Sunday News
Published: November 23, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
As a guitarist for the Eagles, Don Felder had thousands of screaming fans at his feet almost every night of the week in every corner of the world. "It's the greatest feeling to go on stage and see people have the kind of excitement I got when I first saw Elvis or B.B. King," Felder said. "That's the kind of validation you want for all your hard work."
It's the kind of validation Felder no longer gets, at least not as a member of the Eagles. When the band takes the stage tonight at Hershey's Giant Center, he'll be at home in southern California trying to enjoy his semiretirement. The Eagles unceremoniously terminated Felder, and his new tell-all book, "Heaven and Hell: My Life With the Eagles (1974-2001)," explains why.
It describes a poor kid from Gainesville, Fla., who played in garage bands with Stephen Stills, hung out with Duane and Gregg Allman in their teens, gave a young "Tommy" Petty his first guitar lessons and went on to join one of the world's biggest bands.
He got fired from that band, he says, for asking too many questions. Around the same time, his marriage of 29 years to his high school sweetheart was ending. It was an awful period for Felder."My entire world turned upside down. I was wandering in some kind of void, a fog," he said in a telephone interview from his Malibu home. "It was unnerving, disturbing."
During his three decades with the Eagles, Felder made an invaluable contribution, not the least of which was co-writing "Hotel California," "Victim of Love" and "These Shoes" and contributing tasteful, tough guitar licks that helped the band transform itself from a strictly country-rock combo into a harder-edged arena-rock supergroup.
His dismissal from the group in early 2001 was the result of the kind of wrangling and Machiavellian business style the Eagles were known for. It shook out like this: When the band got back together in 1994 for the "Hell Freezes Over" album and tour, the group's corporate structure was realigned, with singer-songwriters Glenn Frey and Don Henley given bigger shares of the revenue than Felder, guitarist Joe Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmit, each of whom would get one-seventh of the total pot.
Felder, by then the longest-serving member of the band besides Frey and Henley, was eager to play the hits again, and the thought of a massively lucrative tour was powerful incentive. "When someone is saying you could make 20 to 50 million over the next few years, you quickly become motivated." Felder agreed to the terms, with the understanding that he could renegotiate those terms later.
For Felder, it felt good knowing they had all survived the excesses of the '70s and came out the other side. The tour was like a celebration. But over the next five years, things went from unfair to worse, he contends. Deals were made in secret by Frey and Henley (whom Felder refers to derisively as "The Gods" throughout the book), essentially cutting out the other three members.
They and manager Irving Azoff began treating the rest of the group more as hired musicians than band mates, he says. "It got to the point where we were intimidated and afraid … like being at the office party when your boss is there," he writes in the book. "You just can't relax."
The extravagance of the touring organization also grew: pilates instructors, personal trainers, press agents, attorneys, accountants and hairdressers, not to mention nannies and tutors for the children that most of the band members kept in tow. Shortly after playing a hugely successful series of millennium concerts in Los Angeles in 1999, Felder demanded to see an accounting of revenues up to that point, which was his right as a member of the Eagles' corporate board.The response from the "Gods," he says, was to fire him.
Felder sued for breach of contract. Then he did one better: He wrote a book. The book wasn't meant to be a revenge project."It started out as a result of just spending some time each day meditating, asking myself how I had gotten to this place," he said.
"I started thinking about things I hadn't thought about in years and started jotting notes down like when you wake up from a dream and want to remember it in the morning." Writing longhand became tedious. "So I sat down at the computer, and naturally I started to flesh things out a bit, add some detail." It was his fiancée who first said it would make a good book.
"In the end, I think I learned that everything I thought was traumatic happened for a reason, was there to push me toward what was to come next," he said.But just when the book was about to go to press, another problem arose. Having gotten wind of the book, the Eagles sued to try to keep Felder from printing it.
Though the suit was essentially groundless ("We do have this thing called the First Amendment," Felder joked), it delayed the book's release by a year. In the end, all the suits and countersuits between Felder and the Eagles were conveniently rolled into one massive court proceeding. Less than a month before their day in court, the parties reached a settlement that Felder called "agreeable."
Felder doesn't regret publishing "Heaven and Hell," nor does he see the book as a barrier to reconnecting with his former bandmates. "The day they fired me, Glenn and Don dynamited all the bridges, so there were really none left for me to burn," he said.
He'd seen it before with other people who crossed Henley and Frey. "You either see it their way, or you are completely cut out." Felder sees irony in Henley's role as a spokesman for the Recording Artists' Coalition, a group that lobbies for better treatment of musicians by record companies. "That is like the Mount Everest of hypocrisy."
And while the group remains a draw, selling 6 million copies of its first new album in 13 years, "Long Road Out of Eden," they aren't the same band creatively. Felder insists the Eagles' success has done them in. "Greed is the ugliest human emotion," he said. "And with the Eagles, there were billions — and that is billions with a big 'B' — of dollars at stake over the years. "
"It ruins politicians, it ruins families and, of course, it has ruined many bands. And when there is that much money, the friendship and the music just get pushed to the back burner," he said, grateful to finally be away from it all.
These days, Felder is playing a lot of charity golf, doing corporate shows with the Don Felder Band, working on a solo album and promoting his book.Felder says he isn't bitter and feels lucky to have been part of such a successful, respected group, no matter how hellish the ride or how ugly his departure. "To be able to see people feel the way I first felt about music when I was 10 years old, that is the heavenly part."
