Joining The Eagles in 1974, Florida born guitarist Don Felder helped transform the group’s peaceful easy feeling country-rock sound into a bona fide, hard-hitting rock band, thanks to his dazzling six-string finesse and virtuoso ability.

A formidable songwriter, he penned a slew of Eagles classics including “Victim of Love,” “Those Shoes” and “Disco Strangler” and, most significantly, crafted the music for the band’s quintessential ’70s air-guitar anthem, “Hotel California.”

Listen to Felder’s stinging lead guitar on “One of These Nights,” the snarling bite of “Victim of Love” or the spectacular guitar solo that frames “Hotel California” for further proof of his accomplished musicianship. It’s no surprise that this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 1998 inductee is championed as one of rock’s finest players.

Unceremoniously fired from The Eagles in 2000, Felder has come full circle, emerging from a dark depression and relationships woes to forge a new positive direction in his life. “Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles (1974-2000)” is a candid, revealing and often painfully honest look behind the curtain at the inner workings and dysfunctional relationships of one of the world’s most popular rock outfits. Pulling no punches, the book balances the “heaven and hell” ups and downs in his career with admirable insight and class.

In Part 1 of this interview, Felder talks about how he came to join The Eagles and his tension-filled early days with the band.

What prompted you to write the book?

Don Felder: I always found my life story about growing up in a really impoverished upbringing on a dirt road in the deep South and going through the trials and tribulations of what every young guy goes through pursuing the American dream of becoming a rock star and what I went through to get there valuable.
And the story would also touch on what life in the fast lane was like once I found success in The Eagles. I thought it was a very interesting story, and that it was worth going through the time and effort to do the book. Working on the book also turned out to be very cathartic for me. I found it very cathartic to be able to look back at my life and relive memories about the people I had met along the way and revisit a lot of the stories and experiences that had happened to me.

The title “Heaven or Hell,” taken from The Eagles song “Hotel California,” pretty much sums up your experience in the band.

DF: As you go through life you have to take the joys and the laughter along with the pain and the tears. So heaven and hell talks about the duplicity of emotions and experiences in life as well as my experiences in The Eagles. It went from soaring in the heavens to frying in hell.

There were a lot of great experiences when I was in The Eagles, and there were a lot of trying, difficult and disappointing experiences as well. Also, there’s another overtone to it. I was raised in a very religious family, a southern Baptist family, which is a God-fearing, hellfire and brimstone kind of religion. I was dragged into church by my mom every Sunday from the time I was old enough to walk.

Later I was dragged into hell in the ’70s by taking drugs. It’s the exact opposite lifestyles. One is a very spiritual, religious-based approach to life versus the other part of my life in the ’70s [which] was really just destroyed with drugs and alcohol and sins of all imaginable shapes and sizes. So in those periods of my life there was also a lot of heaven and hell that I staggered through.

Bring us back to when you received a phone call from Glenn Frey asking you to join The Eagles.

DF: I’d known Bernie Leadon for years and had been around The Eagles playing backstage with them, jamming with them at rehearsals, just being friends with them.

Glenn had Bill Szymczyk (the band’s producer) call me and ask me to come down to the studio to overdub slide guitar on this track called “Good Day in Hell,” which appears on the On The Border album. I went in, played guitar and everybody seemed to like it, and we got along well. It was like jamming with them like I’d always done. The next day Glenn called and asked me if I wanted to join the band. It was a tough decision, because Crosby Nash (they were touring as a duo) were ready to go back on the road, and I was making really good money playing with them, $1,500 a week, which in the ’70s was a lot of money. My wife was pregnant with our first child and I had no idea if The Eagles were gonna be making money or for that matter how successful they were gonna be.
So, I went and met with Graham Nash to tell him that I couldn’t go out with them on the road. They were already getting ready for rehearsals at the Continental Hyatt House. He said, “Don, the smartest thing you could do is go join that band.” He guided me and gave me some encouraging support, so I said, “OK, that’s what I’ll do.”

What do you think you brought to the group as a player?

DF: What they wanted to do was move away from their really soft-country approach to music and go more into rock and roll. The reason being that in the ’70s, AM radio did not play a lot of country music. It was hard to get a country song on AM radio, and there were not that many country music radio stations.

So, they were kind of caught in a really unique niche but, at the same time, a difficult niche. So, they really wanted to add a heavier, more rock and roll, and more R&B, sound to their records and to their shows. A lot of the shows went well, but when you’re an opening act for a big rock and roll band, it’s hard to go out and play “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” “Tequila Sunrise,” “Best of My Love” and “Take it Easy” to a crowd that’s standing in a stadium and have those people get off. So, they wanted to put some strength and power and rock and roll edge into their music, and that’s why I was brought into the band.

“Already Gone” typifies that harder rock edge.

DF: They had already cut that basic track. Once they asked me to join the band they had me overdub some guitar parts and a solo on that record just to try and make it a little harder edge.

I think it was an interesting combination of the writing that Glenn and Don were doing. They were really trying to shift away from that country style and lyrics into a more rock-and-roll approach. Some of that country flavor was still there on songs like “Lyin’ Eyes,” but everything got edgier and more intense. Don’s pencil got really sharp.
His lyric writing has always been brilliant in my opinion. He has an amazing talent for taking a whole picture and putting it into about three or four words. He’d take a very short line of a song and give you a flashcard or a photograph like someone throwing up a slide in front of you. He did it all with very few words. And he’s brilliant at doing that. His songs are little photographs, little slide shows that lead you from point A to point B. I respect him immensely as a lyricist. 

From reading the book, it sounds like there was constant bickering and discord in the band from the day you joined.

DF: When I first joined the band, I thought I’d just joined a band that had just broken up. It always felt like the band could break up nearly any day. There was always somebody unhappy with something, especially when I joined the band at the end of the third record.

When they first formed, they had all agreed that everybody in the band had been sidemen and everybody was gonna be treated equally. Everybody would write two songs, everybody would sing two songs. It was gonna be an equal representation and equal partnership. But, what happened was, Glenn and Don had started singing all the hits, so they started grabbing control over what songs would go on the record, who was gonna sing ’em, what songs were good, what songs were bad. There was a lot of conflict between Bernie, Don and Glenn and Randy. It was almost like two different camps. There was the Don and Glenn camp and then there was everybody else.
When I first joined the band, I tried to mediate since I knew Bernie really well, and I had heard about a lot of this stuff before I joined the band. I tried to mediate between the two parties and tried to explain to Bernie what they were doing, and he really had his own feelings about it. I would go back to Don and Glenn and try to smooth the waters between and try and find some way where we could all put on a smile and go away happy.  It seldom worked.

Did that inherent tension work to the band’s benefit?

DF: No, not really. I think there were a lot of positive things that were destroyed and sacrificed through that process — negativity, criticism and control. Greed, power and control can corrupt anybody from politicians, musicians, businessmen or souls from any walk of life. I felt that iron-fisted rule destroyed spontaneous creativity — that flow that Duane (Allman) was able to have to be able to just play, that was not allowed.