Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  By the time I began to receive this stream of letters from the determined autograph hunter, I was pretty happy with my security. That was, until one November day in 1993, when I was out in the yard working on the ’57 Chevy pickup truck I’d bought in memory of my dad, into which I was fitting a Corvette engine. I was in old jeans and a sweatshirt, covered in grease from my fingers to my elbows, having a private journey down Memory Lane, back to Gainesville and my father working under the hood of his old Chevy while I passed him some tools. Hey, Dad, I said to myself, are you watching me now? Are you impressed?

  I was awoken from my reverie by a rustling in the bushes. “Hey, Don!” I suddenly heard. “Don Felder! Over here!”

  Looking up, I could see a man leaning over my fence and six-foot hedge, waving something at me. “Hey, Don, I’ve got some of those albums I want you to sign. Over here!”

  Wondering where on earth the German shepherd was when I needed her, I stared at this guy in total disbelief before striding purposefully into the house. Emma came as soon as I whistled and stood growling at our intruder while I grabbed the phone. I’d heard of not taking no for an answer, but this was extreme. First he’d found out where I lived, and then, when he refused my offer to send his stuff to me, he came to my house to confront me. “Holy shit,” I yelled, angrily, throwing down a wrench. “Who the fuck does this guy think he is?” I didn’t mind signing anything for him, but after the experience with the psycho, this was too bizarre. I dialed 911 and asked the police to come right away. “There’s a man trespassing on my property,” I told the sheriff, as I locked all the doors. “I’d like him removed at once.”

  The police arrived and picked him up. They drove him several blocks away and warned him that if he were ever caught harassing me on my own property again, they’d arrest him. I hoped that would be enough.

  A couple of weeks later, just a few days before Christmas, my Realtor friend Jack Pritchett called me up. “Hey, how you doin’?” I asked. “Wanna do some fishing this week?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” came the distracted reply. “Listen, Don, I’ve just driven past your house, down the Pacific Coast Highway, and I saw something really strange. I had to stop the car and turn around to make sure I was seeing it right.”

  “What? Seeing what right?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s this guy dressed as Santa Claus standing out on the street, holding up a giant placard.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “The placard says, DON FELDER IS UNFAIR TO HIS FANS. HE WON’T SIGN AUTOGRAPHS.”

  I’m the strongest advocate of free speech. Heck, I’ve done benefit gigs advocating such rights, but Psycho Santa—as he will forever be known in our house—was behaving so strangely that I called the police again. The sheriff found him and issued another warning, but he was too far from my house to be arrested for harassment. I felt really bad about calling the cops. I didn’t want to see the guy in prison; I just wanted him to accept my offer to sign his stuff and leave me and my family alone.

  A couple of weeks after Christmas, I received a videotape in the mail. It was from Psycho Santa. In it, he gave me a guided tour of his bedroom, which was set up as a shrine to the Eagles. It was too weird. His voice close to the mike, narrating where he’d acquired which item and why, he slowly panned around the room, showing me his stash of T-shirts, albums, posters, football jerseys, and guitars, all set up in a very obsessive way. Anyone can be a fan, but this was way beyond the norm. He was almost salivating over the memorabilia he slept with every night, and his breathless narration made my flesh crawl. He was scaring my wife, my kids, and me. I sent the tape to my attorney and had a restraining order issued for him. He’d given me no other choice.

  “Please Lord, may we never hear from him again,” I said to Susan.

  And, for a long time, we didn’t.

  One night in 1993, I was at home flicking through the TV channels absentmindedly, when I suddenly spotted Don and Glenn onstage, performing at a charity event without Timothy and me. They were playing “Hotel California.” I was staggered. No one had approached me or even told me about it. I felt like a spouse betrayed. This was the second time I knew of when other members of the band had played together after the split. Don had done a benefit concert in Massachusetts for the Walden Woods Project, a pet campaign of his to preserve from developers the Massachusetts land that inspired the writer Henry David Thoreau. I had a horrible sinking feeling that events I knew nothing about were happening without me.

  I found out later that Glenn and Joe had decided to do this latest gig together as part of their Party of 2 tour, and Irving, still hopeful, had invited Don to sit in. It was on Glenn’s home turf, and as there wasn’t the pressure of walking into a studio and facing all of us, he still felt like he was in control. A few other gigs followed, and I’d receive messages from friends all over the States about them.

  “Hey, Don,” they’d write, “I see the Eagles are doing a gig in Port-land, Oregon. Any chance of some tickets?” It would be the first I’d know of any gigs, and when I made inquiries, I’d discover it was just Glenn and Joe playing together.

  There was another gig in Central Park, for the Democratic campaign, with Don, Glenn, Timothy, and a backup band, and there were a couple for the Rainforest Foundation. Only once was I was invited to join in, for some antinuclear gig in Long Beach with Timothy and Don and Lindsey Buckingham, of Fleetwood Mac. Glenn was supposed to participate, but never did. Instead, he sent an apologetic video from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from stomach surgery, saying, “Hey, guys, I’d love to be there with you, but as you can see I’m tied up here for a while.” I sent him a bouquet of flowers and wished him well, but never heard a word back.

