by Don Felder
I’d never been more wrong. When Elektra/Asylum asked us to shorten it, Don told them to release it as it was or not at all. He was right.
The final recording and editing of the Hotel California album took place at Criteria Studios, so we rented, among other houses, 461 Ocean Boulevard, Miami Beach, the white stucco beach house made famous by Eric Clapton and his comeback album, called 461 Ocean Boulevard, released in 1974. We hoped that by renting the very same house, some of the magic would rub off on us, and we’d make a great record too.
We had some of our best times as a band in that place. It was right on the beach, and every Saturday and Sunday, we’d lie around the living room, watching football on the television, and then during halftime we’d go out and play touch football on the beach. We were all skinny, puny-looking, 150-pound guys, compared to the bulging musclemen of Miami, but we’d have a game until we got exhausted, then go back in and drink a bunch of beer and watch some more football. It felt, for once, as if we really liked each other.
Much to my delight, while we were there, Don and Glenn chose another of the songs I’d written at the beach house in Malibu. I’d called it “Iron Lung,” reminiscent of my childhood illness, because it had a distinctive echo slap on it. They agreed that its rhythmic sound was just like someone wheezing away on a polio ward in the giant cylindrical machine that encased their body, doing their breathing for them. It was merely an idea, with no lyrics or melody, but with the help of “The Gods,” it became one of our most recognized songs—“Victim of Love.”
Glenn first came up with the concept. He and I, plus Don and J.D., were sitting up late over at Glenn’s house one night, drinking and talking through various lyrical ideas about broken hearts, lost dreams, and power and anger in a relationship, all of which those three knew a great deal about. I often wondered if they sometimes deliberately broke off relationships with their various women, just to keep that emotional edge as songwriters.
“Having a broken heart is like being a victim of a car wreck,” J.D. said broodily, still smarting from his latest split. “You wake up all battered and bruised in an emergency room.”
“Victim’s a good word,” I pointed out.
They all nodded their approval.
“Victim of what, though?” I said, my brow furrowed. We all sat and pondered.
Glenn, sitting quietly in a corner, suddenly spoke: “Victim of luuuuuve.”
He pretty much took over from there. My hesitant, wheezing “Iron Lung” was soon transformed into a hit. Easy as that.
Because I wrote the music for that song, and because of the original agreement to try to keep everything as equal as possible, I was supposed to sing the lead vocal. I was more than a little nervous. I can sing OK, but I’ll never be in the same league as Don Henley. Still, I thought, I’ll give it my best shot. We were in the studios in Miami, and I’d drunk some red wine when I went up to the mike and started to sing. I knew my performance wasn’t great. Nothing was tingling. Don stepped up and sang, and it was immediately apparent to everyone, especially me, that he should sing it—even though, deep down, I wasn’t thrilled at losing my slot. I just hoped there might be another opportunity later on, but there never was.
Joe had come up with a lick and he, Randy, and I jammed on the idea over at Randy’s house one night. It eventually evolved into “Life in the Fast Lane.” Randy had bought Ricky Nelson’s old house, which overlooked Universal Studios and had a 360-degree view. He was a big fan of Rick, the singer of hits like “Hello, Mary Lou,” especially since he had played in Rick’s Stone Canyon Band. I believe the actress Helen Hunt bought the house from Randy afterward and tore it down to build a new one—a shame, because there was so much of Rick in that property, even his children’s painted handprints on the bathroom tiles. Anyway, it was a great place to rehearse, and we were up there jamming and listening to a little cassette machine with Jage Jackson, a terrific roadie who also played drums.
“Hey, try this one,” I said, playing a lick I’d first come up with in Boston. “I’ve had this one lying around for years, but I never did anything about it.” It opened with a raunchy guitar riff and a fast-paced backbeat, but then it fizzled out.