Published: November 23, 2008
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent
As a guitarist for the Eagles, Don Felder had thousands of screaming fans at his feet almost every night of the week in every corner of the world. "It's the greatest feeling to go on stage and see people have the kind of excitement I got when I first saw Elvis or B.B. King," Felder said. "That's the kind of validation you want for all your hard work."
It's the kind of validation Felder no longer gets, at least not as a member of the Eagles. When the band takes the stage tonight at Hershey's Giant Center, he'll be at home in southern California trying to enjoy his semiretirement. The Eagles unceremoniously terminated Felder, and his new tell-all book, "Heaven and Hell: My Life With the Eagles (1974-2001)," explains why.
It describes a poor kid from Gainesville, Fla., who played in garage bands with Stephen Stills, hung out with Duane and Gregg Allman in their teens, gave a young "Tommy" Petty his first guitar lessons and went on to join one of the world's biggest bands.
He got fired from that band, he says, for asking too many questions. Around the same time, his marriage of 29 years to his high school sweetheart was ending. It was an awful period for Felder."My entire world turned upside down. I was wandering in some kind of void, a fog," he said in a telephone interview from his Malibu home. "It was unnerving, disturbing."
During his three decades with the Eagles, Felder made an invaluable contribution, not the least of which was co-writing "Hotel California," "Victim of Love" and "These Shoes" and contributing tasteful, tough guitar licks that helped the band transform itself from a strictly country-rock combo into a harder-edged arena-rock supergroup.
His dismissal from the group in early 2001 was the result of the kind of wrangling and Machiavellian business style the Eagles were known for. It shook out like this: When the band got back together in 1994 for the "Hell Freezes Over" album and tour, the group's corporate structure was realigned, with singer-songwriters Glenn Frey and Don Henley given bigger shares of the revenue than Felder, guitarist Joe Walsh and bassist Timothy B. Schmit, each of whom would get one-seventh of the total pot.
Felder, by then the longest-serving member of the band besides Frey and Henley, was eager to play the hits again, and the thought of a massively lucrative tour was powerful incentive. "When someone is saying you could make 20 to 50 million over the next few years, you quickly become motivated." Felder agreed to the terms, with the understanding that he could renegotiate those terms later.
For Felder, it felt good knowing they had all survived the excesses of the '70s and came out the other side. The tour was like a celebration. But over the next five years, things went from unfair to worse, he contends. Deals were made in secret by Frey and Henley (whom Felder refers to derisively as "The Gods" throughout the book), essentially cutting out the other three members.
They and manager Irving Azoff began treating the rest of the group more as hired musicians than band mates, he says. "It got to the point where we were intimidated and afraid … like being at the office party when your boss is there," he writes in the book. "You just can't relax."
The extravagance of the touring organization also grew: pilates instructors, personal trainers, press agents, attorneys, accountants and hairdressers, not to mention nannies and tutors for the children that most of the band members kept in tow. Shortly after playing a hugely successful series of millennium concerts in Los Angeles in 1999, Felder demanded to see an accounting of revenues up to that point, which was his right as a member of the Eagles' corporate board.The response from the "Gods," he says, was to fire him.
Felder sued for breach of contract. Then he did one better: He wrote a book. The book wasn't meant to be a revenge project."It started out as a result of just spending some time each day meditating, asking myself how I had gotten to this place," he said.
"I started thinking about things I hadn't thought about in years and started jotting notes down like when you wake up from a dream and want to remember it in the morning." Writing longhand became tedious. "So I sat down at the computer, and naturally I started to flesh things out a bit, add some detail." It was his fiancée who first said it would make a good book.
"In the end, I think I learned that everything I thought was traumatic happened for a reason, was there to push me toward what was to come next," he said.But just when the book was about to go to press, another problem arose. Having gotten wind of the book, the Eagles sued to try to keep Felder from printing it.
Though the suit was essentially groundless ("We do have this thing called the First Amendment," Felder joked), it delayed the book's release by a year. In the end, all the suits and countersuits between Felder and the Eagles were conveniently rolled into one massive court proceeding. Less than a month before their day in court, the parties reached a settlement that Felder called "agreeable."
Felder doesn't regret publishing "Heaven and Hell," nor does he see the book as a barrier to reconnecting with his former bandmates. "The day they fired me, Glenn and Don dynamited all the bridges, so there were really none left for me to burn," he said.
He'd seen it before with other people who crossed Henley and Frey. "You either see it their way, or you are completely cut out." Felder sees irony in Henley's role as a spokesman for the Recording Artists' Coalition, a group that lobbies for better treatment of musicians by record companies. "That is like the Mount Everest of hypocrisy."
And while the group remains a draw, selling 6 million copies of its first new album in 13 years, "Long Road Out of Eden," they aren't the same band creatively. Felder insists the Eagles' success has done them in. "Greed is the ugliest human emotion," he said. "And with the Eagles, there were billions — and that is billions with a big 'B' — of dollars at stake over the years. "
"It ruins politicians, it ruins families and, of course, it has ruined many bands. And when there is that much money, the friendship and the music just get pushed to the back burner," he said, grateful to finally be away from it all.
These days, Felder is playing a lot of charity golf, doing corporate shows with the Don Felder Band, working on a solo album and promoting his book.Felder says he isn't bitter and feels lucky to have been part of such a successful, respected group, no matter how hellish the ride or how ugly his departure. "To be able to see people feel the way I first felt about music when I was 10 years old, that is the heavenly part."
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