Heaven and Hell

by Don Felder

  As well as worrying about the technical side of the gigs, we were running back and forth between the studio and the rehearsal hall near Pico and Sepulveda. When we did try to make music, none of us seemed to be playing very well, and there was even more friction than usual between Don and Glenn, who’d completely abandoned any ideas of writing together. Part of the problem was, I think, that they simply ran out of words. With more than fifty Eagles songs under their belts between them, not to mention their individual solo efforts, their vocabulary, like their patience, was running thin. Their broad-sweeping panorama had always been Los Angeles, and there were only so many ways you could describe the people and the desert and the paradoxes of this extraordinary city before drying up.

  On December 7 , 1999, a couple of weeks before the gigs, Irving set up a press conference in the rehearsal hall so that we could receive official plaques commemorating record sales for Greatest Hits, 1971-1975, the album the record company had released almost as a stalling tactic while we finished Hotel California.

  “You’ll just have to stop rehearsing for a few minutes, come out, say hello, play a song and then you can get right back to work,” he told us confidently.

  We were right up against the wire, time-wise, and could have done without the interruption, but we did as we were told and conducted a quick sound check before the press conference. The five of us wandered out into the rehearsal hall with cups of coffee and our instruments and sat on five stools in a row, playing a few verses of “Tequila Sunrise” to a half-empty room while some stagehands set up chairs in readiness.

  A few hours later, when we walked back out onto that stage, we were faced with a barrage of flashbulbs and a flurry of activity. There were many television cameras, about forty still photographers, and maybe fifty international press reporters, their notepads in hand. The numbers of chairs put out was woefully inadequate. There was a live broadcast on CNN’s Showbiz Today with Jim Moret, and we were also live on the Web. It was the largest press conference we’d ever faced. I think we all realized then how important this award was. It wasn’t just Irving blowing smoke up our ass.

  Hilary Rosen, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, had flown in from Washington to present us with the plaque and to declare Greatest Hits the biggest-selling album of the twentieth century, with 26 million units sold. It even outsold Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was close behind us and which many considered to be the album of the epoch.

  Don told the assembled media that as he couldn’t remember much about the seventies, it was nice to have the plaque to remind him what he’d been up to. He added, “I think the real award is that we’re all alive and well when so many of our colleagues aren’t.” We all echoed that.

  In answer to a question about the effect the Eagles had on people’s lives, Glenn replied, “The music you play is the soundtrack of your life. It’s your life movie. . . . In the seventies, people did things to the Eagles. They broke up with their girlfriend. They broke up with their boyfriend. They got in a car and drove across America. They went on a fandango. We seemed to be the soundtrack . . . people like having our music in the background of their movie.”

  I told the reporters, “This is beyond my wildest imagination. It’s an amazing award and one none of us really expected. It is a testament to the songwriting of these two guys right here. Those songs stood the test of time.”

  Asked about ongoing friction between band members, Glenn replied, with one-hundred-percent honesty, “We’re putting up a front for you, you know. We’re on TV.” When the laughter died away, he added, “I think any worthwhile relationship has its peaks and valleys. This band’s had some valleys, but we’re probably in pretty good shape right now.”

  Of the Millennium gigs, he added, “I think the nostalgia and the feelings that are associated with a band like the Eagles are going to be amplified to a degree that we’ve never experienced. To stand in southern California on New Year’s Eve and play all these songs, which are so much about California, so many of them written in California, where we lived, I think I’m looking forward to a pretty emotional evening myself. I’m going to cry.”

  Hilary Rosen assured me privately that Bernie and Randy would each be given a copy of the plaque. In my opinion they should have been there to receive it in person. They were as much responsible for that album as Don, Glenn, or me, and certainly more than Joe or Tim, who were not even on any of the tracks on this album, but “The Gods” would never have allowed it. When we’d received our award and posed for photographs, we picked up our guitars and sat on the stools we’d practiced on earlier and played “Tequila Sunrise.” As always, it was a brilliantly convincing performance of unity.

  I have to say, that award really blew me away. Don described it, very aptly, as musical Viagra. I’d been completely oblivious to how well that album had actually done. I knew it had sold consistently over the years but didn’t realize exactly how well until that moment. Never in my wildest childhood dreams did I expect to surpass my idols Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and His Comets, or B.B. King in record sales. I thought of the time I’d jammed down in Colored Town or stood in that barn watching B.B. play, and I had to pinch myself to believe what we’d achieved.

  It seemed amazing to me, at the age of fifty-two, that I could have made my living doing what I’d always wanted to do ever since I swapped my cherry bombs for my first guitar. My marriage had all but survived the rigors of years on the road, even if it was in its death throes now, and I had four fantastic kids, a grandson, and a beautiful home. Whichever way I looked at it, I was rich beyond the dreams of Gainesville and would never have to work again. I think even my father might have been proud.

