s gonna redo the lyrics and change it around a bit, and would like your permission to use it on his new album.”

  “Er, well, Irv, I was kinda keeping that one for the future,” I said, at a loss for what to say, my head flopping back onto my pillow with a searing wave of pain.

  I felt as though he wasn’t asking me, he was telling me, as Joe’s manager, that this was how it was going to be. I think I was supposed to be grateful.

  I’d always been careful about spending money. When you come from poverty, you never quite believe your luck will last. In L.A., I saw plenty of other people make mistakes. They’d join bands, have some success, and make lots of money. Ten years later, they’d be subsisting in rundown little condominiums in the Valley because they’d blown it all. I was somewhat cognizant of this danger. I also had a good business manager, who’d invested in some profitable real estate ventures for me, but I was still only in my thirties, and none of my investments had yet left me financially solvent for the rest of my days. With the lucrative income from touring cut off, a future living on royalties alone would obviously have a big impact on my family and me. I had enough to live on, but if I wanted to maintain our lifestyle, I would definitely have to reconsider my options.

  I’d bought a big house on a two-acre lot in Bonsall Canyon, Malibu, from Tommy Chong of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong, both of whom became close friends. My immediate neighbors were Jimmy Pankow from the band Chicago on one side and the actor Nick Nolte on the other. Nick used to have such wild parties with Gary Busey and his friends that Jimmy would call me up in the middle of the night and say, “Hey, Felder, turn that music down!” and I’d yell back, �
��It’s not me, it’s Nolte.”

  Jimmy was a great family man, living high on the hog with seven acres filled with thoroughbred horses and Rolls-Royces. He was always inviting me over for barbecues with his friends, most of whom were his fellow band members. I can remember watching them all getting along so well, their wives and kids in tow, and wishing our band had been like that.

  Our house was a California-style property designed by the man who built the Disneyland Hotel. It had a living room forty feet square that was like a hotel lobby. Irving had recommended his architect and interior designer to us and Susan met with them and decided what we wanted, which was effectively a whole new house on the back of this living room, so we had to move into rental houses until it was done.

  When the band split up and I came home to live in the remodeled house, I just didn’t feel comfortable. There was far too much marble and granite for me; it felt more than a little gauche. I’d come from meager means, and my new home seemed opulent and pretentious. I was, quite frankly, embarrassed by it. Worst of all, I felt I had been completely omitted from the planning. Everything seemed very feminine, and there wasn’t even a corner for me to have a comfortable recliner to feel at home.

  I discussed it with Susan, and we eventually agreed that there was no point in my feeling uncomfortable in my own home, so we sold the house and bought a five-acre piece of land at Paradise Cove, for which I started designing a new house. To supplement my income and stop myself from going mad, I went back to school and acquired the qualifications I needed for a real estate license, to broker my own property transactions. I hoped that by doing that and trying my hand at a few different jobs, such as writing movie scores, or doing some TV work, I could finally get to stay home with my wife and kids after years on the road.

  For the first few years of their lives, my kids had grown up with an absentee father. I’d come home and they’d look at me and say, “Oh yeah, you live here, don’t you? You sleep with Mom. I remember you.” I’d be there for a week or two, then go. I missed school plays, parent evenings, soccer games, and many of the major events in their young lives. OK, I was Santa Claus each time I came home, laden with gifts and toys, my plunders from the big wide world, but it wasn’t the same. Our grueling schedule prevented me from being an active participant in their development, despite all the astronomically expensive telephone calls. Poor Susan was effectively a single parent. Now all that was going to change.

  I refused, point-blank, to go back on the road—even when friends in the industry offered me a chance to tour with them. I was enjoying time with my kids again. I’d get up at six o’clock in the morning and make strawberry pancakes for breakfast, each one with their initials cooked into the batter. I drove my kids and their friends to school in the car pool. I became the Little League and soccer coach.

  Jesse was wild about technology and computers and building things like remote-control cars and gliders, so I encouraged him to follow his passion. Warner Brothers gave us one of the first Atari computers, and he and I played a game called Lemonade Stand on it, in which you had to decide how many lemons and how much sugar to buy to make lemonade, depending on the weather predictions for the next few days. Man, he loved that. Later I bought him Millionaire, a stock market game in which he built up his own imaginary portfolio. I took him to the New York Stock Exchange to see how it worked firsthand. He even appeared in People magazine at America’s first computer camp when he was eight years old. With his white-blond hair, he looked like the kid from The Champ. I could have called him Cotton.

  When he was ten years old, he came to me and asked me to teach him how to play guitar. At first I discouraged him and refused, using reverse psychology to make him want it even more. He’d beg me to teach him a few licks, until finally I’d relent, but only after I made him listen to B.B. King and Eric Clapton and Duane Allman.

  “I knew Duane Allman,” I’d tell him. “It was he who taught me how to play slide. And I once shook B.B. King’s hand.”

