Some years in the past, after the Eagles had damaged up, Glenn Frey remembered: “We had been on stage, and Don Felder appears at me and says: ‘Solely three extra songs till I kick your ass, pal’. And I’m saying: ‘Nice, I can’t wait’. We had been singing Greatest Of My Love, however inside each of us had been considering: ‘As quickly as that is over, I’m going to kill him’.”
Within the gentle of such circumstances, it’s not stunning that Don Henley as soon as admitted: “I had an ulcer earlier than I used to be thirty due to the Eagles”. And the music of the Eagles sounded so cool, so easy. They wrote songs that outlined the woozy, Southern California idyll: Peaceable Straightforward Feeling, Desperado, Tequila Dawn and scores of others.
Not often, although, has the interior lifetime of a band been so at odds with the sounds that it made. “Led Zeppelin might argue with us, however I feel we’d have thrown the best travelling get together of the 70s,” Glenn Frey remembered. He was speaking concerning the Eagles’ notorious ‘third encore’, the debauched gathering that will comply with each gig, that includes the band, their entourage, hangers-on, bizheads “and as many stunning ladies as we’d meet from the airport to the resort”.
The Eagles took Learjets like different individuals take cabs. Don Henley would ship one to select up his girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, after she’d completed a gig with Fleetwood Mac. They’d rent them, Elvis-style, to fly in meals and instances of Chateau Lafite Rothschild when Henley celebrated his birthday.
For half a decade through the Nineteen Seventies, the Eagles appeared unstoppable, rising upwards on nice thermals of fame and success. However the entire thing fell aside after they tried to document a follow-up to their inventive and business highpoint that was Lodge California.
Through the three years of depth and madness that had been the making of The Lengthy Run, Don Henley is claimed to have composed a protracted memo to the recording studio supervisor informing him of his displeasure that the bathroom paper within the bathrooms got here off the underside of the dispenser and never the highest. ‘If it was meant to return from the underside,’ the memo allegedly ran, ‘then the little flowers can be printed on the underside of the paper’.
“The Lengthy Run was inferior to Lodge California, and it was an excruciatingly painful album to make,” Henley mentioned. “We had been having fights on a regular basis concerning the songs – huge fights about one phrase – for days on finish. That document took three years and value $800,000, and we burned out.”
Don Henley had all the time been tense. Even when the band had been making thousands and thousands of {dollars} and he’d shared a home within the Hollywood Hills (that used to belong to movie star Dorothy Lamour) with Glenn Frey, and so they’d sit and take a look at the entire of Los Angeles unfold out earlier than them and assume: ‘It actually doesn’t get significantly better than this’, he can be worrying about one thing or different.
His oldest pal, a musician known as Richard Bowden, who was higher often called Balloon Dick, remembered: “Joe Walsh got here as much as me simply after he’d joined the Eagles and mentioned: ‘You’ve identified him the longest. Simply inform him to chill out’. I informed him: ‘Simply let Don be tense. He’s all the time been that approach. When he solves one downside, he simply strikes on to one thing else to fret about’.”
Henley and Bowden had grown up collectively in a city in Texas known as Linden, which had a inhabitants of simply over 2,000. “Mrs Henley was an actual fantastic girl, however she by no means had any management over Don,” Bowden informed Rolling Stone journal after they profiled the band in 1976. “Not that he didn’t respect her, he simply all the time did what he wished. And his father must come down on him. They couldn’t get alongside for years. Don all the time felt he needed to show one thing to him.”
His father was a worrier, too. He was a hard-working man who saved 25 cents per week for Henley’s school fund, and in the end Henley didn’t full his training. C J Henley’s demise was pivotal to Don’s world view.
“I found out a very long time in the past, when my father obtained sick and died, that life wasn’t truthful,” he mentioned, “however I obtained mad about it. I used to go round and cuss God on a regular basis, as a result of my father died too early and he suffered. He solely lived to see Take It Straightforward and a few weeks of Witchy Girl.
“He actually labored and frightened himself to demise, and he had a cardiac and he died on July 7, 1972, after 4 or 5 different coronary heart assaults. You don’t know what’s actual till you see your father within the emergency room heaving and gasping for breath and saying: ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ The whole lot else will get actual trite after that. There’s been a number of demise in my household.”
