by Don Felder
She remained as active as ever, although she finally gave up work when she remarried, spending her time taking bus trips with Oliver instead. They traveled quite a bit and enjoyed church outings, until Ollie developed Alzheimer’s and my mother became his full-time caregiver. Even then, she wouldn’t accept help. Jerry and I paid for someone to come in three days a week to cook, leave food in the refrigerator, and do the heavy cleaning, but she lasted less than two weeks before my mother told her to get out and not come back. “She didn’t do things the way I like them,” Mom explained.
The same year she and Ollie were married, David Blue, whose career had nosedived in the years since I had stopped playing with him, dropped dead while jogging in New York. He was forty years old. I didn’t hear about it until some time later, but the news was shocking. He and I had been contemporaries out on the road together, and now his life was over. I couldn’t help thinking about the time we’d spent together, snorting cocaine, smoking pot, and taking Valium, and I wondered if that had anything to do with his sudden demise. The loss only made me think longer and harder about what I was doing with my life and made me work even harder to keep my marriage going.
In November 1982, our fourth child, Leah, was born. With this birth, we felt we had come full circle from that sad time. Our family was complete. We had survived the traumas I had wreaked upon us, and we had a new baby to concentrate on. I’d lie in bed early in the morning, Leah’s still, warm weight upon my chest, and pray silently to the Lord to thank him for the blessings I’d been given. What had started as a dreadful beginning to the new decade was suddenly looking brighter. I wondered what the next few years would bring.
With Glenn and Don embarking on solo careers, and Joe and Timothy talking about doing a record each, I decided I might as well give it a try, as long as I didn’t have to do any extensive touring. I’d had enough of walking around on eggshells and not saying what I really felt about songs and lyrics. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do and not be a slave to someone else’s agenda. As an inducement for the last Eagles album, Elektra/Asylum had offered each of us a record deal, so I decided to take up the offer.
My budget was around $300,000, which wasn’t huge, so I converted my guesthouse into a full-blown recording studio, with a drum room, a twenty-four track, and a piano. That way I wouldn’t have to be looking over my shoulder all the time or worrying about spiraling studio costs of around $20,000 a week. With time on my side, I’d be able to experiment: If I didn’t like something, I could redo it. The only other person in the studio was an engineer I hired to record the music while I played. I had scores of tracks I’d written for the Eagles, which had never been used. Unearthing them, I chose the best, and worked on them, endlessly reshaping the original sound.
I called the new album Airborne, to signify that this Eagle wasn’t grounded, and worked on it for over a year. I invited friends like Jimmy Pankow and Lee Loughnane (of Chicago), Dave Mason (of Fleetwood Mac and Traffic), Kenny Loggins, and Timothy B. Schmit to provide backup music and vocals, along with a whole bunch of buddies from the business. I played all the guitars, sang all the lead and most of the backup vocals, and played some synthesizer. We had a lot of fun together in the studio, and I enjoyed every minute of working with such outstanding talent.
Cody, who was about four years old and absolutely fearless, would often come into the studio to sneak up on me. “Hey, buddy,” I’d say as I saw his mop of white Felder hair bob up and down past the studio window. “Wanna come in and listen to what Daddy’s doin’?” He’d sit on my lap, smiling at me, gap-toothed, listening to the music I was making. It was sheer delight to spend such time with the children. These were simple pleasures I’d been denied for so long.
With the album nearly ready, I was painfully aware of the comparisons that would undoubtedly be drawn with the Eagles. One song was called “Still Alive,” a comment on my journey through life with the Eagles and my relationship with Susan. Another song, called “Night Owl,” was about the lightless rock-and-roll lifestyle—living in the darkness and going to bed when the sun comes up, a statement on the slithering, intoxicated nights we had allowed to devour us. A song called “Bad Girls,” with a couple of great double-guitar parts, was a track I’d originally offered to the Eagles for The Long Run. Joe and I had come up with it in one all-night drinking session. It was previously entitled “Wild Turkey.” I finished it for this album and wrote a different lyric. My favorite was a number called “Who Tonight?” on the theme of fidelity. It was not unlike that timeless song from Stephen Stills, “Love the One You’re With.”