  “Really, Dad?” he’d say, not sure whether to believe me or not. Then he’d go up to his room and practice for hours, cranking it up on his own, but never in public. He was far too shy.

  I spoiled all the kids rotten, and they were constantly complaining that I was too affectionate with them in public. I guess I was trying to compensate for the lack of physical affection my parents had shown me. Whereas I’d had very few birthday parties, they had massive, catered events with balloons and clowns and magicians. Christmases involved the biggest tree, with me dressing up as Santa and dishing out gifts like huge scale train sets or rocking horses. It was a million miles from my Christmases in Florida, with two small gifts under the tree for Jerry and me—usually much-needed items of clothing or shoes—and the crafts for Mom and Dad that we’d made at school. Or from my first Christmas in that first-floor apartment in Culver City with Susan and Kilo, where we’d made a star out of tin foil and cut pictures from magazines to decorate our skinny little tree.

  I don’t think my kids really understood that their father was a rock star. To them I was just Dad. I played guitar and was away a lot. The only thing that made me stand out from the crowd was the way I looked, with my shoulder-length hair, beard, and mustache. One day, when I’d just dropped Rebecca off at school and was walking her to her class, I overheard one of her friends, who’d previously only seen me from the back, cry, “Rebecca! Your mom’s got a beard!” Maybe my dad was right. Maybe it was time to shave.

  When Don Henley invited me on the road with him for his first solo tour, I turned him down. Not only did I not want to tour again, but the salary he offered was five thousand dollars a week—that of a sideman, not a band member or the lead guitarist of the Eagles. He made the offer through Irving, instead of calling me direct, and I wrote and told him that I wasn’t really interested, despite my enormous respect for him as a singer and songwriter. His letter of reply said, “I don’t see any reason why we can’t write together and remain in touch,” and so we did. I’d send him tapes now and then, and he came and sang on a few records for me, but he was writing with Danny Kortchmar and other people he felt were fresh and new. He was enjoying heading in a different direction and that was cool.

  Instead of going on the road, I concentrated on the completion of our new home, in between writing and performing some songs for film, including the soundtrack for an animated movie called Heavy Metal. I also wrote the title theme song and sound score for an animated Saturday morning CBS series my kids loved called Galaxy High. I did another song, called “Wild Life,” which became the title track for a Neil Simon movie called The Slugger’s Wife, and I contributed some music for a film called Fast Times at Ridgemont High, written by none other than little Cameron Crowe, the Rolling Stone reporter who’d been on the road with us.

  I did some session work for people like Stevie Nicks, Bob Seger, Warren Zevon, Boz Scaggs, and the Bee Gees, and I helped my friends Chicago out a couple of times when their guitarist, Donnie Dacus, left them. I worked on an album by Mickey Thomas of Jefferson Starship, which saw me back working with the inimitable Bill Szymczyk, and I helped Joe Walsh with his solo records. I even ended up cohosting a music video program for kids called Fun TV or FTV. My kids loved it. They were much more impressed with that than anything I’d done with the Eagles.

  The record company waited two years before they officially confirmed that the Eagles had split, and in May 1982, shortly after the announcement, Glenn released his first solo album No Fun Aloud, more than half of which was cowritten with Jack Tempchin, his collaborator on one of the band’s first hits, “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” Glenn swapped his trademark long hair and handlebar moustache for a clean-cut look, and the distinctive Eagles sound for his Detroit rhythm-and-blues roots. No Fun Aloud sold around five hundred thousand copies. Don Henley, meanwhile, was in the midst of his nationwide tour when his hit single “Dirty Laundry” climbed to number three and helped his album I Can’t Stand Still sell around seven hundred thousand copies.r />
  The trouble was that, after years of keeping our names out of the newspapers and our faces off Eagles album covers in favor of the artist Boyd Elder’s incredible decorative cattle skulls, no one really knew who Don Henley and Glenn Frey were—or any of us, for that matter. For years, we’d been able to walk around L.A., into restaurants, clubs, and theaters, and melt anonymously into the crowd. It is one of the great bonuses of being an Eagle. No one knows what we looked like. Furthermore, Don and Glenn were now competing in the charts against the Eagles’ Greatest Hits Volume 2, released by Asylum/Elektra in time for the 1982 Christmas market, cobbled together from Hotel California and The Long Run. Despite its lack of direct involvement with the band, it far outsold both solo albums. It was a hard act to follow.

  When asked if the Eagles would ever reunite, Don famously replied. “Yeah, sure, when hell freezes over.”

  My mother, who was leading a full and busy life in Gainesville, remarried in 1982, having met her new husband, Oliver Reynolds, through the church. She finally moved out of the house I’d grown up in and into Oliver’s concrete-block property with a yard, closer to her sister. The old house remained in the family; my father’s younger sister moved in. Once again, I paid for that old house to be completely remodeled and refurbished. My mother rejected my offer of a Hawaiian honeymoon as a wedding present and asked for a small check instead.