Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  We soon realized what a huge mistake we’d made. It was a hopeless house for a child, with its open-plan design and ladders to the loft, set on a steep hill at the end of a dirt road on top of a mountain, but we were new to this parenting thing. We’d fallen in love with the view and not realized that we were buying a place designed for a single guy, not a family. Its only plus was its location. I never tired of the view or watching the fog roll in from the ocean and creep up the valley beneath us and stop, so that we were above the clouds.

  I’d hoped to be around to help in the final stages of Susan’s pregnancy, but the On the Border tour began and, with it, the madness. The idea was that we’d start off in the States and follow with a world tour, but the album was selling so well that the pace quickly accelerated. Almost daily, we experienced an enervating and dizzying succession of airports, hotels, screaming crowds, and limousines speeding away from backstage doors behind the flashing blue lights of police escorts. With connecting flights, layovers, and long journeys by car, entire days were consumed by traveling. Irving and his team of managers suddenly accounted for every minute of our time. No one had any privacy. We hurtled from city to city at a breakneck clip. We’d arrive in town, sometimes by car, sometimes by plane, check into the hotel, hold some press interviews, do the sound check, perform the show, watch the others argue with each other or party with groupies all night, then fly on to the next town.

  The backstage life was wild. Willing young women surrounded us constantly, virtually begging us to bed them. I quickly discovered there were large groups of bored young women in almost every town whose biggest kick was to sleep with a rock star. They even chalked them up, like plane spotters, bragging about how many they’d slept with and who. I kept urging myself to resist temptation. Like some of the other band members, I took full advantage of the uniquely carefree atmosphere with the weed and the blow yet did my best to ignore the girls, but the more the opportunity presented itself, the more normal it seemed. It was such an extreme, high-octane situation, and the girls were less than one-night stands to those who partook. There was something horribly clinical about it—fucking a groupie while stoned and then throwing her out. Every night, I’d go back to my hotel room alone, and whenever I could, I’d reach for the telephone and call Susan.

  “Hey, honey, how you doing?”

  “We’re fine,” she’d say, sleepily. “The baby’s been kicking a lot today. I think he’s going to be a quarterback.”

  “I wish I could be there to feel it.”

  “Me too.”

  Hanging around us a lot at that time was a quirky teenage boy named Cameron Crowe, working on assignment for Rolling Stone. He looked about thirteen but was probably older, and he seemed to be watching our every move, which was more than a little unnerving. He was a young kid in frumpy clothes, very shy and nervous, and he was witnessing all that was going on with the drugs, women, and booze. I wasn’t the only one who was spooked by his presence. He was like a little doorstop, always in the corner, a weird-looking kind of gnome, nice but strange.

  To his credit, he kept right up with us—although he did have youth on his side, while we had the Peruvian marching powder, youth in a bottle. Nobody had to wet-nurse him; he was very self-sufficient and self-aware. Most of the time he seemed harmless, like some innocent kid on a high school project following us around. He didn’t seem like some big shot reporter, and none of us could understand why they’d sent a child and not a real writer, although Don and Glenn did keep a close eye on him. It was kind of interesting to see him witnessing all this stuff for the first time, watching him watching us.

  If ever any of us stopped to talk to him, he’d whip out his notepad and scribble down every word furiously, as if he was afraid he’d forget what we’d said and didn’t want to lose a single gem. “You don’t have to take it down verbatim, kid,” I’d tell him, placing my hand over his notebook. “We’re just chatting, right?”

  “Sure,” he’d say, swallowing and looking up at me with those baby eyes. “Whatever you say.” I got the distinct impression that the minute my back was turned, he’d jot down every word anyway.

  We never knew what might show up in print, and he made it difficult for us to completely relax when he was around, but he was a nice enough kid, and I knew if Rolling Stone had hired him so young, he was probably going to go far. He did, and years later he made the brilliant movie Almost Famous, based I believe, partially on our crazy life, but mostly on his experiences on the road with Led Zeppelin and my old friends the Allman Brothers.

  One day blurred into the other, but the barnstorming did the trick. We were a huge success. More and more T-shirts, tickets, and albums sold. The touring went on and on. If a radio station played even one of our songs, Irving rushed us into that region as well. Soon, our opening acts, Dan Fogelberg and Jimmy Buffett—both Irving’s clients—couldn’t even finish their set without being drowned out to cries of, “We want the Eagles! We want the Eagles!”

  We were thrilled to see the crowd accepting our new sound, some of which I was responsible for. To make the band a little tougher, I replaced its softer textures with much harder sounds. The first thing I did was to suggest that “Take It Easy” become a three-electric-guitar song with Bernie playing all the B-string bender stuff, me playing a Strat or something stronger, and Glenn also playing electric. The song was just too puny otherwise, and the larger venues we were now playing really didn’t have good acoustic pickups. In those days, it was hard to stand onstage strumming an acoustic guitar and expect to fill a two- or three-thousand-seat auditorium.

  Now, whenever I’d step into the spotlight to play my solos, even in the middle of a show, the cheers were overpowering. I realized with a mixture of humility and awe that the applause was in recognition of me and my guitar playing, not just the band. Life never felt as good as it did then.

