Some years in the past, after the Eagles had damaged up, Glenn Frey remembered: “We had been on stage, and Don Felder seems to be 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.
Hardly ever, although, has the inner lifetime of a band been so at odds with the sounds that it made. “Led Zeppelin might argue with us, however I believe we’d have thrown the best travelling occasion of the 70s,” Glenn Frey remembered. He was speaking in regards to 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 women 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 circumstances of Chateau Lafite Rothschild when Henley celebrated his birthday.
For half a decade in the course of the 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 artistic and business highpoint that was Resort California.
Throughout the three years of depth and madness that had been the making of The Lengthy Run, Don Henley is claimed to have composed an extended memo to the recording studio supervisor informing him of his displeasure that the bathroom paper within the bogs 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 not so good as Resort California, and it was an excruciatingly painful album to make,” Henley mentioned. “We had been having fights on a regular basis in regards to the songs – monumental fights about one phrase – for days on finish. That document took three years and price $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 have a look at the entire of Los Angeles unfold out earlier than them and assume: ‘It actually doesn’t get a lot better than this’, he can be worrying about one thing or different.
His oldest buddy, a musician known as Richard Bowden, who was higher generally known as Balloon Dick, remembered: “Joe Walsh got here as much as me simply after he’d joined the Eagles and mentioned: ‘You’ve recognized him the longest. Simply inform him to chill out’. I instructed him: ‘Simply let Don be tense. He’s all the time been that means. When he solves one drawback, 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 tremendous girl, however she by no means had any management over Don,” Bowden instructed 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 faculty fund, and in the end Henley didn’t full his training. C J Henley’s demise was pivotal to Don’s world view.
“I discovered a very long time in the past, when my father received sick and died, that life wasn’t truthful,” he mentioned, “however I received 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!’ Every little thing 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 grew to become Shiloh. Extra demise got here when Jerry Dale Surratt, one in all that band, was killed whereas messing about on his bike proper in entrance of the band and his household outdoors 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 high school with the little kids of vehicle manufacturing facility employees – fathers who beat their wives and beat their youngsters. The children would then go to high school and beat on me. My father was a machinist in a store that constructed the machines that constructed automotive components.
“I had a reasonably regular childhood. My mother and father weren’t drinkers. I all the time had garments. I all the time went to camp for per week in the summertime. My mother and father didn’t have the funds 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 instructed the LA Occasions. “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 undoubtedly the archetype of probably the most stunning place on the earth.”
“Glenn requested if I’d wish to go on the highway with Linda Ronstadt’s band, and I mentioned: ‘You wager I do,’” Henley mentioned of their first, fateful connection. “I used to be broke, and right here was an opportunity for 200 {dollars} per week. We went out for a month or two, and Glenn and I struck up this nice friendship. That’s after we began plotting to place a band collectively.”
The connection between Henley and Frey – each their friendship and the writing partnership – grew to become the important thing one within the Eagles proper from the beginning. They met bassist Randy Meisner first – he was standing about six toes 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 need to 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 Might Day 1972, and have become, nearly instantaneously, the soft-rock radio basic that it stays at the moment. 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 residing 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 that they had 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 grew to become inside the band.
Leadon give up for the primary time in 1975, saying: “I saved 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, by way of 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 in regards to the sexual and monetary and social politics of the US. It was one other of their contradictions: these stunning songs that might simply cross you by in a haze of melody, and but carried such spite and chew.
“Looking back, I admit that the entire cowboy-outlaw-rocker delusion was a bit bogus,” Henley mentioned after the band had break up for the primary time, in 1980. “I don’t assume we actually believed it, we had been simply attempting to make an analogy. Instantly we had been getting well-known and making all this cash, and it simply turned our little heads round. We had been residing outdoors the legal guidelines of normality, we had been out right here in LA, issues had been form of Western, and we simply determined to write down 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 cherished what we had been doing, after which, as soon as we received a modicum of success, we mentioned, effectively, that is good.
“Then we realised that staying there was more durable 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 your hour within the solar and you then reside the remainder of your life within the shade.
“In any occasion, these first three or 4 information had been simply as a lot us attempting to develop up as something. We had been attempting 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 entire quest as we went alongside was to attempt to make every album higher than the earlier one. And that’s troublesome to do whenever you’re attempting to run a bunch as a democracy. Protecting 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 suppose there was a short time period the place I attempted to place some form of artistic inventory into medicine,” he mentioned, “however I realised fairly quickly that you could possibly get extra work, and higher work, performed when 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 fulfill 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 received the nickname of Grandpa. I imply, medicine had their place, however I used to be by no means a kind of guys to stand up and roll a breakfast joint.”
The Eagles launched a biggest hits album – the well-known one with the blue cowl with a chicken’s cranium on – and it offered 22 million copies. Till Michael Jackson’s Thriller surpassed it a few years later it was the largest album of all time. After which they made Resort California.
The implosion of the Eagles, the years of rancour and remorse, all started with just a little 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 suppose it was round ’74 or ’75,” Felder instructed Guitar journal a few years on. “I keep in mind sitting in the lounge, with the doorways all extensive open, on a spectacular July day. I had a washing swimsuit on and I used to be sitting on this sofa, soaking moist, considering the world is an excellent place to be.
“I had this acoustic twelve-string and I began tinkling round with it, and these Resort California chords simply form of oozed out. Each every now and then it looks as if 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.
