- Pretty close. It's good. - Not too bad.
It's gonna be about two minutes, so come on.
Do what you got to do.
We got to go. I need a wrist band.
It's something that you can't do forever, you know?
This is not a lifetime career that we can do, you know.
- So... - It's not?
All right, let's go.
Thank you, and good evening.
We're the Eagles from Los Angeles.
One, two, three, four.
People are always saying things to me like,
"You're just like a normal person."
And I always say, "Of course."
All right!
We might be a little more world-wise, you know,
than some of those kids, that's all.
We just maybe have less innocence than they do,
but, I mean, I eat, I sleep, I fall in love,
I fall out of love, I work.
You know, I do pretty much the same thing.
We saw a poster of us when "On the Border" was made.
Everybody looked like little kids, you know,
like, early 20s and stuff.
And everybody didn't have their wrinkles and their baggy eyes.
Sort of like a president when he first takes office.
And then, like four or five years later,
you know, he just walks out, and his hair is gray,
and his eyes are drooping,
and he's just really, you know, real burned.
The first thing that happens is you get some kind of label,
and then you got to live up to it,
and then you just get caught in that,
and I forget what the second thing is.
It's hard. It's like living two lives.
You know, I have a family, three kids.
And it's just hard to live in between that line,
you know, of being out on the road and being away for a month.
Maybe we wouldn't want to do this anymore,
or maybe we can't do this anymore,
or maybe nobody will give a shit if we do this anymore.
Thank you.
No, I insist. You first.
Hi, there.
Lock it up. A hearty bunch out there.
Oh, he's not even here. Now...
Hey, driver, lock 'em up for us tonight, okay?
Out of sight.
You just don't know what those kids will do.
Doggone.
How about a beer?
- Is that what I heard? - You got it, brother.
Don't hurt yourself, young America.
Would you like one?
Yeah, I would like one. I'm gonna drink tonight.
I think they feel like they're up there, you know,
like they're on the stage.
'Cause we look like them. We dress like them.
Part of it is that, and part of it's the records.
I think they just relate to the songs.
I think it's 50/50, I guess.
The thing is now is to try to see
how long we can stay up here at the top of the mountain.
It's very narrow and windy up here.
We can probably continue doing what we're doing
as long as the songs keep coming.
That's the only thing that frightens us
is to not be able to do that anymore.
If nothing comes up, we would be in trouble.
So far, so good.
I think we can maintain this for a few more years.
I don't see why not.
Other people have... the Rolling Stones
and the Who and the Led... and Led Zeppelin...
I almost said the Led Zeppelin... have done it.
Chicago's done it.
Groups last longer than they used to, you know.
Shit don't float.
90% of the time, being in the Eagles was a fucking blast.
You know, I was living the dream.
We never in our wildest dreams
figured on being this successful and lasting this long.
We were a bunch of guys out there touring the country.
We had a little private plane.
We had parties after the shows. We had a good time.
We were starting to make some money.
We had three guitar players finally, you know, so we could rock a bit.
So, it was a good time, a good time for me,
a good time for Don.
Everybody was really happy...
...then.
It was going really fast, and probably too fast.
There was turmoil within the band.
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves.
As Glenn used to say, "We made it, and it ate us."
It's hard to be in a group.
It's a bit like being in a marriage,
if you quadruple it or quintuple it, in our case.
They asked Don when the Eagles broke up,
"What was that like for you?"
And he said it was a horrible relief.
And I think that clocks it pretty well.
You're a real pro, Don, all the way.
Yeah, you are, too... the way you handle people.
Except the people you pay, nobody gives a shit about it.
Fuck you. I've been paying you for seven years, you fuckhead.
So much stuff just happened.
You know, there's a philosopher who says,
As you live your life...
...it appears to be anarchy and chaos
and random events,
non-related events smashing into each other
and causing this situation,"
and then... then this happens, and it's overwhelming,
and it just looks like, "What in the world is going on?"
And later, when you look back at it,
it looks like a finely-crafted novel,
but at the time, it don't.
And a lot of the Eagles' story is like that.
I'm gonna fuckin' kill you.
I can't wait. I can't wait.
We might as well start at the beginning.
I grew up in Detroit, Michigan.
My dad worked in a factory.
My mother baked pies at General Motors.
I started taking piano lessons when I was five years old.
That alone could get you beat up after school in suburban Detroit.
Detroit was Motown, and so they played all the Motown hits.
And that was the kind of stuff that we would listen to.
I stopped playing piano when I was 12.
It was too much.
I wanted to do other things,
and I think the girl thing was starting to happen, as well.
Then the Beatles came along,
and my Aunt took me down to see the Beatles at the Olympia.
It was crazy.
I remember having a girl
that was standing on her seat in front of me
fall backwards into my arms, delirious, going, "Paul, Paul."
You know, and I thought, "Oh, my God."
I have a very vivid memory of seeing the Beatles
with my parents on our old Admiral TV set.
It was like a bolt of lightning.
It had a huge impact on me. It was revolutionary.
And it was an impact that would last a lifetime,
and I know that had a huge impact on Glenn, too,
even though we didn't know each other at the time.
Linden, Texas, is my hometown.
It's a small town in Northeastern Texas.
When I was growing up,
the population was about 2,500, 2,600.
It's primarily an agricultural area.
Some people worked at the steel mill.
It's just a typical small Texas town.
There's an old courthouse
dating back to before the Civil War and one stoplight.
It's kind of like "The Last Picture Show," you know?
