Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  I needn’t have worried. Bernie had come along not to judge, but to enjoy. All he wanted was to see a bunch of old friends, hear the show, and reminisce, rekindling his own fond memories of his years with the Eagles. I thought I’d learned all I could from the streak of brilliance that was Bernie Leadon. But that night, he proved he had still more to teach me.

  The final leg of the Hell Freezes Over tour beckoned that fall, and I prepared to leave again for Europe with a slightly lighter heart. Something had changed, and I think it had as much to do with my own acceptance of the situation I found myself in as with a changing attitude in “The Gods,” each of whom had happier things to think about.

  In May of 1995, immediately after the winter tour ended, Don had married his girlfriend, a Dallas model named Sharon. His bachelor life finally behind him, he splashed out on a lavish wedding reception at a ranch in Malibu, at which Bruce Springsteen, Tony Bennett, Sting, and Billy Joel sang. Susan and I were invited, along with the rest of the band and people like Sheryl Crow, Jackson Browne (whom Susan had always wanted to thank for stepping in for me when Jesse was born), and even David Crosby, to whom I said a cordial hello. Emeril Lagasse, the television chef, was flown in from New Orleans to provide the catering. The media helicopters flying overhead trying to film the celebrities were kept at bay by helium weather balloons floated up to block their view.

  Don built his new wife a mansion in Dallas. He finally resolved his ongoing legal dispute with Geffen Records, which released a greatest hits album of his work that year. Even though it failed to make much of a mark in the charts, Don negotiated a deal with Warner Brothers for another solo album.

  Now that Don was married, he seemed to be a happier man—Glenn, too. After his divorce, Glenn had married a dancer named Cindy, whom he met in one of his fitness videos. Both men were discovering for the first time the comfort and security that marriage can provide, something I’d known for years. We all knew that the tour was moving into its final phase and that the feuding would soon be at an end. I’d been forced to accept the deal offered to me, but I was also grateful for the blessing of being allowed to make as much money as I had. Individually, our lives were taking separate paths. Each of us was discovering a new level of maturity.

  That October, Susan and I were in Santa Monica, on our way home from another session with our couples therapist. We were getting along pretty well, and our trials with Cody seemed to be almost over. (I should have had more faith in my youngest son. Like me, he grew out of his rebelliousness and began to lead a full and relatively normal life.) The issue of my infidelities from fourteen years ago and beyond had been faced and wrestled to the mat, and now we were just struggling with the fact that we’d been together for twenty-four years and had lost a great deal of the fire.

  Driving back from the therapist, we were talking about how I was going to cope with going back on the road, dealing with the band and the whole business of sexual temptation again. “I’m proud of you, Don,” Susan told me, “I know how hard you’ve tried.”

  Pulling up at an intersection, we were stopped by a speeding blue-light cavalcade of vehicles, complete with police escort. The convoy of limousines and motorcyle outriders was being chased by media vehicles and helicopters swooping low overhead. Switching on the radio, we heard the news that O.J. Simpson had just been acquitted of murder after his extraordinary nine-month trial. For all that time, I’d been following the case from hotel rooms around America, as I struggled with the vicissitudes of the tour and with my own personal demons. Now, flashing past me, a few feet away, O.J. sat, a free man, in the back of his limo. The coincidence seemed uncanny.

  Back on the road, the tour rolled on like some vast moneymaking machine that none of us could stop even if we’d wanted to. It had become a monster that needed to be fed. It was big business for everyone. Audio recordings of some of our live shows—“made for posterity,” secured in a vault—would appear for sale a week to ten days later as bootleg CDs, for which the band didn’t receive a penny. We couldn’t really complain. We were making more than any of us had ever made before, and I tried to keep sight of the fact that I was being paid very well to do what I loved, play music.

