To say that The Eagles didn’t always get along is the understatement of the year, if not the century. They fought constantly behind the scenes, and guitarist Don Felder was right in the middle of the storm.

Brought aboard in 1974, Felder shook up The Eagles’ tranquil country-rock aesthetic with the venomous lead guitar of tracks like “Victim Of Love” and “Those Shoes.”

Felder, who was sacked from the band in 2000, has written a new book titled “Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles (1974-2000)” that chronicles the contentious atmosphere within the band and Felder’s battle with depression.
Continuing on from Part I of our interview with Felder that appeared in the June 6 issue, in Part II of this interview, Felder talks about the Hotel California record, critics and his own place in The Eagles. Watch for more in our July 4 issue.

The dictate for Eagles live performances was to reproduce all the music exactly like the records?

DF: Yes, identically. As a matter of a fact, it got down to where you had to make certain moves onstage, a certain position. It was almost like you were doing a play. You had to go and hit a certain mark, do your solo and move to a certain area. If you were too far out of that or drawing too much attention to yourself, you were reprimanded. It was really strange. It was power and control; that’s what it was all about.

How would you present your songs to the band?

DF: The one place that I was able to freely create without the iron fist was in my own studio, not in the band and not in the studio with them. It was my one place to really look at this band, no matter what the makeup of the band as far as members.

Having studied how Don plays drums — I play drums — when I’d write tracks I would play drums in my demo studio how I thought Don would play. I would write parts for him. I knew what Glenn was good at, and I’d write guitar parts that he could manage. So, each part I came up with I’d write to fit each member of the band. It was like you had a cast of characters on a sitcom, and you knew the character of each person in the ensemble, and you’d have to write to their strengths. That’s really what I tried to do. If I wrote a complicated drum part, we would never record it, because Don couldn’t play it. He plays very simply, has a great feel, way behind the beat. But he’s not a technician, so you can’t write complicated parts.

When I was writing tracks for the Hotel California record, I wrote for two lead guitar players, Joe (Walsh) and I. I wrote thinking that this was an opportunity for me to write stuff that Joe and I could do together. I wrote bass parts, too. As a matter of a fact, on “One of These Nights” I had to write the bass part and show it to Randy (Meisner), because he was locked in a snow storm in Nebraska, and I was in the studio. So I said, “OK, I’ll play bass.”

We cut the demo of that song with me playing bass. I wrote all the bass lines, and Randy came in the next day, and I showed him the part. I also wrote the bass part for “Hotel California.” That bass part comes out of jazz from my time in New York. If you look at stand-up jazz bass players, they all play those sort of root fifth octave lines. That’s really what that is. It’s a jazz approach to playing reggae.

Was the band open to your presenting them with material?

DF: Yeah. Don and Glenn wanted my input. They wanted my writing, and they wanted my guitar influence. They wanted my drive.

What I would do for One of These Nights or Hotel California or The Long Run was write a bunch of tracks. For Hotel California, I wrote 16 or 17 tracks, of which two of them were “Victim of Love” and “Hotel California”. There were 15 or 16 other songs in that rock idiom that weren’t used. I’d give them cassettes and ask, “Is there anything on there that you like? What do you think about this?” If I didn’t hear anything back from Don or Glenn in a couple of days, I knew I had to go back and write some more tracks. If I got the word back, “I kind of like this track, it’s good.” Then, they might write some lyrics for the songs.

The Eagles never received much critical acclaim. How did that lack of critical approval affect the band?

DF: My satisfaction from being involved in a career of music doesn’t come from what people write about it in magazines; it comes from what people do when they hear it. When I walk onstage and play, if I can light up a room or touch people, that’s all I need. It goes back to my early experiences watching B.B. King when I was 13 or 14 years old. I had walked into an old barn out in the middle of a farm and watched B.B. King make women cry and people scream with the emotion he was able to present onstage. He was able to reach people and touch them through his soulful performances and playing. To me, that meant way more than anything anybody could write about it. I realized that a lot of that media criticism is really meaningless in the long run.



In the ’70s I think it was Rolling Stone that published an issue that had us on their front cover. It had ‘Eagles’ splashed on the cover of Rolling Stone and featured an article about us. In the back of the same issue, there was a review of the Hotel California album, which they had totally panned. Their record review department reviewed our record and said it was crap, and on the front of the magazine, they’re using us to sell copies of their magazine to make money. That’s one of the things that really upset Henley. We agreed to do this interview, and it’s unfair to turn around and cut our record to pieces. But I didn’t really pay that much attention to reviews. I cared far more about the music itself.

You wrote “Victim of Love,” which was a standout on Hotel California.

DF: “Victim of Love” was a track that I’d written in my back bedroom in Malibu about the same time as I wrote “Hotel California.” It was originally called “It’s About Time.” I’d written the melody and had the musical track finished, and I gave Henley that song, which was one of my 16 or 17 tracks on this demo tape I put together.

He really liked it, because it was really hard. He liked the intensity and the edge of it. It had very simple drum parts that were easy to play. When Don was gonna sing something, the drum track had to be simple enough so he could play it and sing at the same time. So, I wrote a fairly simple melody for it and a pretty simple drum part. I was pleased that Don had taken my melody and had written some other lyrics to it. It turned out well.

That song was originally nicknamed “Iron Lung” by Glenn, I believe. But I found that particularly offensive since as a young child I spent a summer in the polio ward in the hospital watching kids come into the hospital and be put in a polio iron lung chambers.