It was a great place musically
because it was kind of a cultural crossroads.
It's really located
where the old South begins to meet the West.
Linden, Texas, was the birthplace of Scott Joplin
and T-Bone Walker.
Both my parents loved music,
so we had a lot of records in the house.
I was exposed to music of all kinds from an early age...
you know, country-and-western music,
Western swing music, gospel music, blues,
Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline.
There was a 50,000-watt radio station in New Orleans,
and I heard things on that station that I didn't hear anywhere else.
So, I had a lot of radio coming in.
And when I would go to work with my dad,
he would listen to a station in Shreveport, Louisiana... KWKH.
And that station broadcast a radio show
called the "Louisiana Hayride,"
where Elvis Presley made his first radio broadcast in 1954.
The very first rock-'n'-roll record I bought was by Elvis Presley.
My playing the drums was sort of an organic process.
I began by beating on my school books
with my fingers and with pencils.
I would beat out little cadences,
and I used to drive my classmates crazy doing that,
until, I think, one day, somebody said to me...
I think it was my friend Richard Bowden...
he said, "Why don't you just start playing the drums?"
I managed to cobble together a drum kit from old drums
that I found stashed in the back of the band hall in high school.
And then one day, my mom said, "Come on, get in the car."
And she drove me to a town about an hour and a half away
called Sulphur Springs, Texas, to McKay Music Company.
Much to my surprise,
she bought me a set of red-sparkle Slingerland drums
that I still have today.
So, I have to give my parents a lot of credit.
They bought me that drum kit
even though they couldn't really afford it.
The first band I was in
was a band with my high-school buddy Richard Bowden
and another high-school friend, Jerry Surratt,
and we played Dixieland jazz music.
Nobody sang. We just played music.
I went to a high-school party,
and there were four kids who were freshmen in high school
who were playing.
I was a junior, and I had a couple beers that night
and said, "Hey, you know, do you know 'Satisfaction'?
'Cause I can sing it."
So, I became the lead singer of the Subterraneans.
I played in the Subterraneans for a while,
and then I played in another band called the Mushrooms.
The most important thing that happened to me
when I was in Detroit was I met Bob Seger.
He took me under his wing.
He invited me to recording sessions that he was having, you know,
so I could see how records were made.
I was his mentor.
He was just so young,
and I liked him right away because he was so funny.
He had a great sense of humor,
and, like me, I could see he was really ambitious.
He really wanted to be on the radio.
He cut a song called "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man."
He let me play acoustic guitar on the basic track
and sing background vocals.
You can really hear Glenn blurt out on the first chorus.
He comes out really loud.
Tremendous gusto.
Of course, that was a national hit for us,
so that was really cool.
Bob was the first guy that wrote his own songs
and recorded them that I had ever met.
He said, "You know, if you want to make it,
you're gonna have to write your own songs."
And I said, "Well, what if they're bad?"
And he said, "Well, they're gonna be bad."
He says, "You just keep writing and keep writing,
and eventually, you'll write a good song."
We were gonna have a band together.
He was gonna get rid of his other guys,
and I was gonna be his bass player.
It didn't work out.
My mom found me smoking pot with a friend of mine
in somebody's basement,
and she called up Seger's manager, Punch Andrews,
and said, "Just a minute, not so fast."
In the years leading up to the Great Depression,
my dad had to quit school after the eighth grade.
He had to go home and work in the fields
with his brother and sister to help support the family.
His fondest wish... in fact, his life's goal
was that I would go to college.
Every Saturday night, he would bring home seven quarters,
and we'd put them in a piggy bank,
and when those quarters amounted to $100,
he would take me to the bank and we would buy a savings bond,
a United States savings bond,
and put that away for my college education.
So, between what my dad had saved
and between what I was making doing gigs all over Texas
and Arkansas and Louisiana on weekends,
I paid for 31/2 years of college.
They have a world-famous music department
in which I did not excel.
I took one music course.
I think it was beginning theory, and I flunked.
I made an "F."
But I didn't really care because I was an English major.
Well, after the Mushrooms,
I got invited to join this band called the Four of Us.
Started getting into some of the California bands...
the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys.
Always wanted to go to California.
And I got out there, my mind was blown.
The vegetation... I'd never seen palm trees.
You know, it was just like a dream come true.
The first celebrity I saw was David Crosby.
And he had on that flat-brimmed hat
that he wore on the second Byrds album,
and he had a little leather cape on,
and I just looked and I thought, "My God, there's David Crosby."
Zoom, and we went right by.
And the first person I met was John David Souther.
We wanted to get high and play music.
There were two of us with guitars.
We were listening to a lot of that sort of interface
between rock 'n' roll and country-and-western music
that was happening in Southern California at the time
with the Byrds and Dillard & Clark
and the Burrito Brothers and Poco.
There was a lot of great music of that sort going around then.
Longbranch Pennywhistle here.
I suppose you wonder what that name meant,
and John David and I...
It was a well-kept... funky women.
The songs weren't very good.
I don't think Glenn and I were very far along as songwriters then.
We were a funny little group, but we got gigs.
We, you know, managed to play in some of the folk clubs
around L. A.
The Golden Bear and the Ash Grove.
We had a chance meeting with Kenny Rogers
in Dallas, Texas, one day.
He was coming through town with the First Edition.
They were very hot at the time.
I remember this like it was yesterday.
This little kid came up and said, "Mr. Rogers,"
he said, "I'm Don Henley, and I'm with a group called Felicity,
and we're doing a show tonight,
and we'd love to have you come see us."