  At least this time I was seeing the countries we were visiting through clear eyes, unaffected by too many drugs or crazy nights. Japan, always one of my favorite places to visit, had never looked more beautiful, and the sushi never tasted so good. Christchurch, New Zealand, had never been wetter. It was a mudfest, just like Woodstock. I have never seen so many people standing out in torrential rain, soaked right through to their undershorts, having a good time, while we onstage were just concentrating on not getting electrocuted as the rain came slanting down.

  I knew how lucky I was to be travelling in such exalted luxury, surrounded by such good friends as Joe, Timothy, and the crew. Gigs like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, where we played to ninety thousand people, the biggest gig we’d ever played in L.A., provided some golden memories. It was a cold night and we had heaters on the stage, but we played one of our best shows of that entire tour. We’d matured in terms of our playing and our singing, and every note was perfect. It was like some of the best gigs we’d played when we were at our musical peak in the seventies.

  The night was clear with stars twinkling in the sky above us, and when each song stopped, you could still hear it and the noise of the crowd echoing through the canyons beyond the stadium. Everyone who was anyone in L.A. was there—musicians, rock stars, and management staff. There were celebrities like Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson, and Sheryl Crow standing on the side of the stage alongside Susan, Jesse and his girlfriend, and the rest of my kids. It was a Who’s Who event, with a huge circus tent set up backstage for hospitality.

  The last gig the Eagles played together on Hell Freezes Over was in Edinburgh, Scotland in August 1996. We’d been around the States twice, as well as to Canada, Japan, Australia, and Europe. None of us really knew if this was going to be the final gig, or whether we’d get another call from Irving in a few months, but Glenn had privately decided that he wouldn’t be doing any more. His attitude toward me that night was different from any other time since the seventies. I think he was genuinely happy to have made it through to the end of the tour with us all in one piece. Despite the undercurrents of unhappiness and the old frictions resurfacing, everything had stayed fairly contained. We’d gone out, we’d played music, we’d made a bunch of money, and—most important of all—we’d gotten through it without killing each other.

  When the concert ended, at the end of a beautifully warm Scottish night, Glenn and Don actually went around the whole band and hugged everyone.

  “Good job,” Glenn told me, slapping me on the back. “We made it, buddy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, somewhat dazed and confused. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

  Family life occupied me once we’d come off the road. Jesse finally decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Erin, his girlfriend of many years, which was the smartest move he ever made. Their wedding took place in 1997, and within a year, they’d provided us with an unexpected delight—our first grandchild, Kurt. I had suddenly gone from being a rock-and-roll star to being a grandpa. Strangely, I didn’t mind one little bit. Jesse had become a successful financial advisor, his early passion for the computer games Lemonade Stand and Millionaire serving him well.

  Sadly, while Jesse’s marriage took its first tentative steps, mine was faltering badly. After more than two years on the road, the differences between Susan and me had grown. By the time I returned from that grueling tour, my conviction to Susan stronger than ever, the house and my marriage were empty.

  With no one home most days but me, I found myself rattling around this large decadent property, wife and kids absent. I began falling back into my bachelor routines of fishing, boating, flying, and dabbling in real estate. My children were in their adolescence or early twenties, with all the highs and lows that can bring. Mostly, they were away or out with their
friends, and the only time they wanted me was to give them some money or to pick them up from somewhere.

  I bought myself a sixty-eight-foot offshore boat I called Wings, took the necessary advanced navigation exams, and did several seasons of marlin fishing down in Cabo San Lucas, Baja, Mexico, with my old fishing buddies or friends, like Joe Walsh, accompanied as ever by his bodyguard, Smokey.

  Jesse and Cody would come with me sometimes, and I was never happier than on the flybridge of that beautiful vessel, a cigar firmly planted between my lips, a glass of champagne in my hand, and my two sons beside me. It was a far cry from the little powerboat I used to mess around with up at Lake Alice when I was their age. I knew how fortunate I was to give my children these extraordinary memories and experiences. Life should have been truly sweet.

