Heaven and Hell: My Life with The Eagles, 1974-2001

Don Felder

Wiley Books

By Mark Brown

There are a lot of things Don Felder can't say. Confidentiality agreements with the Eagles keep him mum on just how his book came out, as well as his writing process, legal roadblocks and if the rumors are true that the European version published last year had some material yanked for U.S. publication. "I can't comment on anything you just said," he said cheerfully.

While he dishes the dirt heavily in the book (sometimes justified in the cocaine-fueled The Long Run sessions, sometimes just gratuitously with band feuds) Felder does tell a musical story. It's a breezy read; most fascinating are the tales about the construction of individual tracks such as "Hotel California." Felder also explores his roots in Gainesville, Florida, which some pundits have called "the Liverpool of the United States" for the wealth of talent that came out of that early scene -- Felder, fellow Eagle Bernie Leadon, Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, the Allmans, Stephen Stills and more.

Q: Gainesville must have been an incredible scene at the time.

A: It was a great place to grow up, a great place to start. Although one of the things I suffered with was there was really no music education. There was chorus in high school. If you wanted to be in the marching band you could do that. But there was no music instruction. There was one music store in town. When I first started playing you had to buy your guitar strings at the drugstore. You just picked it up yourself, by ear. I pretty much taught myself how to read listening through records and learning by ear how to play. I became so good at it that I started teaching at the music store there. Tom Petty was one of my students early on in his career. That's how I also met Bernie. He came to town and went to the music store and asked them who was the best guitar player in town. The guy who owned the store said I was. I was 15 or something. I had ridden the bus with my guitar to Palatka, Florida. I got back to Gainesville and stepped off the bus and this guy was there to meet me. It was Bernie. He gave me a ride home and came in the house and we played some acoustic guitar, some electric guitar and decided we'd be picking pals.

Q: Who was the best musician out of there who didn't get the breaks? I'm thinking Bernie's brother Tom, who was in Mudcrutch with Tom Petty, which just put out its first album 30 years later.

A: Tom most likely. When he first moved to California we were roommates for about a year. We shared a house in the hippie headquarters of Topanga, the happening scene of the early ‘70s. He was a really good player and singer. He just never really stuck to it long enough here in L.A. to get the big break to get on through.

Q: Is it true you helped arrange Petty's early music?

A: Well, when Tom was one of my students I used to go over to his house and help him with guitar parts. He was in a band before that called the Rucker Brothers with Rodney and Ricky Rucker who played guitar. Tom actually played bass in that band. I helped those guitar players and Tom arrange some of their band tracks. Instead of three guys just thrashing artlessly I tried to make it sound more like one guy playing lead, one guy playing rhythm and one guy playing bass.

Q: I love the story of constructing the track "Hotel California." How much did it change from start to finish?

A: As a matter of fact I found a cassette about a month ago where I'd made (demo) mixes from that old TEAC. It's surprisingly accurate. I thought maybe I should take these and digitize them. I archived them before the oxide on the cassette just falls apart. Then we went and recorded that record in the same key I'd written it in and Don (Henley) went out to sing it. When he started singing he sounded like Barry Gibb - this very high falsetto voice and it was just wrong. He'd been driving around in the car listening to my cassette and singing lyric ideas to it. When he set up a mic and tried to sing it, it was way too high. We had to sit down with an acoustic guitar and figure out how to lower the key to where it would suit his voice.

Q: It's still a high-pitched vocal as it is.

A: Yeah. But we unfortunately landed on a key that's a perfect key for his voice, but a really awful guitar key. We had a bit of a dilemma about how to satisfy both key requirements. Obviously the vocalist won. It's the most important thing. Joe (Walsh) and I had to play in B minor, which is not a fun guitar key.

Q: It sounds like it was fun to record anyway, especially the solos.

A: Part of it was set up so I played the stuff I'd written, then Joe had some answer parts. Some of it was very close to what I'd written on the demo, some of it was just Joe playing. When we got to the harmony (guitar) parts at the very end I said "We really need to end this thing in just a glorious way that nobody's really done." We kinda came up with this fast d-d-d d-d-d lick. We went through it and worked out both lines. It took us about three days of just working on the guitar endings to do those solos on the way out. It's about two, two and a half minutes long, just those guitar parts.

Q: Hotel California and The Long Run had some iconic guitar sounds.

A: It's just a new sound. I enjoyed trying to do groundbreaking newer sounding guitar stuff. It's easy to set up, take a Les Paul, plug it in and turn it up. You get a great tone. To be able to approach it as trying to make a new, unique, identifiable sound is what I'm looking for.

Q: You lasted a while in the reunion. How does Irving Azoff get feuding musicians back together?

A: In one word: Money. There's a great deal of forgiveness and understanding where there are large lines of zeros.

Q: What was it like to be cut out of the band?

A: It's a hard, bitter kind of feeling on their part. I've tried to not react in a negative way. About three months after I divorced I got this call from the Eagles that I was being terminated. I was in a really dark depression there. You want to talk about sorting through your identity; you've lost your family and your job and your friends - just, pffft, gone. My girlfriend at the time told me that "this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to you." At the time it just sounded no way, it can't be. But when I sat down and started writing this book and took a really long look at my life from childhood, growing up on a dirt road, close to poverty in a little clapboard house with a tin roof in the middle of the palmetto fields of north Florida - to wind up having been in the biggest rock ‘n' roll band in American history, that's a gift. The talents that I was given and all the steps along the way, the jobs and the hard work, the people I'd met, the people who'd mentored me, teachers who taught me to sing, everyone along the way--Stills, Petty, Allmans, everyone--who had helped me develop to that point. It was a very cathartic thing to look back and realize this is not the end.

Q: It didn't bother you that the features on the release of Long Road Out of Eden never mentioned you?

A: It doesn't upset me at all. The thing I noticed about that, I noticed the intense discomfort that I saw onscreen between Don and Glenn (Frey). It was very uncomfortable for me to watch. I know what they feel. To put that on national television was embarrassing to me. I'm glad that my name wasn't mentioned.