And I said, "You know, I'm really sorry, but I don't do that.
I don't just go to clubs and watch groups."
He said, "I really think you'd like us."
And I thought, "Well, that's pretty cool," so I did.
Kenny is a Texas boy, and he was looking for groups to produce.
So, I brought them to L.A.,
and they literally lived at my house for about four months.
We changed their name to Shiloh.
It was so much fun to take them into the studio.
With Shiloh, we made one album, and it had a single called
"Simple Little Down Home Rock and Roll Love Song for Rosie."
Not exactly a short title.
We didn't know much about the business at that point.
We were pretty naive.
We kicked around in the L.A. Clubs for a while,
played the Whisky,
played some of the clubs down in the South Bay area,
and nothing really happened for us.
J.D. And I were looking for any place to play.
We had heard about this guy Jackson Browne.
He'd been playing the same clubs we had,
but we never had seen him perform.
This is California. Mr. Jackson Browne.
Ah, thank you, thank you.
Then there were a bunch of gigs that they had
and some gigs that I had
that they would show up at my gigs and me at their gigs,
and we became really good friends.
This is...
And we'd start talking about,
"Where do you live, and what's going on?"
And Jackson said, "You know, you should come down to Echo Park.
Rent's real cheap."
Glenn got the apartment next to my apartment,
and this apartment cost like $125 or something a month, you know.
And I needed to economize,
so I moved into the basement underneath Glenn's place,
which I could get into for $35 a month.
It only had one door.
It was really just kind of an illegal place, just a cubbyhole,
and that's where Jackson lived, with J.D. And I above.
You know, that was it.
There was a stereo, a piano, a bed, a guitar,
you know, a teapot.
We slept late in those days,
except around 9:00 in the morning,
I'd hear Jackson Browne's teapot going off,
this whistle in the distance.
And then I'd hear him playing piano.
I didn't really know how to write songs.
I knew I wanted to write songs, but I didn't know exactly...
you just wait around for inspiration, what was the deal?
Well, I learned through Jackson's ceiling and my floor
exactly how to write songs 'cause Jackson would get up,
and he'd play the first verse and first chorus,
and he'd play it 20 times
until he had it just the way he wanted.
And then there'd be silence.
And then I'd hear the teapot go off again.
Then it'd be quiet for 10 or 20 minutes.
Then I'd hear him start to play again,
and there was the second verse.
So, then he'd work on the second verse,
and he'd play it 20 times.
And then he'd go back to the top of the song,
and he'd play the first verse, the first chorus,
and the second verse another 20 times
until he was really comfortable with it and, you know,
change a word here or there, and I'm up there going,
"So, that's how you do it...
elbow grease, you know, time, thought, persistence."
I wanted to kill him sometimes.
Jackson would play the same phrase, "Doctor, My Eyes" for six weeks.
The same thing with "The Pretender." I just wanted to murder him.
And it was during that period of time that I met Glenn Frey
because we were on the same label
called Amos records.
Some of the things that struck me when I first met Glenn
were things we had in common.
Both of our dads made a living in the automotive industry.
Glenn and I loved old cars, especially cars from the '50s.
He had a '55 Chevy that he named Gladys.
And we drove around Los Angeles in Gladys.
Check out some of the new talent.
There's no better place in town
to catch those new singers and songwriters
than down at the Monday night Hoot Night,
Doug Weston's world-famous Troubadour, happening tonight.
The Troubadour club was the center of the musical universe.
It was a very seminal place.
It was the place to see and be seen.
Every Monday night they had an open stage.
It was called Hoot Night.
The Troubadour was the place to go if you were young and happening
and trying to get involved in the music scene.
It was happening there.
I saw a lot of great acts at the Troubadour.
I witnessed Elton John's American debut performance in 1970.
Everybody who was anybody at the time played at the Troubadour.
Of course, Linda...
And she still has one of my favorite voices in the business, ever.
The Troubadour is really responsible for the entire music scene.
I mean, everything I got, really,
was virtually through either performing there onstage
or in the bar, you know?
I was just started managing Linda then,
and Linda was gonna be a star... that voice as big as a house.
There wasn't anybody in the room
that cared about anything but that voice.
One night, we're down at the Troubadour,
and John Boylan comes to me... he's managing Linda Ronstadt...
and he says, "I'm taking Linda on the road.
We need guys who can sing.
You want to play rhythm guitar and sing?"
I offered him $250 a week, and he took it.
I went back to him, I said,
"Can you give me some of that money right now?"
I think he gave me 50 bucks.
And then I found Don from this band called Shiloh.
I heard him playing at the Troubadour.
I was looking for a job.
Glenn introduced me to John Boylan.
I auditioned at this little house in Laurel Canyon.
I had listened to her album hundreds of times,
so I knew the songs backwards and forwards,
and I guess I passed the audition because I got the job.
I learned a lot from Linda.
It was a very formative experience for me.
And she could hang with the guys, you know.
She could drink tequila with the rest of us and hold her own.
It was really very ad hoc.
We had a station wagon, put the gear in the back.
We'd all get in it and drive to the college and play there.
As a cost-cutting measure,
band members had to share rooms in those days,
so Glenn and I were roommates.
- What did you guys eat? - I had a bowl of Rice Krispies.
Ladies and gentlemen, Linda Ronstadt.
It's funny. I seem to get people
at a critical stage in their development,
and they sort of build their chops.
I mean, there's nothing that gets your chops up better
than playing every single night.