  When I asked Irving why I hadn’t been asked to any of the other gigs, he told me, “Don’t worry about it, Felder. It was hard enough to get those guys to work together. You were omitted so that there wouldn’t be that specific friction between you and Glenn that would make him refuse to do it. I thought if we started this way, it would be easier to include you later.”

  I still felt sick to my stomach. I wondered how much it really was a ploy to get Glenn to play ball, or whether Irving was saying, “Fingers, we can do this without you.”

  Glenn and I still hadn’t spoken since the Alan Cranston incident thirteen years before, although I’d tried half a dozen times to extend olive branches. When Glenn divorced his first wife after just three years of marriage, I sent him a note expressing my sorrow and asking if there was anything I could do. As with the flowers, I never received a reply. It was all very strange, because I couldn’t ever recall doing anything to Glenn that warranted his behavior. I never screwed his wife behind his back or stole anything from him. I just became the scapegoat for the breakup of the band and the ongoing “sibling” rivalry between him and Don, because I’d dared to vent some feelings publicly, as Glenn so freely and frequently did, and because I had occasionally asked some searching questions about the way the band was being run.

  I can even remember being in a little studio in L.A. with Glenn one night after we’d recorded “Those Shoes” for The Long Run, when he told me that what I’d brought to the band would propel it to a whole new level of success.

  “Man, what you’ve added to our sound with Hotel California and all the musical changes you’ve made, is awesome,” he said. “I knew when I first heard you play slide that you were perfect for this band, and you really are one of the main reasons the Eagles have risen to this level.”

  I was staggered. It was so unlike Glenn to give credit to anyone. I will never forget that night, sitting there after everybody else left, snorting some cocaine together while he expressed his sincere appreciation of me and acknowledged what I’d done. How could it have gone so wrong—or was it just the drugs talking?

  Later in 1993, Irving Azoff rounded up some of America’s biggest country stars in Nashville and issued an album of covers of Eagles songs. It was called Common Thread: The Songs of the
Eagles and featured stars such as Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt, Trisha Yearwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Clint Black. Irving had resigned from MCA, and had set up Giant Records. Don Henley, one of his first new clients after splitting from David Geffen, again, was intimately involved in the Nashville project, and a portion of the proceeds of the album sales were to go to the Walden Woods Project.

  Common Thread was like the remake of a favorite old movie, and it sounded great. After years and years of hearing those songs sung in the same old way, without a single note altered, it was good to hear fresh voices with a new take. I was impressed. The album sold three million copies in its first six months and rose to number one on the country chart and number three on the pop chart. It was even named Album of the Year by the Country Music Association. The first single was “Take It Easy,” written by Glenn and Jackson Browne, sung by Travis Tritt.

  To promote the single, Travis wanted to come up with something really different, an eye-catching video to be released for Christmas 1993. He suddenly suggested getting the Eagles back together again. When everyone stopped laughing, someone said, “Why not?” The record company asked Don first and then the rest of us, and, amazingly, Glenn agreed.

  The original idea of the shoot was that Travis would be singing in a seedy bar in downtown L.A., and we’d be his backup band, shooting pool and hanging around behind him. There were to be a couple of shots of all of us, walking along a road five abreast, arriving and leaving the bar together.

  The filming was all very secretive. Streets were blocked off, and everyone was sworn to silence. A funky Spanish-looking bar in North Hollywood was selected, and for the first time in thirteen years, we were all going to be in the same room together. There had been a lot of nervous anticipation in the days leading up to it, and when we arrived for the shoot, I felt the way I had on my first day at F. W. Buchholz High School in Gainesville, watching all the other kids arrive in their parents’ cars, wearing brand new clothes. Fortunately, Joe was there early, and he and I fooled around and he made me laugh, instantly defusing an extremely tense situation.

  When Glenn arrived, we said hello politely and then hugged.

  “Good to see you, man,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s good to be here.”

  The atmosphere worsened, though, when everyone arrived except Don. We knew of old that he was always late, but the forty-five minutes he made us wait that day seemed like a hundred and forty-five. Was he coming? Or was he gonna piss Glenn off by not showing, as Glenn had in 1990? By the time Don eventually walked through the door, I felt so brittle, I could have snapped in two. They said hello and hugged each other and began rehearsing “Desperado” almost right away, a song for which Joe and I weren’t required.

  In urgent need of some light relief, the two of us did something we used to do in the old days, which was sit at the back, not miked up, and look as if we were singing harmonies, when actually we were singing “Desert Rat Hole,” “Avocado,” or “El Dorado,” anything but “Desperado.” It had started as a childish way of keeping ourselves entertained and awake during the long periods in an Eagles set when only ballads would be played, but it helped break down the tension of that sizzling day.

  Within a few hours, though, we were shooting pool together, jamming, and actually having fun. It was like a high school band getting back together for a twenty-year reunion and playing “Louie Louie.” There was even a mock-up of us lined up against the wall outside the bar, being arrested by a highway patrolman, which brought back some old memories of a few close calls. It felt good to be back together and making music again. Glenn and I spoke to each other quite cordially and even hugged again at the end.