The trouble was, I still had serious inhibitions about my voice. I mixed my voice down so low that you had to strain to even hear it above my guitar playing. For years, I’d been browbeaten into believing that my voice was mediocre at best. When it was time for me to step up to the mike for my own album, my self-confidence was a bludgeoned, bleeding thing, and it showed.
I remember Joe Walsh telling me once how hard it was to be a solo artist because you had to do everything yourself, and I suddenly understood what he meant. Even at the lowest moments of the Eagles, we’d always had each other as sounding boards, even if it was just to sound off. Our biggest arguments were over the music and trying to get it right. Now, I felt stuck out on a limb with no one to ask how I was doing. There was no Don or Bill to ask, “Hey, what do you think of this one?” It felt horrible to be so alone.
While I plodded on, doing my own stuff, everything was changing at the label. The likes of the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt were no longer vital to the organization, which had been completely restructured. Asylum had done a 180-degree shift, and its new direction was in black R&B acts. By 1983, Michael Jackson was the undisputed king of the charts with songs like “Billie Jean” from his best-selling album Thriller. I eventually delivered Airborne to a company that had no interest in it and had even closed its offices in Los Angeles, relocating to New York.
I was just relieved and happy to have finished the album, which had taken all my strength. I turned it in and thought, “If it sells, that’s great. If it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t really matter.” Which was just as well.
I had a whole new relaxed attitude to life and so, I think, did the rest of the band. It had been incredibly hard work being an Eagle, and until we stopped, we didn’t quite realize how hard it was. Being an Eagle was burdensome—the stress and pressure of writing, recording and touring, the media, and the fan frenzy. When that machine gears up, it has a loud roar. It takes a lot out of you to get up every day, put on your Eagle suit, and have every note or word you write put under a microscope by other band members and the critics. It’s oppressive.
Now we were free of all that, and it felt good to be home with our families, writing and recording the music we liked, having a few beers, doing our own stuff, playing with our kids, and being ourselves. The magnitude of what we’d become had torn us apart. It wasn’t just Glenn. We’d all been ready to run from the machine.
FIFTEEN
Don Henley was flying high. He released his second solo album, Building the Perfect Beast, in 1984 and had his greatest success to date with his single, “The Boys of Summer,” an editorial on the failed dreams of the sixties. The video of the single won the MTV award for Best Video of the Year, and within twelve months, he’d also won a Grammy for Best (Male) Rock Vocal Performance. In 1985, he was watching Late Night with David Letterman when he saw Glenn interviewed and singing “Desperado.” He called him after the show for a chat, the first time they’d spoken in five years. Irving, ever hopeful, heard of their contact and organized a dinner for the three of them that Christmas in Aspen, but no Eagles reunion was forthcoming.
Glenn went on to have some success with the song “The Heat Is On,” written by Keith Forsey and Harold Faltermeyer and featured in the film Beverly Hills Cop, starring Eddie Murphy. Glenn also starred in an episode of Miami Vice, thus fulfilling a lifetime dream of becoming an actor. Fu
rther roles followed, including one as a plumber turned commando in a film called Let’s Get Harry, but a television show he starred in made network history by being canceled after just one episode. Few other acting jobs were forthcoming, and he ended up in television commercials promoting a fitness chain.
I spent a few years working with the Bee Gees’ producer, an innovative genius named Albhy Galuten. He and I had first met in Miami during the recording of Hotel California, when I’d been asked to play on a couple of their albums. I liked the Gibb brothers immensely. Barry, especially, was the perfect English gentleman. Ever since my days in the Maundy Quintet, I’d been a sucker for all things British, and Barry Gibb reminded me of Graham Nash. Albhy and I set up in business together, developing some technical equipment and working with some great musicians. We had a lot of fun. My nickname for him was “Albhy Seeing Ya!” After a few years’ successful collaboration, he went off and did his own thing, concentrating on the technical side, leaving me wondering what to do next.