Linda and John Boylan
really like the way Henley and I play,
really like the way we sing with her,
and they start to get a vision
of putting together a super group to back up Linda...
the best of the new country-rock musicians,
and we were gonna be part of it.
I remember talking with Don, and Don said,
"Well, you know, I'd rather, like, just be in a band with you."
And I said, "Well, yeah, me too.
You know, I'd rather just be in a band with you."
So, we went to Linda and said,
"You know, we really appreciate everything you've done for us,
and it means a lot, and we love playing with you,
but we'd like to have our own band."
Now, you know, I think a lot of people,
you know, could get miffed by that,
say, "Well, wait a second. I brought you out here, you know.
I gave you a paying job
when you couldn't afford your own drinks at the Troubadour bar,
and now you want to quit?"
Linda was extremely gracious about the whole thing,
as was John Boylan.
They weren't resentful or bitter at all.
They were great.
They were supportive, as a matter of fact.
They started talking about putting a band together,
and we told them they should get Bernie Leadon.
I was in several bands in L.A. Early on, I met Linda.
Then I worked with Dillard & Clark...
Doug Dillard, banjo player, and Gene Clark from the Byrds.
And so, now I'm in an offshoot of the Byrds world,
and then that turned into an invitation
from the Burrito Brothers from Chris Hillman
to come join them for their second album on A&M.
And I was still in the Burritos, but they had lost Gram Parsons,
and it had changed, and I wasn't that interested anymore.
Bernie was a very accomplished banjo player,
and he could also play guitar
in what we called the Bindi lick style.
It was pioneered by a fellow named Clarence White.
And then Glenn told me about this guy named Randy Meisner
who had been in a band called Poco.
Randy could sing really high, and he also played bass.
So, Glenn just kind of asked me one day
if I'd be interested in starting a group with him.
And he had Henley and Bernie.
That was the first Eagles.
So, the plan was that Glenn and I
would try to recruit Bernie and Randy,
and then we would all go to David Geffen
and see if he would give us a recording contract.
In the '70s, Asylum Records was considered the L.A. Sound...
Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jackson Browne.
David Geffen, who started Asylum, is our patron, you know.
A medici, medici of rock 'n' roll.
It's a very artist-oriented company,
and whatever they want to do, we support them.
If we believe in them, we'll stick with them,
whether they make it or not.
Jackson was our conduit to David Geffen.
He was the first guy to get signed
by Geffen's new Asylum Records label.
So, we all walk in Geffen's office,
and we basically said, "Here we are."
Bernie Leadon just boldly says to Geffen,
"Well, do you want us or not?"
They were dying to sign with me.
I think they were very ambitious, particularly Glenn.
Glenn wanted to have a hit band.
I loved the way Don sang.
You know, we all had hopes for it.
All of a sudden, we were signed to Geffen's new label.
They sent us back to the drawing board.
They said, "You guys need to go and rehearse some more."
They said, "You know, you need to write some songs.
You're not really ready to record yet."
So, they packed us off to Aspen, Colorado.
It could have been worse.
There were people who were way higher
than any of us had ever been.
It was a Wild West wide-open town at that point.
We played at a club up there called the Gallery,
which was located right at the foot of Aspen Mountain.
We didn't have a big catalog of our own tunes at that point.
We were just getting started.
We needed to learn how to play together as a band, and we did.
And then it was like, "Okay, we need to make a record.
Who are we gonna get to produce it?"
We wanted to shoot as high as we could.
Glenn Frey came up with Glyn Johns as an idea.
Glyn Johns was a name that kept popping up
on records we loved.
The first time I heard them was in Aspen.
I was not at all impressed, really.
I thought they were confused.
Glenn Frey wanted to be in a rock-'n'-roll band,
and Bernie Leadon, on the other side,
was one of the greatest acoustic players...
country players, if you like.
And there was a bit of a confusion.
I didn't see what all the fuss was about at all.
So I passed.
We're like, "God dang, what..."
You know, it's not what we expected.
He had worked with Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Stones,
so he was coming from that,
and he said flat-out, "You're not that, man."
It isn't always easy to spot what's hot about an artist
if you go and see them play.
You can see them on a bad night.
You know, it's not necessarily the fairest way of doing it.
So, I thought, "Well, the best thing to do
would be for me to see them in a rehearsal situation
where we could converse and they could play new stuff
and I could stop and start."
And they played the stuff that they played in Aspen,
and it all sounded pretty much the same.
Well, I was thinking, "I don't get it. I still don't get it."
So, we decided to take a break for lunch,
and as we were leaving,
somebody said, "Oh, why don't we play Glyn that ballad?"
And it just completely blew me off my feet.
I mean, there it was. That was the sound.
Extraordinary blend of voices, wonderful harmony sound.
Just stunning. And that was it.
I was in with both feet.
Except that Glyn Johns
didn't want to come to the United States and work.
He wanted to work in London
in the recording studios that he was familiar with,
and so they shipped us off to England.
I don't think that any of us except Bernie
had ever been out of the country,
so it was a little bit like going to the moon for us.
And I'm stoked.
You know, I'm thinking,
"I'm gonna go to Beatle country with Glyn Johns.
I'm gonna record in the same studio
where Led Zeppelin did 'Rock and Roll'.
Oh, my God, I can't wait."
We were recorded at the famous Olympic studios,
where a lot of legendary records had been made.
Glyn Johns... he had a certain style of recording,
which was very organic.
He would simply place a few mikes around the room,
and off you go.