  There was, however, a new distance between Susan and me that had never existed before. I blamed myself for being away so long this last time, and for not paying her enough attention. In my absence, she’d become a workaholic and was as addicted to her jewelry business as Joe had ever been to Jack Daniel’s. If I ever persuaded her to take some time out and come with me to Catalina on the boat, she’d bring along her black day planner, full of her accounting, business schedules, and appointments (although never one for me, I noted with dismay), and these huge bags of gems and gold. Instead of hanging out with me, making love and hiking like we used to, she’d sit in Catalina and make jewelry like a woman obsessed. We were like two friends on vacation, one of them working.

  We’d hardly ever have supper together. I’d usually make something for myself and any of the kids who happened to be around, then sit there with the dogs salivating and watching me eat. Susan’s working hours were long and erratic. Our intimate moments were few and far between. I felt increasingly lonely, living in this big house by myself, sitting there day after day, waiting for my wife to find the time to play golf with me, or have lunch, or even fly to Europe or Hawaii to help me spend the fruits of my labors.

  “Oh well,” I finally told myself. “You can’t possibly complain after all the time you’ve spent away.”

  The rest of the band became homebodies too, busy doing nothing. We did one benefit gig for President Clinton’s reelection campaign, and with him and Hillary as honored guests, we attended the official opening of the Henry Thoreau Walden Library, part of the Walden Woods Project, into which Don had poured so much of our charitable contributions. Don was a family man in Texas, with three small children and a new wife; Timothy and his wife, Jean, were raising their kids just outside L.A.; and Joe, still sober, brought out a new album, Look What I Did! The Joe Walsh Anthology, and embarked on a solo tour. Glenn played some golf and landed himself a small part in the Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire. He also launched a record label, Mission, with an icon of a mission bell, which failed despite the success of its first release, One Planet, One Groove, by my old friend Max Carl. Glenn then set up a studio in L.A., which he called the Dog House. Don did something similar—but even more high-tech, with bedrooms—out at a Spanish-style house in Malibu.

  Then one day, Irving called up. “Hi, Fingers, just to let you know, the guys are thinking of going back into the studio again. They’re gonna try and record a brand-new album of all new songs, the first in nearly twenty years.”

  “OK,” I said, somewhat warily, wondering if Don and Glenn could actually bear to sit down and try to write together. Painful memories of The Long Run in 1979 were still burned into my brain. “Where and when?”

  Even though we could afford the finest producers and recording equipment money could buy, and the stature of our next project deserved the very best, the plan was to use Don’s and Glenn’s new studios, paid for by the band. Mindful of the failure of the “Almost the Eagles” project over the choice of producer, they decided that this time there’d be no producer at all.

  The first band meeting in years was called, at Don’s rental house over near Brentwood, just the five of us together. It was the first time in over twenty years that we’d assembled like that without an entourage of managers and attorneys. I arrived early, nervous as a kitten. Over tuna fish sandwiches, Don and Glenn decreed that Joe, Tim, and I had to submit any CDs of tracks we’d prepared, and they would pick which ones they liked. We weren’t allowed to hear what they had written.

  They played us some other songs, demos from Nashville songwriters—not, sadly, from our old friends Jackson, J.D., or Jack Tempchin. Most of them were, at best, mediocre, without the Henley/Frey magic. I said nothing, but I remember thinking, “Hey, we’re the Eagles, we should be playing our own stuff,” but I knew I wasn’t in a position to speak out. One track, called “I Love to Watch a Woman Dance” sounded to me almost exactly like another song by the same writer called “For My Wedding,” just with a different set of lyrics. Don was releasing the latter on his next solo album. He suggested that Glenn could sing this version instead for him with an Italian-type mandolin sound, which wasn’t at all right for Glenn’s R&B voice.