By 1986, things had changed. Don was still reeling emotionally from the breakup of the Eagles, an event—he later said—that took him eight years to recover from. Joe Walsh was opening for Tina Turner, getting divorced, and struggling with drugs and alcohol. Rehab beckoned. Timothy Schmit was making solo records and working as a session player with people like Richard Marx, Bob Seger, Jimmy Buffett, and Gregg Allman. The world largely forgot Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, despite their individual successes and diverse solo projects. Only in Japan, where a Best of the Eagles album had been released in 1985 by WEA, were we still riding high in the charts.
I shelved plans for a second solo album and concentrated on my real estate ventures and spending time with my family. I learned how to fly a plane—an interest sparked from years of visiting the cockpits of the planes we toured in and being allowed to take the controls—and got my commercial rating. I did some sea bass fishing in the kelp beds off Malibu with Cheech Marin, Jimmy Pankow, and my good friend Jack Pritchett, the Realtor who’d found us our first house in Malibu. On one trip out into a choppy ocean, a freak wave hit my little seventeen-foot boat and almost capsized us. We somehow escaped with just cuts and bruises, despite being tossed up into the air like something out of The Perfect Storm. I remember clinging to the side of the boat, half-drowned and praying for a speedy deliverance.
Afterward, Cheech joked, “Hey, man, I can just see the headlines if we hadn’t made it: ‘Don Felder of the Eagles, Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong, Jimmy Pankow of Chicago, all drowned in a tragic boating accident . . . with an unidentified male.’ ” He had wetsuit jackets made up for each of us with our names embroidered on them. Jack’s read UNIDENTIFIED.
It wasn’t the first time I’d nearly drowned. Besides a couple of surfing accidents that left me with a lifelong back problem and a few gallons of the Pacific in my lungs, Joe and I once took his boat, the So What?, to Santa Cruz Island, when a storm blew in. Stupidly, high on blow and Jack Daniel’s, with an inexperienced young captain, we left the sanctuary of Smuggler’s Cove and headed back out across the ocean, because we were due to leave for a European tour the following morning. The coast guard had strongly advised us against attempting the crossing and followed us in their cutter as the waves pitched and tossed us like corks.
“Here, put this on,” Joe told me, handing me a plastic garbage bag and some gaffer tape. He hadn’t thought to stow foul-weather gear. So there we stood, wrapped up in black plastic bags, swigging brandy, trying to see through the wall of water that was crashing onto our little boat at regular intervals. We made it by the skin of our teeth, and only when we arrived in port did we notice the coast guard helicopter hovering overhead. “Is that there for our benefit?” we asked the coast guard radio operator gratefully.
“No,” he growled. “We took photographs of you for training purposes.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, we’re gonna use you as an example of how stupid some people in boats can be.”
The Malibu incident frightened the life out of me, so I bought a bigger boat, a twenty-five-foot Sea Ray, for weekend trips out to Catalina and the islands with the kids for swimming, spearfishing, and snorkeling excursions that I think were probably the happiest days of their lives. Even the Sea Ray wasn’t quite up to those rolling Pacific waves, so we upgraded to a forty-two-foot Grand Banks, which we called Nantucket, after the place where Susan and I spent our honeymoon.
I busied myself with other stuff too. I became a scuba diver, to master level, and I won the Catalina Island Lobster Contest for catching the biggest lobster on opening day. I learned Spanish from my gap-toothed gardener, inadvertently ending up speaking like the Mexican equivalent of Gabby Hayes, and I spent a lot of time playing golf, for pleasure and for charity, with friends like Peter Cetera.