You know, rather than, for example,
placing a microphone on each and every drum,
he would just put three microphones on the drum kit.
He was accustomed to recording people
like John Bonham with Led Zeppelin.
And I said to Glyn, "I want the bass drum to be louder."
And he said, "If you want it louder, hit it harder," you know?
And I hit it as hard as I could,
but I couldn't hit it as hard as John Bonham.
He had a bunch of rules that really didn't suit me
and some of the other guys, too.
You know, no getting high in the studio,
no drinking in the studio.
I agreed wholeheartedly with Glyn Johns
regarding drugs and alcohol in the studio...
that we'd get more work done and that it would be better work.
When I got the opportunity to produce
and therefore be in the chair,
I decided that I would no longer put up with that.
Somebody said to me the other night
that I was the designated driver in the '60s and early '70s.
Glyn had worked with the Rolling Stones
at a time when they went to the studio
and did nothing except wait for Keith, you know,
to go down in the basement and play his guitar
until he came up with some riff.
So, Glyn was impatient.
The Stones had burned him out on the, you know,
"get high in the studio and wait for something to happen"
kind of thing.
Let's go. We're rolling.
One, two, three.
There were three hit singles on the first album.
"Peaceful Easy Feeling" was written by Jack Tempchin,
who is our friend and frequent collaborator.
"Peaceful Easy Feeling" captures the time,
captures this attitude.
You can feel the wind blowing across the desert.
The second hit was "Witchy Woman," which I wrote with Bernie.
"Witchy Woman" started as a guitar figure.
Then we were jamming it one day, and everybody was digging it.
And then Henley came back the next day with the lyrics.
During the time that the Eagles were on the road
for the first album, we had just come through the '60s...
civil rights movement, '68...
all the assassinations, all the rioting.
The Vietnam War still winding up.
Nixon, Watergate.
I welcome this kind of examination.
I really think that part of the reason
that the Eagles succeeded the way they did
was because the country and people and young people
needed to feel like things were okay.
So, here comes this song "Take It Easy."
Jackson had this song called "Take It Easy."
He couldn't finish the song.
He was stuck in the second verse.
He had "I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona."
And so, I filled in, "Such a fine sight to see.
It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford
slowing down to take a look at me."
Girl, Lord, Ford... I mean, all the redemption, you know...
girls and cars and redemption all in this one line.
I mean, he's very mercurical.
You know... mercurial? Mercurial.
And he's mercurical, too.
All right!
Someone once asked Stephen Stills about the Eagles,
and his response was, "They just wanted to be us."
But when it came time to do our album covers,
they suggested that we use Gary Burden and Henry Diltz.
They had done the first Crosby, Stills, Nash cover
and some stuff for Joni.
The one I really remember was the Mamas and Papas
all sitting in the bathtub.
That was one of their album covers.
So, these were, like, the cool guys to have work on your album.
Gary Burden is about 40 years old, full beard,
long, grayish, wavy hair, crystal-blue eyes.
Henry was sort of magical, non-invasive photographer guy.
For the Eagles, it was the peyote spirits
which the American Indians, of course,
ate peyote and had a very, very spiritual experience,
and they would maybe meet their animal totem
or they would get their quest for life.
My deal was always to take the bands out of their comfort zone.
Take them away from their girlfriends, from telephones,
from anything, and have them under my control
so that I could get things to happen without any interference.
And so, we would take trips.
Now, how this plan came about exactly,
today you have to scratch your head, but this was the plan.
Okay, we'll all go to the Troubadour,
and we'll stay there till closing time.
And then we'll drive to Joshua Tree.
We had a bag of peyote buttons, a bunch of trail mix,
some tequila, and some water, and some blankets.
And the seven of us set out for Joshua Tree.
We got there probably about 4:30 in the morning,
parked in this special place
that I don't know how we found it in the dark.
We all took one peyote button, put it in our mouths,
and started hiking up to the place that we were supposed to go.
So, right around the time that we're getting to the campsite
and we're starting to build the fire
and starting to cook some peyote tea, and the first buttons...
everybody's chewing the first button,
and the drug starts coming on just as the sun is rising.
I think everybody got higher
than they ever imagined anybody could be,
and it was a good thing.
We were after getting into life deeper and better
and more and surrendering.
I had to go to the bathroom, so I left the campsite,
and I hear the guys yelling from the campfire, "Eagle! Eagle!"
I look up, and it's soaring right above me.
Huge wingspan.
I'm, like, scuffling to get my pants back up, and I'm slipping.
I fall down, and the bird just kind of goes,
"Eagles, huh? Yeah, I don't think so."
The images of the first album cover,
I think, really set the tone for visually what Eagles are.
Gary designed the album cover
so that it would open up into a whole poster,
and at the bottom were the Eagles around the campfire.
And then, up at the top,
it would go on up into the sky and the eagle up in the sky.
But David Geffen thought that would be confusing,
and without consulting us or consulting Gary or the Eagles
or anybody, he told them, "Just glue it shut."
And so, then, when they glued it shut, you would get this...
this album, front and back, and you'd open it up,
and it would be upside-down,
which didn't make any sense to anybody.
The fact was that the success of the first album
scared the hell out of us.
Why me instead of some guy down the street, you know?
Why me and some friends of mine
who are just as good of musicians as I am, you know,
but it happened to me and it didn't happen to them?
I don't know.
Success can sometimes be just as disconcerting
and frightening as failure,
especially when you have questions
about your own worthiness and your abilities.