  It was surprising that we received so much airplay. Part of our success came from the openness of the AM band. Radio was truly diverse in the seventies. A station would play a rock track, then a country track, then something else. You didn’t have to change the dial if you wanted to hear a certain kind of sound. We knew we had a good shot at getting on the radio with the original Eagles sound, but we also knew the best-selling hit songs were all rock-oriented, which was why everyone but Bernie wanted to head in this direction.

  Despite the pressure and the ever-present threat of an argument simmering away somewhere in the background, we did have a lot of fun together on that tour. There are no words to describe the feeling of having made it to the big time and knowing that thousands of fans are waiting out there to listen to your music. Every night, just before we’d go onstage, we’d gather together for a voice rehearsal in the locker room of what was usually a sports arena. We chose the locker room for its privacy and the natural echo it provided. Huddling together, we’d open our mouths in unison and practice several ooohs and aaaahs from specific songs, like “Take It Easy.” Once we’d opened our throats and warmed up, we’d all sing “Seven Bridges Road,” a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young-style a cappella song written by Steve Young. No matter what the mood between band members or how bad things were, we always had that private rehearsal together, and then when we went out onto the stage, the lights would come up and we’d be standing there at a single microphone to open the show with that same melodic, lilting song. It blew people away. It was always a vocally unifying moment, all five voices coming together in harmony.

  I’d get goose bumps every night.

  Cocaine abuse continued to be rife. In those years, nearly everyone was doing it, from members of the band to the crew to the record executives. People would wander around asking, “Hey, you holding? You got any?” At various times, they’d disappear off into the men’s room and come back with white powder rings around their nostrils, a sure indication of what they’d been up to.

  “Hey, buddy, you’re showing,” one of us would say, pointing to the other’s nose. A quick wipe on the back of th
e hand would solve the problem.

  Many of us still smoked a lot of pot and drank longneck Buds, but we’d rarely refuse some blow. We were generally well coked up before we even appeared on stage, but our roadies had instructions to leave lines of blow on our amps so that between songs we could go back and bend over as if we were adjusting the knobs, when actually we were snorting in front of an entire live audience. The drugs must have affected our performance, but at the time, I thought we sounded just great.

  I doubt we could have continued at the pace we were being driven, unless we’d had some chemical help. Cocaine offered us the chance to keep going, pushing ourselves to the absolute limits, when all we wanted to do was stop for a while and catch our breath. Then, in April 1974, something happened that let me do so.

  The tour was going full tilt, with five or sometimes six shows a week, but one of our final gigs of the first six-week stretch was in a theater in Phoenix, Arizona, an amazing venue with a revolving stage. You’d play to a different part of the audience every few minutes (and the other band members could closely inspect the girls who’d be invited backstage afterward).

  I was quite literally in a spin after that gig and the backstage party that followed, where the usual amounts of drugs and tequila were consumed. We caught the last flight back to L.A. and landed around one thirty in the morning on April 6, almost too exhausted to leave the comfort of our seats. The plan was to jump in a fleet of rental cars and drive that night to Ontario Motor Speedway, about an hour east of the city. We were due to perform at one of the biggest gigs we’d ever played, the California Jam, in front of 300,000 people. The show was billed as “the Woodstock of the West Coast,” and fellow artists included Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Black Oak Arkansas, and Earth, Wind & Fire.

  I was walking through LAX, feeling that bone-weary exhaustion that only a cocktail of drink, drugs, and sleep deprivation can bring, wishing I could just curl up and go to sleep in some quiet corner, when a message came over the paging system.

  “Mr. Felder. Mr. Don Felder, please come to the information desk immediately, where there is an urgent call waiting for you.”

  My heart began pumping hard again, stirring up all the stuff I’d taken the previous night. Susan, could it be Susan? She wasn’t due for a week or so, but as I ran over to the desk, I feared the worst. Grabbing the phone, I spoke into it breathlessly.

  “Hello?”

  “Don? It’s Susan. The contractions have started and they’re getting real bad. I need you to come home. Now.”

  Without hesitating except for a quick word to the rest of the band, I grabbed my suitcase off the baggage carousel and ran to one of the waiting rental cars.

  “Go for it, man!” I heard Bernie scream behind me.

  “Tell Susan good luck from us,” yelled Randy.

  I drove out to Topanga at breakneck speed, my eyes smarting with tiredness, my body being kept awake on pure adrenaline. Susan was in bed, breathing hard. I helped her get up and drove her to the Santa Monica Hospital on Wilshire and Fourteenth Street. I didn’t even have time to take my suede tassel-sleeved jacket off.

  We’d agreed on natural childbirth, but it was a long and painful labor, and Susan really went through hell. There was a window right next to her bed, which looked out over the roof and the air-conditioning ducts. From where I stood, and in my hazy mental state, suffering as I was from chronic sleep deprivation, it seemed as if the building was in labor too, wheezing out steam in time with Susan’s heavy breathing.