Joe listened hard, his head hanging so low that his greasy hair flopped completely over his face, parting only to reveal his bulbous nose. “I have an idea what to do with that,” he said suddenly, picking up a guitar. We all worked on it, with Jage adding some nifty drumbeats and me contributing a few licks that followed Joe’s classic intro, but the song definitely became Joe’s.
When the demo was done, Joe took it to Don and Glenn, who rushed away and came up with a concept. Glenn came up with the idea of driving in the fast lane, and he took that idea and expanded on it. I thought it was brilliant, sheer genius, to use the spaghetti-like L.A. freeways as an analogy of what it was like to be in the rock-and-roll business. Perfect. Don wrote some great lyrics that summed up how people destroy themselves with drugs in the “cold city”—lines of cocaine chopped out on a mirror creating lines on their faces. Pretty cool!
It was only when it was almost finished, when they set up the vocal track and Don started singing in that soulful Ray Charles voice of his, that we realized what he’d really achieved. We all thought, “Wow.”
Many consider Hotel California to be our finest album, but it wasn’t always an easy road to that elusive hotel. Just when we thought the departure of Bernie and the hiring of Joe had cleared the air, the pressure was still on to top the Greatest Hits album. How do you better your best? It was like raising the high jump bar another few inches, moments after you’ve won the gold medal. We worked many days and nights until the wee hours of the morning, squeezing the highest quality out of everyone involved. Whether it was engineering, writing, singing, playing, tracking, or editing, it was all done under the most intense scrutiny. Joe and I had calluses on our calluses. The ultimate goal was to produce the best possible record, but the process was extremely taxing and caused a lot of wear and tear on everyone’s nerves. Everyone wanted to set an impeccable standard for Eagles records.
In trying to achieve this, however, we often wound up erasing performances that were fiery, motivated, and inspired. If a take had a tiny human glitch, one note out of tune, even if all the rest sounded fine, we’d junk it and do it again. This was before Pro Tools digital editing allowed someone to sit at a computer and insert sounds or fine-tune a few notes. None of that existed then, so we’d have to play the song over and over. Before we knew it, we’d squeezed the creativity out of it. We could strive for flawless music, but we couldn’t force people to remain flawlessly inspired while delivering ten or twenty identical takes. The creative process was quickly robbed of its passion.
Fresh rifts began to open up, with Randy becoming the new focus of discontent. The sweetest-natured, gentlest of men, he was not someone to be easily riled, but every day in the studio, Don in particular seemed to find some reason for criticizing him. Maybe he’d stayed up too late the night before and was feeling a little the worse for wear (as we all so often did). Maybe he’d been a bit late arriving, or wasn’t in the most talkative of moods.
What was ironic was that Don was the worst of all at being on time. We had this policy of arriving at the studio “two for three”—between two and three o’clock. I’d always be one of the first to arrive. I’d help Bill—who dubbed me J.E., for Junior Engineer—to tidy up a few tracks. Or I’d shoot a few hoops with him outside, or tinker with a guitar, or play pool with Randy or one of the engineers until the rest of the guys showed. We’d play marathon poker games that lasted several days—“Eagle poker”—where thousands of dollars would be won and lost. One night, I lost eighteen hundred dollars in one hand to a roadie, and it hurt so much, I never really played again.
We had a saying, “Hurry up and wait,” because you’d hurry to be in the studio on time, and then you’d wait and wait and wait. One by one, the others would arrive, bleary-eyed, disheveled, sniffing or coughing, sufferin
g from the excesses of the previous night. Don would consistently show up at four o’clock or later, never with a reasonable excuse. It drove Glenn up the wall.
Worse than arriving late, when he did finally get to the studio, he was never in a good mood. One word best describes Don at that time: castigating. He had a constantly critical approach to everything. He’d always been a moody perfectionist, guarded with his lyrics and his personal feelings. We never really knew what he was thinking. Randy even slipped him a couple of Quaaludes once, to see what he’d be like when he was relaxed. They had a great night together, laughing and drinking and getting high, but the next morning Don was right back to his grumpy old self, the persona that had gained him the nickname Grandpa. In the words of Glenn Frey, “No one can suck the fun out of a room faster than Don Henley.”