“Once I gave Henley the cassette it had eight or ten totally different tune concepts on it. He got here again and mentioned: ‘I actually love this one observe 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 other place fully with the lyric. It was one other of their bittersweet epics, all superficial shimmer and sad-eyed social remark.
“I believe 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 possibly can take a look at any time you want, however you may by no means depart’ line was primarily based on Jackson Browne’s first spouse, who dedicated suicide. In different phrases, you may take a look at, die, however you’re nonetheless within the cosmos someplace. You’re not going to get out of that karmic part 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, means 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 strains.”
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 attempting to warn them about,” he mentioned of the cautionary third observe on Resort California. “Everyone’s received cocaine now, regardless of how shitty it’s. I might hardly take heed to that tune after we had been recording it, as a result of I used to be getting excessive lots on the time and the tune made me in poor health.
“We had been attempting to color an image that cocaine wasn’t that nice. It activates you. It tousled my again muscle tissue, 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 Resort California album got here out in 1976, 12 months that punk rock started. Henley struggled with the guilt of all of it: “You already know that you simply don’t deserve it. You get an excessive amount of cash and an excessive amount of of all the things whenever you’re too younger, and it comes actually rapidly. And it messed me up for some time. I grew up in a city of two,400 individuals. My dad didn’t imagine in bank cards, he paid money for all the things. And out of the blue I had a gold American Categorical card which I used to be embarrassed to take out of my pockets as a result of I’d by no means performed 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 Resort California. “In case you had been to ask a struggling, twenty-five-year-old musician: ‘How would you wish to promote eighteen million albums?’ he’d say: ‘Yeah! Rattling proper I’d’,” Glenn Frey defined.
“The subsequent query is: ‘However how would you wish to attempt to make one nearly as good because the one which offered thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of information?’ Anyone requested my buddy Bob Seger: ‘Why do you assume the Eagles broke up?’ He mentioned: Resort California.”
They started making the follow-up album, and it was troublesome from the beginning. “Don and I didn’t have any enjoyable engaged on The Lengthy Run collectively,” Frey instructed Interview journal. “Henley and I’d sit throughout from one another for hours not saying a phrase. We’d sit attempting to write down, however we had been each afraid to counsel a lyric or a chord in case it wasn’t good, in case it wasn’t nice.”
They lower the primary observe, 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 reveal precisely how huge the Eagles had develop into, and the way intense the strain on them was, the band’s supervisor, the acerbic Irving Azoff, instructed Rolling Stone: “We solely hear from the document firm about ten occasions per week. Once they undertaking 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 quick 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. Quite a lot of new bands have come out for the reason that Eagles final launched an album.”
On the door of Bay Shore recording studio in Miami, the band had pasted cut-outs from a whole lot 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…
In order that they had been in it collectively, attempting to grind out successful 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 considerations, the Eagles responded in time-honoured trend: they received out of it. They known as it getting ‘monstered’: you could possibly 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 things moderately,” he admitted. “However we had been determining the gradual burn, the long term. In case you use cocaine just like the Indians use it – when you need to, however not on a regular basis – you don’t get poisonous. I thank God I’ve sufficient shut associates who would inform me if I had been messing up my life. Thank God for the love and help I’ve acquired from them. But when there’s an evening to occasion, you go proper a-fucking-head…”
Don Henley’s enthusiasm for such extracurricular actions made him one thing of a Hollywood legend. One explicit incident at his California residence, which featured 5 prostitutes, a intercourse support 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 Resort California, an eternity within the music enterprise of the Seventies, and the world had certainly modified. It offered a number of million copies fairly rapidly, however the place the society of the 70s had chimed with the Eagles’ sensibility, the 80s would show very totally different. They had been known as misanthropes and cynics. Their attitudes to girls had been known as into query.
“I suppose a number of good artwork down by 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 an entire thriller to me. We had been important, however for truthful causes. We cared about our fellow man; we cared in regards to the ecology; we cared in regards to the Indians; we cared about nuclear power. And so we’d level out what was flawed. I don’t take into account that to be misanthropic.
“We had been conceited. Certain. It’s important to be conceited when you’re going to be in a rock’n’roll band. However, you realize, 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 consistently ask myself what I consider girls. Recently I’ve been feeling a lot much less bodily, you realize, the place you meet an actual fairly woman and instantly connect all these nice qualities to her. However girls are objects for males, whether or not or not intercourse objects. They’re a aim. 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 occasion at his Hollywood residence to have fun 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 thought how outdated she was and I had no thought 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 means it was a becoming finale. When time gave Henley a ways from that last 12 months, he realised how terrible 1979 and 1980 had been, how near damage he had come.
“It was a horrible 12 months,” he mentioned. “The band broke up. I broke up with my girlfriend and received into bother with the regulation. Then I met my new girlfriend and we nearly received killed in a non-public aircraft crash in Colorado. John Lennon received killed, and that devastated me for some time. And my girlfriend contracted a virus and he or she has been virtually an invalid for a 12 months and 5 months.”
He and Glenn Frey didn’t actually announce the tip of the band. As an alternative they went to Irving Azoff individually and performed him the solo albums that they had 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 understand how the Eagles might be remembered. Some day, although, I believe 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 gorgeous and good songs. However greater than that, that they had 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 when you’ll return for a few weeks together 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 eternally younger, like James Dean.”
It was with wry humour, then, that the eventual reunion, in 1994, was known as Hell Freezes Over.
“Properly,” 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 era left the place all of the members are nonetheless residing.”
He paused. “Truly, I actually assume that’s an achievement.”
This function was initially printed in Basic Rock 63, (January 2004).