  Back at the Ontario Motor Speedway, the band waited for word. They were due to go on at two o’clock that afternoon, and Irving had arranged for a helicopter at the Santa Monica heliport a few miles away, to fly me to the gig if the baby was born in the morning. My deadline was one o’clock, and I was watching the time and urging this child to hurry up, not wanting to miss such an amazing gig.

  “Come on, Jesse,” I’d urge the baby through Susan’s convulsing tummy. I was convinced he was going to be a boy, and I’d already named him in honor of my kindly Uncle Buck. “Any time up to 12:45 would be fine. Just come out and meet us, son.”

  “Don!” Susan hissed through the pain. “Don’t you think I want him out as soon as possible too?”

  “Sorry, honey.”

  One o’clock came and went, and I called Irving up. “You’ll have to go ahead without me,” I told him. “This baby must be a Jackson Browne fan.” Jackson, recently a father himself, had agreed to stand in and play for me. By the time Susan had dilated and was ready to go to the labor room for an assisted birth a few hours later, I was almost delirious with a combination of exhaustion, excitement, and nerves. I felt so faint, I could easily have blacked out, but when our baby was born and handed to my wife, bloody and bawling, I somehow found enough strength in my legs to stand up and kiss them both.

  The physician let me cut the cord, and as I did so, I realized I was crying. Great droplets splashed down my face as I cradled our child in my arms. “Welcome to the world, Jesse Felder,” I told him, wetting his face with my tears. Looking up at Susan, her own face wet, I’d never felt happier in my life.

  TEN

  I was only able to spend a couple of weeks settling Susan and Jesse in, while the rest of the band reacquainted themselves with the inside of the Troubadour club, before we went back on the road for what turned into a nine-month tour.

  While I was home, I changed diapers, fed and washed Jesse, babysat when Susan needed a break, and enjoyed spending quality time with my new son. We had a Mexican matrimonial hammock in the backyard and I rigged up a clothesline from it to the house, so that I could sit on the couch watching baseball in the living room while rocking Jesse gently to sleep outside. As soon as I stopped, during a particularly engrossing part of the game, he’d exercise his lungs and yell just to remind me.

  I’d maintained polite long-range contact with my parents ever since moving to L.A., sending them the odd card from on the road and calling them once in a while, but I hadn’t seen them since my wedding, two years earlier, and they’d never seen Jesse. My brother, Jerry, who had two kids with Marnie and was living and working in Gainesville as a partner in a law firm he’d joined after college, called to tell me that Dad had finally quit working at Koppers, due to ill health. He’d never officially retired and was still being paid, but he had congestive heart failure and lung problems, probably exacerbated by years of smoking and inhaling toxic fumes.

  “You might want to fly down and see him, Don,” Jerry advised, long distance. “He’s not doing very well.”

  Having a son had considerably mellowed my resentment toward Dad, making me realize how hard it was to be a parent. During a lull in the tour, when I had a week off to spend with my family before we went back on the road, I decided to fly to Florida and reacquaint myself with the old man.

  We flew to Gainesville and rented a brand-new car, which I knew would impress Dad. The house looked just the same, although even smaller than I remembered it. Jesse was just a couple of months old, and when Mom opened the front door of that old clapboard house with the tin roof that Dad had built with his own hands, I felt so proud to hand her my son. She looked a little older, but she was very pleased to see us and to meet her new grandson.

  “Hi, little Jesse,” she said, cradling him in her arms and beaming down at him. “I’ve waited a long time for this.” Jesse gurgled and wriggled on cue and gave her one of his winning smiles.

  Dad was sitting in an armchair in the lounge, an oxygen tank by his side, a clear plastic tube from it hooked around his nose. He was thin and gaunt, with sunken eyes, and his whole body seemed to have shrunk and caved in as he slowly drowned in his own lungs. Gone was the granite mountain of a man who’d serviced the machinery at Koppers for fifty years, the Dad who’d driven us around America, his tanned muscular arm protruding from the driver’s window. He was so diminished, he looked as if he could barely stand, let alone clamber onto a roof and fix the most high-tech television
antenna in Gainesville.

  His appearance shocked me to the core. He was only sixty-four, but he looked fifteen years older. Shakily, he got to his feet, clinging to the arm of his chair.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, holding out Jesse. “Meet your grandson.”

  “I can’t hold him, I’ve gotta sit down,” he said, collapsing back into his chair. It was summer and the house was like an oven. I could hardly breathe myself.

  Looking up at me weakly, he managed a half-smile as I lowered Jesse into his lap. He looked down at his grandson and then up at me, a shine in his watery eyes.

  “Well, hello, Jesse,” he said. “I’m your Grandpa Felder.” Looking up at me again, studying my straggly beard, handlebar moustache, muttonchops, and shoulder-length hair with a frown, he complained, “Don’t you think it’s time you went to the barber’s, Doc, now you’re a father?”

  Within a year, he was dead. I’d spent some time with him on that initial visit, buying an air-conditioning unit to keep him cool and help him breathe (which he refused to switch on for fear of the electric bills). I offered him money, but he was too proud to accept. I’d taken some Eagles records and played them to him on his old music center and tried to explain to him how successful the band was, but I don’t think he ever really understood. All he said about the music was, “There’s no horns. I like horns.”