Don Henley performed drums in Bowden’s first band, The 4 Speeds, which turned Shiloh. Extra demise got here when Jerry Dale Surratt, certainly one of that band, was killed whereas messing about on his bike proper in entrance of the band and his household exterior their rehearsal rooms in Linden. Issues had been by no means the identical once more for Shiloh, and first Bowden after which Henley went to Los Angeles.
There Henley encountered singer/guitarist Glenn Frey in 1970. Frey had drifted from Detroit to California on the age of 19, and had met guitarist J D Souther on his first day on the town.
“I grew up operating in Detroit,” Frey remembered. “I went to highschool with the little children of car manufacturing unit employees – fathers who beat their wives and beat their youngsters. The children would then go to highschool and beat on me. My father was a machinist in a store that constructed the machines that constructed automotive components.
“I had a fairly regular childhood. My dad and mom weren’t drinkers. I all the time had garments. I all the time went to camp for per week in the summertime. My dad and mom didn’t find the money for to purchase me a automotive after I turned sixteen, however I had a terrific childhood.”
Congregating on the Troubadour membership the place The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield and different SoCal scenesters frolicked, everybody was dreaming the identical dream.
“All of us watched the solar set within the west each evening of adolescence and thought sometime about popping out right here,” Frey informed the LA Instances. “All of it appeared so romantic… The Life journal articles about Golden Gate Park and the Sundown Strip… And the music: The Seashore Boys, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield. It was positively the archetype of probably the most stunning place on the earth.”
“Glenn requested if I’d prefer to go on the street with Linda Ronstadt’s band, and I mentioned: ‘You guess I do,’” Henley mentioned of their first, fateful connection. “I used to be broke, and right here was an opportunity for 2 hundred {dollars} per week. We went out for a month or two, and Glenn and I struck up this nice friendship. That’s once we began plotting to place a band collectively.”
The connection between Henley and Frey – each their friendship and the writing partnership – turned the important thing one within the Eagles proper from the beginning. They met bassist Randy Meisner first – he was standing about six ft away, additionally backing Linda Ronstadt. Then, legend has it, they got here throughout singer/guitarist Bernie Leadon on a drunken time out at Disneyland.
After the third rehearsal, Frey turned to Henley and mentioned conspiratorially: “We’re going to should run issues…”
David Geffen, who was busy constructing an empire of his personal, had signed up Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, J D Souther and different artists. He gave the Eagles some cash, and Jackson Browne co-wrote Take It Straightforward with them.
It got here out as a single on Could Day 1972, and have become, nearly instantaneously, the soft-rock radio basic that it stays at this time. And for the Eagles the repercussions started. It was, as Rolling Stone reported, ‘Hell from the very begin’. Leadon and Meisner resented Henley and Frey however couldn’t do a lot about it. Henley and Frey started dwelling collectively, and, as Jackson Browne mentioned: “Glenn all the time went round messing issues up, and Don all the time adopted him round cleansing issues up”.
It was as if they’d a portrait of Dorian Grey within the attic: the extra stunning the sounds they made (the Eagles album got here out in 1972; Desperado in ’73; On The Border in ’74; One Of These Nights in ’75), the uglier issues turned inside the band.
Leadon give up for the primary time in 1975, saying: “I stored asking: ‘Are we going to relaxation subsequent month?’ I wished to get in form earlier than the age of thirty so I’d have an opportunity at the remainder of my life. I used to be afraid one thing inside me was dying. Leaving was an act of survival.”
Desperado was the album that outlined Eagles, when it comes to their picture as a lot as their sound. They styled themselves after a bunch of real-life outlaws, the Doolin-Dalton Gang. Henley and Frey used the cowboy mythology to discover their very own tortured emotions concerning the sexual and monetary and social politics of the US. It was one other of their contradictions: these stunning songs that would simply move you by in a haze of melody, and but carried such spite and chunk.
“Looking back, I admit that the entire cowboy-outlaw-rocker fantasy was a bit bogus,” Henley mentioned after the band had cut up for the primary time, in 1980. “I don’t assume we actually believed it, we had been simply making an attempt to make an analogy. Abruptly we had been getting well-known and making all this cash, and it simply turned our little heads round. We had been dwelling exterior the legal guidelines of normality, we had been out right here in LA, issues had been form of Western, and we simply determined to put in writing one thing about it to attempt to justify it to ourselves.”