  The Millennium concerts—dubbed by fans the Eaglennium—went ahead, despite a serious dose of the flu that left me barely able to stand. It began a few days before the first show and lasted all the way into January. I was so sick. I had a high fever, was clogged with mucus, and couldn’t speak without coughing up fluid from my lungs. There was never any suggestion of canceling. We had a multimillion-dollar performance bond, and New Year’s Eve, 1999, was not a gig you could cancel and just reschedule. I knew I had to go on, no matter what.

  Jackson Browne opened for us with his usual professional set, featuring his classics such as “Doctor My Eyes,” “The Pretender,” and “Running on Empty.” My old rival David Lindley played with him, and David Crosby joined him onstage for the song “For Everyman.”

  Then it was our turn. Standing in front of the top half of a giant clock face with Roman numerals, beneath huge stained-glass chandeliers, flanked by a scarlet curtain, we opened with “Hotel California,” which the fired-up audience of twelve thousand of our most dedicated fans was well programmed to receive, then continued with the usual playlist: “Victim of Love,” “New Kid in Town,” and “Wasted Time.”

  I could hardly stay upright on stage and couldn’t see beyond the lights because of my flu delirium. The music we were playing seemed to roar like the sea in my ears. I’d had four different doctors give me different prescriptions. I was dosed up to the eyeballs with injections and pills. Susan and the kids were there to give me support as I lay down on the floor of my dressing room, shivering, between sets. Thankfully, there was a twenty-minute intermission, during which a film, coproduced by Glenn, was shown on giant video screens. It was a montage of music and images of the century, run with a score Glenn wrote with songwriter Jay Oliver, and a series of spoof interviews, with each of us claiming the credit for naming the band and writing “Hotel California,” in a misjudged attempt to make us look like humorous best buddies. After the intermission, I staggered back out onto the stage. I tried to keep my voice from breaking during a rendition of “Seven Bridges Road,” and then I tried to rock. I was having a really hard time under the hot lights and never received a flicker of sympathy from “The Gods.”

  In my view, our performances on those interminable three nights weren’t great, especially b
earing in mind how much people had paid to hear us play. Glenn sang Randy’s “Take It to the Limit,” but without his uniquely soulful voice, it simply didn’t work. Thankfully, the crowd sang along to almost every song, bolstering us through our weakest moments. Our only really good number was a new rhythm-and-blues version of “The Best of My Love,” which sizzled. For that song, we were on fire.

  To appease those who wanted to hear new or different material, we included some seldom-heard numbers like Tom Waits’ “Ol’ 55,” “Those Shoes,” and “Please Come Home for Christmas,” saving “Funky New Year” for the fireworks-spitting encore, snippets of which were broadcast live on CNN shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve as the chosen celebration for the West Coast of America. Bang in the middle of “Funky New Year,” Don for some reason sang a “Millennium Rap,” trying to sound like some New York rap artist and failing badly. “We got back together, we broke up,” he said, clicking his fingers in time. “We got back together, we broke up, we broke up, we got back together.” Nobody, least of all us, found it terribly amusing, except him.

  As the clock struck midnight and Joe played “Auld Lang Syne,” I slumped over my guitar with relief. The ordeal was over. I searched for Susan at the side of the stage to give her a kiss, but she was nowhere to be found.

  Back home after New Year’s Eve, I gradually recovered from the flu and gained my physical and mental strength for what I knew was to come. Susan and I were communicating largely through notes left on the kitchen work surface. I felt starved of affection and horribly lonely in my own home. Finally, one day in late January, I took off to Palm Springs to escape what had become an untenable situation. I’d tried to reach her during the day but eventually left her a note, which said, “Gone to the Palm Springs Film Festival and to play golf.”

  When she called me at my hotel later that night and asked me why I had just taken off, I blurted out all that I was feeling about my marriage.

  “It’s over, Susan,” I told her, the words sticking in my throat. “I know this probably isn’t the kindest way to tell you, but I’m afraid that’s the truth. We’re not in love anymore. I’m so sorry.”

  I know I didn’t handle it very well and that I should have had the courage to break it to her personally, but I was just so tired of waiting for her to find a window in her busy schedule so I could tell her we were through.

  I honestly thought she would have seen this coming, but her response was far from expected. She was absolutely devastated and refused to communicate with me, dealing only with our family therapist. In an atmosphere of bitter recrimination, I moved out onto my boat, and within a week I was served with divorce papers. The kids were shattered. One by one, they came by the boat, and we held each other and cried together.

  “I will always love your mother. I just can’t live with her anymore,” I told them. If I could have taken away any of the hurt, I would have, but it was too late. The sense of cold isolation I felt left me unable to sleep or eat. I felt as if a piece of my heart had been cut out. Thus began a long, sustained period of darkness that crept over every aspect of my life and plunged me to new depths of despair.