It came time to do another album.
Don and I decided we'd try to write some songs together.
I had been sitting over on Aqua Vista.
I was living on the couch,
and I'm just laying there playing the guitar,
and I started going...
You know, I'm thinking, "Yeah, that's pretty cool,
kind of Roy Orbison, kind of Mexican.
Yeah, I like that."
So, I showed him, you know, that guitar riff.
I said, "Maybe we should write something to this."
Songs like "Desperado" and "Tequila Sunrise"...
that's when Glenn and I began collaborating,
and that's when we really became a songwriting team.
Earlier that year,
someone had given Jackson Browne the book of gunfighters.
It had all the big outlaw groups...
Frank and Jesse, the Doolin-Dalton gang.
We were all just fascinated with those guys,
and we thought it would make a great analogy.
Well, for example, we live outside the laws of normality.
Also, you usually... because of records or bank robberies,
you usually heard about these guys before you ever saw them.
They had posters that were wanted posters up for people.
There just seemed to be some parallels.
It wasn't really like we were outlaws,
but I think they did have their nobler characteristics.
We started talking about it.
Then we said, "Well, maybe we should do, like,
an album all about the rebels."
We got to doing this outlaw album,
and we had eight songs finished, and we needed two more.
An idea Randy came up with was how the guy became an outlaw
and how he became a guitar player.
I kind of started it, and that's what usually happened.
I'd get a verse or two, and then I'm done,
and they would help fill in the blanks.
Nobody expected there to be a concept album
with Western cowboys music.
Don Henley was from Texas. He was a cowboy.
Glenn was from Detroit. He wanted to be a cowboy.
Because I knew all these guys had a little cowboy inside of them,
I took them to Western costume
and just said, "Pick out your persona."
Their premise was that, if they had lived 100 years ago,
in like 1872, they probably would have been gunslingers.
Everybody's gonna be firing
in the direction of this building right here.
Jackson, J.D., Boyd, you all got to be in the picture more.
We're gonna be in there.
You ready? One, two, three!
And we fired so many blanks
that it was a cloud of smoke hanging over this Western town,
and the fire department came 'cause they thought it was a fire.
Keep firing!
We were just a bunch of kids. We were just playing around.
The picture that's on the back of the album...
there's a lot of reality in it.
All of the agents and managers and road managers,
all the guys who didn't play are standing up,
alive with badges and guns,
and the four Eagles at the time and Jackson and I are all dead,
bound up the way they used to do
when they'd catch outlaws in those days.
They'd stand them up for display.
People never tired of looking at the corpse of a bad boy.
We all felt, when we were doing it and as it was delivered,
that it was another really remarkable record
on the part of the band.
I mean, it was pretty extraordinary.
The band and I were enormously thrilled with it.
They literally carried me out of the control room.
They chaired me out of the control room.
"Desperado" comes out, and it bombs.
Jerry Greenberg was the Vice President of Atlantic Records.
They were excited to get the second Eagles album.
We played him "Desperado," and he said, "Hmm, that's, yeah,
that's nice, that's good, that's nice,"
and turned around and said,
"God, they made a fuckin' cowboy record."
I was extremely flattered that Linda recorded "Desperado."
It was really her that popularized the song.
Her version was very poignant and beautiful.
There have been a lot of articles and things
that identify me with the L.A. Sound.
It's sort of, like, me and Jackson Browne and the Eagles.
All of us are reaching out for other musical influences
all the time.
The so-called southern California sound was developing.
It was fresh, it was different, it was unique.
It was a melting pot, people moving here
from all over the United States to pursue their dream...
actors, musicians, wannabe managers, agents,
wannabe, you know, like me.
I picked up the phone cold and called David Geffen,
who was just starting Asylum Records.
Long story short, I took a job as a manager with Asylum.
I was intrigued. I wanted to know about the Eagles
and meet the Eagles 'cause I was a fan.
Emergency.
I get a phone call. Glenn Frey's on the phone.
"We need money for Christmas. Can you book dates?"
I book some dates.
So, I get on a plane and go out to meet them.
First of all, the show was fantastic.
Crowd was nothing like I'd seen a year, year and a half earlier.
Good evening. Welcome to the Portland version of...
- Spread eagle. - Spread eagle.
Tonight, the promoter gave us chopsticks.
I don't think we ever checked in a hotel.
We went from there to a party at a sorority house.
One thing led to another,
and I'd never seen anything like this.
They wouldn't give us any booze in the bar.
We tried to get some booze, but they fucked up,
so we may burn the fucking place down.
We're not sure.
I don't think we went to sleep. It was Eagle mania.
And then they went off to England
to record "On the Border" with Glyn Johns.
They were quite open to being produced.
Understandably, that changed.
They began to be more opinionated and less insecure, perhaps.
We wanted to play rock 'n' roll
or at least a more rock-'n'-roll version of country music,
and Glyn Johns was of the opinion
that we weren't really capable of that.
I think he had been bombarded by loud,
aggressive rock 'n' roll for many, many years.
At that point in his life,
he wanted mellow people and mellow music,
and we weren't exactly at the same stage in life.
Frey sort of took over more.
He had this desire to be something
that I didn't really feel that they were capable of doing.
He and Glenn Frey were like oil and water.
They clashed frequently.
In the studio, Glyn Johns was pretty much a schoolmarm.
He'd push, push, push, you know?
And then he'd say, "That's it.
That's good enough. We're moving on.
You're not a rock-'n'-roll band.