  “We should do this more often,” I told him, trying to resume my old diplomatic role in the band as a sort of marriage counsellor between the warring factions.

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “We should.”

  The planets were aligning.

  The video was a great success and sparked what one leading rock journalist described as “Eaglemania.” The ever-resourceful Irving attempted yet another reunion. After the Northridge earthquake destroyed Don’s L.A. home and he decided to return to his native Texas, Irving quickly organized another lunch in Aspen, to which Don, Glenn, and Joe were invited. Timothy and I weren’t. The numbers being thrown around this time for a resumption tour were too tempting for any of them to refuse.

  The Eagles had never originally been about making music for money, but suddenly it became the main focus of interest. Irving called everyone, conducting a litmus test to see how we felt. Word came back that, if the money was right, there might be a possibility. It’s amazing how a few zeros on the end of a check can make you forget how much you dislike someone and justify your putting up with them again after all these years.

  After more than a decade of silence and inactivity, everyone agreed to try again, to rehabilitate, get back into shape, relearn old skills, and put away our differences. Glenn had first come up with the word “resumption.” We weren’t reuniting, he insisted, just resuming. We honestly didn’t know if we could pull it off, and nobody knew how long it would hold together if we did—six months was the initial estimate—but $300 million can sure put a smile on a person’s face. The resumption tour was on.

  Irving faxed the media a four-word message to announce the news. It said simply, “Hell has frozen over.”

  SIXTEEN

  Despite such momentous news and the effect it was about to have on my life, my family had become the main focus of my concern, chiefly my second son, Cody, the most free-spirited of all our children. Sweet, sensitive, gorgeous to look at, he had all the confidence of a third child and spent his childhood with scabby knees and scuffed hands. He looked just like I did as a kid, only he was ten times more accident-prone. He became such a regular visitor to the emergency room at the local hospital that they were on first-name terms.

  When he was eleven, he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and after a battery of tests, we were advised to place him on the now-controversial amphetamine Ritalin, then commonly prescribed for ADD kids to help them focus. Having had plenty of personal experience with amphetamines myself, I didn’t approve of Cody taking pills at such an early age, but we’d tried everything else, and this was a last resort.

  By the time he was in seventh grade, I realized we may have inadvertently given him a lifetime taste for drugs. Some kids at school introduced him to pot and speed. The first time I noticed the telltale glazed look in his eyes my stomach did a flip. Memories of my own unhappy encounters with my father flooded my brain. I was suspended in an agony of indecision. Part of me wanted to yell at him, grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and tell him how stupid he was being. I could almost envision the effectiveness of using my belt.

  The other part of me wanted to buckle under, drop to the floor, and cry like a baby. I, of all people, knew what drugs could do, and I had a dreadful sense of foreboding that this was the start of something serious. In all the years I’d been in the music industry, I’d seen dozens of promising young people fall by the wayside. Not just famous rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, but personal friends like some of the guys from Flow, and friends like John Belushi, lying cold in his grave. I didn’t have a clue what to do.

  In my young son, I saw echoes of myself, of Joe Walsh, of all the people I’d known who were addicts, and I felt physically sick. I began driving him to and from school and picking him up from his friends’ houses. I tried to talk with him, reason with him, and explain that I wasn’t saying this just because I was his dad.

  “I know the temptations, son,” I told him. “I know what it’s like to be persuaded into trying things by your buddies, but you’ve got to fight it, stand up for yourself, and say no. If this sort of behavior carries on, we’re gonna have to take you to see someone, to get some professional help, and you don’t want that, do you?”

  Cody would stare up at me with those big blue eyes
of his and promise never to try anything again. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he’d say. “I only tried it once and I didn’t like it anyway.” His answers stuck in my craw, because they were the same I would have come up with.

  Even more poignantly, at the same time I was dealing with young Cody’s problems, I had to drive my old buddy Joe Walsh to a clinic in Santa Monica for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, after Don and Glenn decreed that unless he was sober, he’d remain in the fires of hell.

  Susan and I and Cody underwent some searing encounter sessions and family therapy. It was an extremely salutary experience. I seemed to be to blame for just about everything that had gone wrong in his life. I was either never there, or when I was, I wasn’t paying him enough attention. Maybe he was right. In the hope that Cody might find some release in music, I bought him a guitar. The next time I saw it, the guitar was leaning up against his bed with the words I HATE DAD scratched deeply into its mahogany veneer. Tears pricked the back of my eyes.

  I knew I was to blame. I’d failed as a father and as someone with experience of drugs who’d, luckily, never felt the barbs of addiction. I’d been absent for much of his young life, following my dream at the expense of his. The guilt nearly killed me. Cody had always had that wholesome, kid-surfer kind of look, with his blond hair and bright eyes. Now his eyes had lost their sparkle, and he seemed like a different child. It broke our hearts, not least because it felt like we were losing him.