  Never once did Glenn or Don call me up and offer any support or sympathy over the breakdown of my twenty-nine-year marriage. Not once did they phone to ask, “Hey, man, are you OK?” Glenn had been divorced; he knew what it was like. Joe, Timothy, even Irving called up. Many other people, including some I least expected, offered their support. When you’re going through such a shitty time, you come to realize that the ones who step up are your real friends. The rest no longer count.

  Work became a welcome distraction.“Let’s go into the studio and finish the record from the Millennium gig,” Irving told us.

  “But we don’t even have a record deal yet,” I pointed out.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me, that smile of his ever more unnerving. “The negotiations are well underway. Just go in and do this on a ‘good faith’ basis, and we’ll fine-tune the details later.”

  The venue was preset: Glenn’s Dog House, and Elliot Scheiner as the producer, no questions asked. The recording needed a great deal of post-production work, all of which was done with each member separately and Glenn as an invisible producer, so that he never actually had to work directly with any of the other band members. He’d spent the five months since the gigs deciding which recording of which song to choose from which night. Once he’d made his selection and completed his own vocal and guitar parts, he set dates for each of us to go in separately and fix our own parts.

  Don Henley, alias Grandpa, was scheduled to come in last, after everyone else had finished, because every hair on his entire body would have stood straight on end if he had heard the first takes.

  Trouble was, we weren’t at the Record Plant or Criteria. Glenn was at his home in Hawaii, playing golf or doing some corporate show for big bucks—a lucrative new sideline of his. Don was on tour or busy in Dallas or promoting his new pet project, the Recording Artists’ Coalition, professing equality for musicians in the business, campaigning to change what he called the unfair practices of record companies.

  Nobody seemed to be talking to anyone else. Joe and Tim were scheduled to come in at separate times from me. Nothing I said seemed to matter. I felt our sound had become glossy, corporate, less human, and in my opinion, downright lousy, if you want to know the truth. Then again, the album’s later sales show that millions of people disagreed, so what did I know? They just don’t know what they’re missing.

  Despite Irving’s repeated warnings not to make waves, I never stopped asking to see the various documents that would allow me and my attorneys to assess the deals that Don, Glenn, and Irving were making, especially this new one, which could potentially be our most important. Because of my continued interest in the current negotiations, many of the feelings that had been harbored against me in the seventies and eighties resurfaced. I was made to feel isolated and out of the loop once more. For whatever reason, the Triumvirate didn’t like me asking too many questions.

  Maybe because of my newfound courage from having just dealt with the unhappiness of my marriage, I didn’t take Irving’s warnings too seriously. Susan and I had a long way to go before we’d be talking again, but the fact that I had faced up to the demise of my marriage and come out the other side lulled me into a false sense of security as to how much I could push a situation. Incident after incident with Don, Glenn, and Irving made me realize that the time was coming when I would have to stand up to “The Gods” as well, and say or do something to stop them treating the rest of us like lowly subordinates. A classic example was that of Timothy Drury and John Corey. Timothy was a multitalented musician who toured with us for years and who’d played on Don’s solo tours before that. John, who played keyboards, was much the same and had cowritten some of Don’s solo songs.

  Timothy had written a short classical segue, a beautiful piece of music that he played on a piano during the intermission of each show every night during the Hell Freezes Over tour. John played the string part so that it sounded like an orchestral introduction. When that music started, we knew, on cue, that half of us would walk out from stage left and half from stage right, our gait in perfect time to the music, and set up on five stools placed at the front of the stage. Just as we all sat down, the music would end, and Glenn would say, “Hi, and welcome back to the second half of our show,” and we’d launch into an acoustic version of “Tequila Sunrise.” It worked like a dream.

  When it came to putting together the music for the box set, I heard that Don, Glenn, and Irving decided that they wanted to use that little piece of music that Timothy had written and played live. He was delighted, thinking he’d have a tiny slice of the lucrative writers’ and publishers’ royalties on an Eagles record, but that wasn’t the deal.

  Irving told him he just wanted to do a buyout and offered Timothy a couple of thousand dollars.

  Timothy was horrified but had told me it was a take-it-or-leave-it dea
l.

  Timothy couldn’t believe it. He’d let the Eagles use that piece of music over and over for six years. He’d been pounding around on the road with us for all these years. The music was not included.

  Fred Walecki, our old friend from Westwood Music, developed throat cancer that year and had to have his voice box removed. Days after his surgery, which cost six figures and wasn’t fully covered by his medical insurance, Bernie Leadon contacted Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and Glyn Johns—the English producer who’d put the first Eagles albums together and shared Bernie’s country rock vision—and the four of them decided to organize a benefit gig. Word hit the streets, and a veteran lineup of California’s finest musicians agreed to play the gig that August. Among them were Don Henley, Randy Meisner, Graham Nash, David Lindley, David Crosby, Linda Ronstadt, Chris Hillman, and Ry Cooder. Over two nights at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the friends of Fred Walecki stepped up and played, as Fred sat, with his new electronic voice box, in a seat of honor at the front of the stage.