The Who is a rock-'n'-roll band, and you're not that."
After each of those records,
the band freaked out and said, "We've made a huge mistake.
Glyn Johns missed it."
We actually had conversations.
You know, "Desperado" hadn't done as well as the first album.
None of them were thrilled with the way the record sounded.
We wanted more input into how our albums were being made.
We wanted more input into the recording process itself.
Don and I thought that the vocals were too wet.
There was too much echo on them.
And he definitely told us, "Excuse me, that's my echo.
It's my signature. It's my bloody echo.
It stays there. You don't tell me what to do."
We needed to make a change.
I joined the Navy at the height of the cold war.
One of the main things they were doing
was looking for Russian submarines, and you do that by using sonar.
When I got out, I had a lot of electronics education, obviously.
And I got a job in a recording studio here in New York.
The first session I ever saw, like day one, day two,
was a Carole King demo.
She sat down and played piano,
and it was like, "Boy, this is fun. These people are having fun here."
I worked my way up through the ranks,
and then, of course, after engineering for four or five years,
I was like, "Well, I can produce better
than some of these guys I'm working for."
At the time, I was managing Joe Walsh,
so I played them Walsh music
that I thought was an example of how it could be edgier.
Joe and I had just finished an album called
"The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get."
And they heard that and said, "That's what we want to sound like."
So, Irving arranged for us
to have a meeting with Bill Szymczyk.
We really only had two questions that we wanted to ask him...
Do you mind if we have some input
about how much echo is on the vocals?
And we wanted somebody who would put a microphone
on each and every drum
so we could have more control over the mix.
He said yes to every question,
and so we knew he was the guy for us.
I said, "Okay, under one condition.
I have to call Glyn and make sure it's okay with him."
So, I called him, and I said,
you know, "Glyn, the Eagles want me to produce them."
"Better you than me, mate."
That's pretty much how I felt.
I mean, it had come to a fairly unpleasant end.
Well, okay, you know,
so much for Beatle country with Glyn Johns.
Let's have a warm round of applause on a hot afternoon for the Eagles.
Along about the third album,
I was having some difficulty in communicating,
I felt, in the band,
and I was starting to think maybe I should go at some point.
They still had this unfulfilled desire
to be a mainstream rock band and not just a vocal band,
but I think they wanted to go in a tougher direction.
Bernie Leadon was a country-based guitar player,
but every time I wanted to do a rock-'n'-roll song,
he was the lead guitar player.
Every time we wanted to do something country that Bernie sang,
I was supposed to be the lead guitar player,
and I wasn't a country musician by any stretch.
It always felt like we needed a third guitar player.
We had met this friend of Bernie's, this guy named Don Felder.
We were playing in Boston, and he came back to visit Bernie,
and we were jamming upstairs in the dressing room,
and this guy was all over the neck.
What he brought was great chops.
I mean, we called him Fingers... Fingers Felder...
because he was an incredible player.
We did that session. I think it was like three hours.
And then I packed up and went home,
not thinking anything more about it than it was just another session.
And the next day, Glenn called me
and asked me if I would like to join the band.
I said, "Absolutely."
- All right, let's do... - I'm in heaven.
- Let's go another one. - All right, do it right!
The banter that would go on in between takes was hysterical,
and so I took to running a two-track to pick up these silly things.
We were young men with raging hormones
and something to prove.
In the context of the times and the profession,
the way we behaved wasn't really all that remarkable.
The creative impulse
comes from the dark side of the personality,
so we worked it good, you know.
We did a lot of stupid things, said a lot of stupid things.
It was the '70s. There were drugs everywhere.
Cactus sunrise was in my face
Everyone was dying, everyone was lying and trying
Well, rub your belly in the linseed oil
There you go.
Well, the heartbreak of psoriasis
has once again descended upon the adolescent experience,
and we'll see you later.
See you at the show later on tonight.
The question was, you know, who could handle it?
Who could function? Who could show up?
There were always girls.
There were a lot of opportunities out on the road
to entertain ourselves with one thing or another.
So, we started to perfect after-show partying,
and we invented a place called the Third Encore.
We did two encores in our show, so the third encore was the party.
Everybody in the band and everybody in the crew
was given a bunch of buttons, and all we said was,
"No weirdos, no strange people, okay?
If you're gonna give a button to somebody,
you know, make it count."
Totally sick.
There's some real warped shit coming on now, ladies and gentlemen.
A member of Andy Warthog's pop-bowel movement
has just tried to crash our party.
What the...
Welcome to Pittsburgh Spread Eagle.
We want to just ask these girls
why they think they have to leave now that it's 2:00.
One thing, he smells like beer.
We'd fill the bathtubs up with Budweiser,
and we'd have a party after every show.
- Your name, please. - Tammy Farley.
Tammy, Tammy, Tammy.
Here we have Karen. Karen is 20 years old.
- Is that correct? - Yeah.
What's your name, dear?
- Fuck it, man. - Pardon?
Fuck it. Her name's fuck it, man.
I want to talk about sex and drugs.
Who wants to go first?
I'm not lost for words on either subject.
Sex and drugs kind of came as a big package in the '60s.
You know, it seemed like everybody...
the sexual revolution and the drug thing, I guess,
probably started out together.
Didn't they?
Don and I both tried to have relationships
while we were members of the Eagles,
but it was always like the Eagles trumped everything.
When the Eagles became successful,
we challenged all the rules.
Like when David Geffen left Asylum Records
and sold everything to Warner Bros. And started his new empire.