“When the band first began,” Henley recalled, “I by no means thought we’d final greater than a few years. I believed we’d make a few albums and that will be it. At first we liked what we had been doing, after which, as soon as we obtained a modicum of success, we mentioned, nicely, that is good.
“Then we realised that staying there was tougher than getting there, which is all the time the case. So then we put all our energies into staying up there, realising that you’ve got your hour within the solar and then you definitely dwell the remainder of your life within the shade.
“In any occasion, these first three or 4 information had been simply as a lot us making an attempt to develop up as something. We had been making an attempt to clarify issues to ourselves, and a number of the time we didn’t know what we had been speaking about. There’s one thing on all these albums that makes me cringe. I imply, our complete quest as we went alongside was to attempt to make every album higher than the earlier one. And that’s tough to do whenever you’re making an attempt to run a gaggle as a democracy. Retaining that group collectively was a full-time job.”
The opposite members of the Eagles began calling Don Henley Grandpa. He’d taken medicine with the very best of them – he’d wanted to, to maintain up with the band’s relentless schedule – however he hated the truth that they fucked issues up.
“I assume there was a short time period the place I attempted to place some form of inventive inventory into medicine,” he mentioned, “however I realised fairly quickly that you might get extra work, and higher work, carried out should you had been straight. We did a number of work on medicine within the Eagles.
“Our schedule was simply so gruelling; we didn’t have the stamina in any other case. We’d do issues like exit on tour, play a couple of gigs, then get on a Lear jet and fly to Miami and begin recording at 4 o’ clock within the morning, then get again on the Lear jet at three or 4 within the afternoon and return to Cleveland and do a live performance. And we’d do all of it simply to satisfy deadlines. So we took medicine.
“However from the start within the Eagles I’d get in fights with the opposite guys about smoking joints or doing coke earlier than happening stage. Utilizing medicine would screw up their voices, and so they’d sing out of tune. So I obtained the nickname of Grandpa. I imply, medicine had their place, however I used to be by no means a type of guys to rise up and roll a breakfast joint.”
The Eagles launched a best hits album – the well-known one with the blue cowl with a hen’s cranium on – and it bought 22 million copies. Till Michael Jackson’s Thriller surpassed it a few years later it was the most important album of all time. After which they made Lodge California.
The implosion of the Eagles, the years of rancour and remorse, all started with slightly guitar noodle that Don Felder got here up with one idle afternoon. “I had simply leased this home out on the seaside at Malibu. I assume it was round ’74 or ’75,” Felder informed Guitar journal a few years on. “I keep in mind sitting in the lounge, with the doorways all vast open, on a spectacular July day. I had a washing go well with on and I used to be sitting on this sofa, soaking moist, considering the world is a superb place to be.
“I had this acoustic twelve-string and I began tinkling round with it, and these Lodge California chords simply form of oozed out. Each infrequently it looks like the cosmos components and one thing nice plops into your lap. I had a four-track arrange in one of many again bedrooms, and I ran again there to place this concept down earlier than I forgot it.
“After I gave Henley the cassette it had eight or ten completely different track concepts on it. He got here again and mentioned: ‘I actually love this one monitor in your tape, the one which seems like a matador or one thing… such as you’re in Mexico’. We labored all of it up and went into the studio and recorded it.”
Henley and Frey took Felder’s Mexican melody some place else totally with the lyric. It was one other of their bittersweet epics, all superficial shimmer and sad-eyed social remark.
“I feel he and Glenn had this concept, form of the fantasy of California. It’s purported to be form of a microcosm of the world,” Felder mentioned. “However I wouldn’t need to communicate for them. The ‘You may try any time you want, however you’ll be able to by no means go away’ line was primarily based on Jackson Browne’s first spouse, who dedicated suicide. In different phrases, you’ll be able to try, die, however you’re nonetheless within the cosmos someplace. You’re not going to get out of that karmic section of it.
“The best way Glenn and Don labored it was, Glenn was nice at conceptualising. He’ll say: ‘I can see this man driving within the desert at evening, and you’ll see the lights of LA, approach off on the horizon…’ Henley will get the image and goes from there. He was an English literature main. He writes actually nice prose. He can take these snapshots and put them into simply two or three traces.”