I built Susan a potter’s studio at the back of our house and learned how to throw some half-decent pots and vases myself, after she and Cheech taught me, but mainly, I was bored and depressed. My relationship with Susan at that time didn’t help. She’d had a serious health scare soon after Leah was born. She needed surgery on what ended up being diagnosed as a benign nodule on her thyroid. I bought her a beautiful gold-and-diamond necklace to hide the scar on her throat. Unfortunately, the problems with her thyroid affected her behavior for a while, and she lost some of the verve she’d always had. Our therapy sessions became ever more intensive, and it seemed to me that the more time we spent talking to a third party about our problems, the less we actually talked to each other. The thought of what was happening in my marriage and my life dragged me to an all-time low. I gained twenty pounds as I tried to reconcile myself to being a husband, a dad, and a retired rocker. The hundreds of people who’d been part of the Eagles machine, whom I’d thought of as my friends, had evaporated. For a while there, I felt pretty lost—a thirty-seven-year-old has-been.
By comparison to Don’s career, mine had come to a grinding halt. Most of all, I missed playing and performing music more than I could ever have imagined, even during the darkest days. There’s something so emotionally fulfilling in standing on stage and playing live music to an audience. Nothing else beats it, and without a regular fix, I felt bereft.
Ultimately, the Eagles proved to be the best any of us would ever do. The combination of our various talents and the creative tension that fueled them was a heady mix that none of us would ever match individually. Don came pretty close with his hits and videos but didn’t quite reach the same magnitude. Everyone’s desire was to work together again, but at the time, it was still impossible. We had gone off in different directions and had limits to how much we’d be willing to tolerate again.
After a year of feeling sorry for myself, our therapist suggested that I go on Prozac. “I think it might just help you get through this rough patch,” she advised.
“OK.” I smiled. “I’ve done drugs before. Give me some.”
Fortunately, Susan’s condition stabilized, and she was eventually able to pick herself up and start all over again. I began to feel much more like the old Fingers Felder, so I flushed my pills down the toilet.
Every few months or so, some spark would be lit about the possibility of an Eagles reunion, and Irving would call up. “Hey, Don, how ya doing? I’m just checking in. Still hoping to get the guys together in the same room sometime. If it comes off, are you in?”
“Book it, Irving,” I’d always say.
After months of nothing ever coming of it, though, I decided to try something myself. Tired of fishing, sailing, and renovating houses, I told Irving, “If the Eagles aren’t gonna work together again, then let’s put something together with those of us who will.”
Irving seemed nervous at first. I don’t think he was sure where a band consisting of two-fifths of the Eagles would fit in. Timothy jumped at the chance. “I’m in,” he said. We both contacted Joe, and he agreed to join us. We didn’t have a name or much of an idea what we could do, but we knew we needed a singer, so Walsh suggested
an English guy who had a really great soulful rock-and-roll voice—Terry Reid. His greatest claim to fame was that he had almost been the lead singer with Led Zeppelin, turning the job down for a solo career before recommending the unknown Robert Plant to Jimmy Page. He’d worked with Cream, Procol Harum, and the Yardbirds, and he had supported the Rolling Stones, the Hollies, the Faces, and Jefferson Airplane. He knew David Lindley, Graham Nash, and Jackson Browne and had done some session work for Don Henley. He was a couple of years younger than me, and his pedigree was excellent.
The trouble was that both he and Joe liked to drink, and Timothy and I quickly realized that we couldn’t work with either of them. Joe was pretty bad by then. He couldn’t even drive himself anywhere or walk the streets alone. He was so incapable of dealing with the real world, due to the paranoia caused by his addiction to alcohol and drugs, that he had to be accompanied everywhere by his personal bodyguard, a supposed former White House Secret Service agent called Smokey.
Matters came to a head at a meeting with Irving, when we were discussing a measly $500,000 record budget, which, by the time we’d paid the studios and cartage and the road crew, amounted to around $40,000 each. Joe had known Irving since they were in college together. They’d been roommates in Illinois. Enraged, he jumped to his feet and leaped at him, screaming, “You’re just trying to fuck us over, aren’t you!”