His perfectionism undoubtedly worked; look at the end result. Thanks to Don and his insistence on doing everything just so, we produced probably our most brilliant studio album, but the process was sometimes very difficult to live with. By comparison, Glenn was much more upbeat, now that Joe was on board. He was a high-energy person, and more often than not, in those days, he was a delight to work with. That was the fun Glenn, the one you wanted to stay up all night with, drinking beers and listening to his stories. When he was like that, he really personified all that we were and wanted to be—a bunch of young guys playing music, having fun, and getting high.
With Don’s constant insistence on perfection, though, Glenn started to become edgy too. Glenn would do a first take, which sounded great to the rest of us, but Don wouldn’t be happy. He’d do it again and again, taking the letter c from one rendition of the word city, as in “City girls just seem to find out early,” then the i from another and the t from a third, and so on, until the final word city was made up of maybe five different takes. Bill Szymczyk was six three, and his new nickname became the Big Lopper, because he had to cut and paste so much tape together with a razor blade to make up a final take. There’d be what we called a pile of Big Lopper droppings all over the control room floor.
Don suddenly decided that we hadn’t gotten the guitar parts right on “Hotel” and that he wanted it to be exactly as I’d had it when he first heard it on my demo cassette. He was a stickler for that, being just like the demo. The trouble was, we were way down in Miami, and the cassette was back at my beach house in Malibu.
“Is Susan home?” he asked, his expression blank.
“Of course,” I replied.
“Then call her up and get her to play it for us over the phone.”
Poor Susan, who was juggling two small children at the time, not only had to find the cassette among all my stuff, she had to get a small blaster, set it up, and play the tape over the phone to Don and Bill, who recorded it on another cassette in the studio.
With that sort of insistence that everything sound flawless, Glenn became more sensitive to exposure than photographic film. He started forbidding anyone from coming into the control room when he was singing, except occasionally Don. We wouldn’t be able to hear what he’d done until the first comp was made. Only then would we be allowed in to listen and make suggestions and add our parts. It became an agonizingly slow process, taking five times as long to make the record as it should have, with tempers being lost along the way. These should have been the best times of our lives, and in many ways they were, but it could have been a hundred percent better.
In between takes, Don had become a prolific letter writer. Each letter took him a great deal of time, energy, and effort, but he seemed to feel it was worth it. It’s a well-known trait of his, and Don’s friend, Danny Goldberg, at one time, had copies of Don’s letters hanging in his office. One of the best and most famous letters I clearly remember Don writing was one that he composed to the studio maid, insisting that the floral toilet paper be put on the roll the other way around so it rolled off the top, pointing out that if it was meant to come off the bottom, the little pink flowers would have been printed on the undersides of the sheets. Where you would see them.
Whenever I could, I escaped from the studio atmosphere through drugs or alcohol. Oblivion seemed preferable to the nightmare of working in such an intense situation. But heavy cocaine abuse left me and everyone else feeling burned out, which wasn’t the best frame of mind for dealing with a highly stressful creative environment. I don’t know how many nights I drove back to 461 Ocean Boulevard at five or six in the morning, with the sun coming up, my shades on, hardly able to stay on the road, having been up all night, before falling into bed, knowing I had to do it all again at two o’clock that afternoon.
Thank the Lord for Joe Walsh. He was the only source of humor. He and Randy and I used to have a blast. We’d take silly videos of each other in the studio, usually while waiting for Don to arrive. We also started playing “cutout man”—snipping pictures from nudie magazines and wrestling magazines, then sticking them together on the wall to make a sort of storyboard collage. Each day there’d be a new picture and a new storyline. Pretty puerile stuff, admittedly, but it whiled away the hours between takes and gave us some laughs.