Henley considered his reward for a telling phrase as a double-edged sword. “Life In The Quick Lane – by God in the event that they didn’t flip that right into a celebration of precisely what we had been making an attempt to warn them about,” he mentioned of the cautionary third monitor on Lodge California. “Everyone’s obtained cocaine now, regardless of how shitty it’s. I might hardly hearken to that track once we had been recording it, as a result of I used to be getting excessive so much on the time and the track made me ailing.
“We had been making an attempt to color an image that cocaine wasn’t that nice. It activates you. It tousled my again muscle mass, it tousled my nerves, it tousled my abdomen, and it makes you paranoid. I’m not saying I’m an angel or a saint now, as a result of I’m not, however I’ve slowed down fairly a bit.”
![Eagles - Hotel California (Live 1977) (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/09839DpTctU/maxresdefault.jpg)
The Lodge California album got here out in 1976, yr that punk rock started. Henley struggled with the guilt of all of it: “You recognize that you just don’t deserve it. You get an excessive amount of cash and an excessive amount of of all the pieces whenever you’re too younger, and it comes actually shortly. And it messed me up for some time. I grew up in a city of two,400 individuals. My dad didn’t consider in bank cards, he paid money for all the pieces. And all of the sudden I had a gold American Specific card which I used to be embarrassed to take out of my pockets as a result of I’d by no means carried out that earlier than.”
By now, Henley, Frey and the band (together with new guitarist Joe Walsh) had been confronting the enormity of the Eagles and the ubiquity of Lodge California. “In the event you had been to ask a struggling, twenty-five-year-old musician: ‘How would you prefer to promote eighteen million albums?’ he’d say: ‘Yeah! Rattling proper I’d’,” Glenn Frey defined.
“The following query is: ‘However how would you prefer to attempt to make one pretty much as good because the one which bought thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of information?’ Someone requested my pal Bob Seger: ‘Why do you assume the Eagles broke up?’ He mentioned: Lodge California.”
They started making the follow-up album, and it was tough from the beginning. “Don and I didn’t have any enjoyable engaged on The Lengthy Run collectively,” Frey informed Interview journal. “Henley and I’d sit throughout from one another for hours not saying a phrase. We might sit making an attempt to put in writing, however we had been each afraid to counsel a lyric or a chord in case it wasn’t excellent, in case it wasn’t nice.”
They minimize the primary monitor, I Can’t Inform You Why, a lush ballad from the brand new bass participant Timothy B Schmit, on March 9, 1978. Fifteen months later they weren’t a lot additional on.
To display precisely how large the Eagles had turn out to be, and the way intense the strain on them was, the band’s supervisor, the acerbic Irving Azoff, informed Rolling Stone: “We solely hear from the document firm about ten occasions per week. After they challenge a $116-million-year as a result of Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles are going to launch albums, after which they arrive up $40 million brief from not having an Eagles album, they harm.”
Elektra/Asylum concurred. The corporate chairman, Joe Smith, mentioned: “All of us want that document now, however there’s no assure the way it will do. Plenty of new bands have come out because the Eagles final launched an album.”
On the door of Bay Shore recording studio in Miami, the band had pasted cut-outs from tons of of magazines and newspapers, and had written captions and personal jokes about their sexual habits, favorite medicine, soccer bets and extra for all of them. It was to the studio supervisor right here that Henley wrote the well-known bathroom paper memo…
So that they had been in it collectively, making an attempt to grind out a success album that the document firm had been determined for in a brand new and unsure creative panorama. Tired of the recording course of, assaulted by their particular person issues, the Eagles responded in time-honoured style: they obtained out of it. They known as it getting ‘monstered’: you might be ‘half monstered’, ‘three-quarters monstered’, or normally, ‘completely monstered’. Frey’s nickname was Roach, after his love of a joint.
“We haven’t all the time practised all the pieces moderately,” he admitted. “However we had been determining the gradual burn, the long term. In the event you use cocaine just like the Indians use it – when it’s a must to, however not on a regular basis – you don’t get poisonous. I thank God I’ve sufficient shut mates who would inform me if I had been messing up my life. Thank God for the love and help I’ve obtained from them. But when there’s an evening to get together, you go proper a-fucking-head…”
Don Henley’s enthusiasm for such extracurricular actions made him one thing of a Hollywood legend. One specific incident at his California residence, which featured 5 prostitutes, a intercourse help and prodigious quantities of cocaine, was extreme sufficient to function within the well-known exposé of La-La Land You’ll By no means Make Love In This City Once more.