  Another song we were going to try was one that Timothy had written at a songwriting seminar in an English castle. Despite the fairytale surroundings, it wasn’t that great either. Joe piped up, “Well, I think I might have a couple of licks.” He had one pretty solid track started, which he’d recorded at his home studio. It sounded very much like a recognizable “Life’s Been Good,” Joe Walsh type of song. I had a song I called “Downer Diner,” a semispoof on “Sad Café,” which featured electric piano and acoustic guitar with an ascending progression slightly reminiscent of “Sad Café.” I also had another up-tempo track with Latino rhythms, called “Little Latin Lover,” with gut-string guitar. Glenn loved it.

  “Hey, this sounds like the party music wafting over from a neighboring yacht,” he said. “Jimmy Buffett would kill for this.”

  Among us, we had five or six other tracks, none of them very good. One sounded like “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”—black, spiritual, sixties retro, not at all the sound of the Eagles. When we went into the studio, picked up our instruments, and tried to play it, along with the rest of the Nashville songs, we just sounded like a bad demo band.

  Furthermore, because we were constantly running between the two studios, there began to be some serious competitive rivalry about whose studio was best and where the bulk of the recording should be done. It got to the point where personalities would spark over the smallest issue.

  To me it seemed that Don’s continual tardiness was irritating Glenn. At times Don would arrive late and spend time on the phone making personal calls, preferring to work between about two and six o’clock before he went back to his studio in Malibu to work on his solo album until the small hours. Glenn, like the rest of us, preferred to work from ten until six, so we’d have time to spend with our families in the evening and would be fresh the next day. The constant sitting around waiting for Don caused me to be increasingly impatient.

  The jockeying for position became ludicrous. At the Dog House, Glenn would sit in the primary producer’s chair in his control room; no one else was allowed in it. The same would happen at Don’s place, where Glenn would take a subordinate position on a little roller stool, while Don sat in the big chair. Joe and I desperately wanted to sit in the big chairs and swivel around like naughty schoolboys just to see the reaction, but we feared that “The Gods” wouldn’t see the funny side.

  Behind each other’s back, the two of them complained constantly about the other’s studio and equipment. To resolve the constant bickering about which studio was best, I had mixes of the same song made from both studios and listened to them at home. There wasn’t a dime of difference between them. They both sounded fine.

  Irving called me one day to tell me I wasn’t making it any easier. He suggested I just leave everything to him.

  “Hey, Irv, I was just trying to help,” I explained, “and I don’t care if we record this album in my fucking garage. I just want those two big kids to get past this pissing contest.”

  Know
ing that critics were waiting to cut us off at the knees, whatever we produced, injected even more pressure and fear into an already volatile situation. There was a highly competitive market out there, and with artists like Madonna and the Spice Girls hogging the charts, there was no magic team this time. After a while, Glenn decided that he couldn’t work this way anymore. Just to appease him, we ended up going back into Glenn’s studio.

  After months of hoping that we could salvage enough songs for a new album, Don finally pulled the plug. He’d almost finished his latest solo record and was increasingly preoccupied. Irving accepted their decision with a sigh. “Let them just get this stuff out of their system and then we’ll regroup,” he said. I wasn’t sure.

  The songs we’d worked so hard on were consigned to digital heaven. The album was never completed, even though we’d recorded four or five tracks. All that’s left are a few tapes I took home with me to carry on tinkering with, just in case “The Gods” ever decided to try again.

  “Maybe we’ll put out another greatest hits, or even a box set,” Irving told the rest of us, ruefully, “to buy us some time.”

  For Glenn’s fiftieth birthday, he held a huge party in Palm Springs at La Quinta golf resort, a famous hotel that people used to drive across the desert to in their Model T Fords. Tom Hanks and Don Johnson were invited, along with a list of celebrities as long as my arm. “I want you all to come along, and jam some with me on the stage, while the guests finish their banquet,” he said. It wasn’t an invitation, it was an order. Glenn played his guests an embarrassing video featuring film clips from his brief and not very successful acting career. After the fifth or sixth clip, someone yelled from the back of the room, only half-joking, “You ought to stick to playing music.”