Criteria consisted of five studios in a large complex, and anyone who was anyone recorded there. Clapton had just been in, the Bee Gees were in another studio, and you could walk down the hallway and bump into face after famous face. One day I went for a breather and ran into my old friend Stephen Stills in the corridor, coming out of an adjacent studio.
“Hey, Don!” Stephen cried, delightedly, when he saw me. “I heard you guys were in town. How you doin’?”
“Oh, OK,” I said, reluctant to tell him the truth. “What’s up?”
“Just laying down some tracks for a new album,” he said. Smiling suddenly, he added, “Why don’t you sit in and help me out with some guitar work? I could really do with your input.”
Always happy to oblige, I went in and jammed with him for a few hours, adding some guitar parts to a couple of tracks. The last time we’d played together had been in that surprise gig in Colorado with Crosby & Nash. Before that, it would have been at some teen dance with the Continentals in Gainesville or Palatka, riding there on the Greyhound or in the back of someone’s pickup. We had such fun together in Miami, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to work alongside someone who was just pleased to play music. We talked about the old days in Florida and wondered where friends like Jeff Williams were now.
“Do you remember that time we wrecked that bed in that motel?” Stephen laughed. “Man, we drank some Jack Daniel’s that night!”
“Yeah, I remember.”
It felt good to recall such happy memories with him. They almost made me homesick. Leaving him and wandering back to the Eagles studio, I had to stop and take several deep breaths before bracing myself to step inside.
We endured seven quarrelsome months in Miami, broken only by a concert tour sandwiched between studio sessions. We flew between Miami and our live gigs, sometimes working twenty-four hours straight. Bill would fly out to where we were playing, let us hear some mixes, get a couple more takes, and then fly back. After what seemed like an eternity, we finally delivered an album that continues to dominate the hearts and charts of America. The Los Angeles Times called it a “legitimate rock masterpiece.” Besides the title track, it contains several other enduring classics, like “New Kid in Town,” “Wasted Time,” “Try and Love Again,” and “The Last Resort.” Don and Glenn once again dominated the songwriting credits, quite rightly, although I’d come up with “Hotel California” and “Victim of Love,” and Randy wrote the words and music for the haunting ballad “Try and Love Again.” Joe’s chief contribution was a song called “Pretty Maids All in a Row” and, of course, the music for “Life in the Fast Lane.”
Irving had negotiated the highest royalty rate in the history of the record business—a dollar fifty per album. Besides the distinctive opening shot of the Beverly Hills Hotel in silhouette, the sleeve featured wide-angle photographs of us with a group of disparate peop
le posing as hookers, pimps, surfers, and weightlifters, all standing in the lobby of an old Hollywood hotel that once had been the epitome of sophistication but had become somewhat shabby and more than a little fake—a bit like California. The album sold five hundred thousand copies a week in the early days, and eventually topped fourteen million, remaining one of our bestselling records of all time.
On January 14, 1977, three weeks after the album’s release, we kicked off a world tour in Cleveland, Ohio, with Jimmy Buffett as our opening act. We traveled everywhere by private jet, which became known as the “party plane,” complete with a “party pilot” and “party stewardesses.” Man, most of the time, we were several thousand feet above the atmosphere.
Because of the success of “Hotel California” as a single, we no longer opened with the lilting a cappella song “Seven Bridges Road.” For some reason, we rarely even bothered to rehearse it in the shower of the dressing room any more. I sorely missed that moment of vocal and spiritual harmony. My song, the new album’s title track, opened the show each night instead. Every evening, I stepped to the front of the stage in the spotlight to play those distinctive chords in front of a backdrop reproduction of the cover, the rest of the band in silhouette. Every night, there’d be thunderous applause and this incredible noise rising out the darkness, as the crowd reeled from the shock of that being the opening number. Don’s voice would float out from behind the drum riser, strangely disembodied, leading the fans along that dark desert highway, and we’d join him for the chorus and those sun-drenched harmonies. The stadium would explode. I’ll never forget that as long as I live.