When The Lengthy Run lastly got here out in 1979, it had been three years since Lodge California, an eternity within the music enterprise of the Nineteen Seventies, and the world had certainly modified. It bought a number of million copies fairly shortly, however the place the society of the 70s had chimed with the Eagles’ sensibility, the 80s would show very completely different. They had been known as misanthropes and cynics. Their attitudes to ladies had been known as into query.
“I suppose a number of good artwork down by way of the ages has come out of turmoil and stress, however this was simply an excessive amount of,” Henley defined. “This misanthrope enterprise has all the time been a whole thriller to me. We had been vital, however for truthful causes. We cared about our fellow man; we cared concerning the ecology; we cared concerning the Indians; we cared about nuclear power. And so we might level out what was unsuitable. I don’t take into account that to be misanthropic.
“We had been smug. Positive. You must be smug should you’re going to be in a rock’n’roll band. However, , I believed we had been fairly good individuals all in all.”
“I’m although my Playmate interval,” Frey mentioned as The Lengthy Run emerged. “I continually ask myself what I consider ladies. Currently I’ve been feeling a lot much less bodily, , the place you meet an actual fairly woman and instantly connect all these nice qualities to her. However ladies are objects for males, whether or not or not intercourse objects. They’re a objective. That’s the way in which we’re purchased up.”
![Eagles - In The City (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/J39LK_wDzKw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Don Henley threw one other get together at his Hollywood residence to have a good time the tip of the tour to help The Lengthy Run. Police arrived within the early hours and found {that a} 16-year-old woman had overdosed. Henley was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana, cocaine and Quaaludes, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was fined, placed on two years’ probation and ordered to attend drug counselling.
“I had no concept how outdated she was and I had no concept she was doing that many medicine,” Henley defined afterwards. “I didn’t have intercourse together with her. Sure, she was a hooker. Sure, there have been roadies and guys at my home. We had been having a farewell to the Eagles.”
In its personal approach it was a becoming finale. When time gave Henley a ways from that ultimate yr, he realised how terrible 1979 and 1980 had been, how near spoil he had come.
“It was a horrible yr,” he mentioned. “The band broke up. I broke up with my girlfriend and obtained into hassle with the legislation. Then I met my new girlfriend and we nearly obtained killed in a personal aircraft crash in Colorado. John Lennon obtained killed, and that devastated me for some time. And my girlfriend contracted a virus and she or he has been virtually an invalid for a yr and 5 months.”
He and Glenn Frey didn’t actually announce the tip of the band. As a substitute they went to Irving Azoff individually and performed him the solo albums they’d recorded. It was 1982 by the point an announcement was made.
“I’ve no regrets,” Henley mentioned. “Lots of people within the media connect extra significance to bands that got here out of the 60s than bands that got here out of the 70s, so I don’t know the way the Eagles will likely be remembered. Some day, although, I feel individuals might look again and say: ‘A few of that stuff was fairly good in any case’.”
He was proper. The band had written scores of lovely and sensible songs. However greater than that, they’d come to embody a specific life and a specific time. By 1986 they had been being requested to reunite.
“I don’t assume so,” Frey mentioned. “We had been provided two million {dollars} to play the US Competition and two and a half million to play the second. One in every of my managers on the time mentioned: ‘Come on, you rehearse for a few weeks, you play the gig, that’s it’. He had simply gotten a divorce from his spouse, and I mentioned: ‘I’ll go rehearse with the Eagles should you’ll return for a few weeks along with your spouse’. I can’t see myself at age forty-one, up on stage, with a beer stomach, singing Take it Straightforward. And not using a reunion, the Eagles are without end younger, like James Dean.”
It was with wry humour, then, that the eventual reunion, in 1994, was known as Hell Freezes Over.
“Nicely,” Henley mentioned, “we labored lengthy and laborious. We earned it. It’s payday. We prided ourselves on the truth that had been one of many solely bands of our technology left the place all of the members are nonetheless dwelling.”
He paused. “Really, I actually assume that’s an achievement.”
This function was initially revealed in Traditional Rock 63, (January 2004).