Let's be frank.
When we signed that contract, we were idiots.
We knew nothing about the business.
We had poor legal representation,
nobody looking out for us.
Remember, bands don't really get record royalties usually ever.
So, they get money from touring, but they get publishing money.
So, in the very beginning, one thing that Geffen did
that I thought was great...
he had us form a band publishing company.
All the band's publishing went in that.
The problem was Geffen had the other half.
Half the Eagles' publishing, half of my publishing,
half of all the artists that he signed
went to Warner Bros., but he got them to return mine.
Jackson turned me on to the Eagles.
He had turned me on to a lot of artists,
and I felt I owed him something.
And that, not surprisingly,
was not acceptable rationale to the Eagles.
There's a certain amount of ire,
like, real, you know, like, "What the fuck?
I mean, we didn't get our publishing back."
So, it was the publishing issue
and the fact that the business managers
and the lawyers were all shared common guys,
and did they have a conflict when an issue came up
and which side to take?
Well, it just makes you feel like meat, you know?
It started out as such a personal, nurturing endeavor,
you know, with Mr. Geffen saying, "Oh, I'm going to protect you guys.
"That's why I'm calling my new label 'Asylum'.
It's going to be a sanctuary for real artists."
He once said to Irving Azoff, "You know, Irving,
this would be a great business if there weren't artists."
Irving was the one guy who really believed in us,
that I thought could do something to help us.
I basically hired a lawyer and went in
after I said the Eagles would like their publishing back,
to which the obvious response was "No".
He sort of drew a line in the sand and declared war,
so I felt, for my survival as their manager,
I needed to prove to them that I wasn't afraid of Geffen
and would stand up and, you know.
The lawsuit was filed as a last resort.
I don't think David liked reading his name in the lawsuit.
I thought it was incredibly ungrateful
and they misrepresented the facts, but so be it.
Ultimately, we settled out of court,
and I don't believe it took very long.
He just wanted to get rid of us.
This is our new record contract.
Just paper.
So, then we headed off for parts unknown
with Irving Azoff at the helm.
This card game is called Eagle Poker.
It's a bastardization of Red Dog.
I invented it in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947,
one year before I was born.
We were big gamblers. We played poker all the time.
Oh, boy. They should have never given me money.
So, we decided we'd go to the Bahamas to gamble.
Everybody but Don was holding.
I had like four joints in a baggie,
stuffed down my sock in my cowboy boot.
Durkin, the pilot, has a joint.
Irving had about 30 valiums in a sugar pack.
There was a couple of customs officials there
that asked us to collect all our luggage and come over,
and they wanted to search us 'cause we looked terrible.
We had really long hair and patches on our jeans
and a beard and not slept.
Now, I'm freaking out. Bernie's freaking out.
Irving's freaking out. Henley's pissed off.
Don't touch me.
Well, the guy proceeds to put us all in a room together,
and they start searching us one by one.
My greatest fear is that I'm gonna be locked in a jail cell
with Bernie Leadon.
So, at this point, Irving steps in
and takes one of the Bahamian customs guys
over to the side and has a chat with him.
I'm not sure, to this day, what Irving said to him.
The next thing I knew, they let us pass with no problem.
It was sort of miraculous, really, it was,
because I thought for sure we were gonna be in the slammer.
It was dumb luck that this guy bought my line
and didn't search them.
That was the day I decided Irving Azoff
was the greatest manager in rock 'n' roll
and I would never do anything without him by my side.
I had the only seat in a major championship fight...
to be sitting there when, you know,
when a lyric was thrown out and then hear a track.
And I've watched the creative process with lots of other people,
but I've never seen it the way it fell in place with them.
I remember watching "Lyin' Eyes" written.
Glenn just had a way of coming up with a phrase, you know?
He had written some kind of a tune,
and they were sitting in Tana's one night
and looking at some young girl with an older guy at the bar,
and Glenn said, "Look at those lyin' eyes."
And just... just like that, wow, there's the song.
It was just about all these girls
who would come down to Dan Tana's looking beautiful,
and they'd be there from 8:00 to midnight
and have dinner and drinks with all of us rockers,
and then they'd go home because they were kept women.
You know, when we were doing the "One of These Nights" album,
we'd gone through three albums,
and the only people who'd sung on any hit records
were Don and myself.
And Randy always felt like, you know, he was a lead singer, too.
And I actually felt that way, too. I liked his voice.
So, he brought in the beginnings of "Take It To the Limit,"
and it became the Eagles' first number-one single.
The line "Take It To the Limit"
was to keep trying before you reach a point in your life
where you feel, you know, you've done everything
and seen everything sort of feeling.
You know, a part of getting old,
and just to take it to the limit one more time,
like every day, just keep punching away at it.
And that's all that I really... that was the line,
and from there, the song took a different, you know, course.
I think everybody in the Eagles did the level best we could.
You have to remember how young we were,
the fact that nobody had anything when we started,
and you got all this stuff coming at you.
Meanwhile, you're touring all the time.
It's a lot.
To Bernie, success on any scale was synonymous with selling out.
He wanted us to remain sort of an underground band.
We had our problems with Bernie,
and Bernie had his problems with us.
Some of it was based on him being able to have a voice
in the Eagles
and record the songs he wanted to the way he wanted to.
We were getting more and more rocked out,
and I think Bernie was less and less happy about that...
...to the point that, one time, we had worked on a track all night.
I mean, it was a rocked-out track,
and we're all sitting behind the board the next day,
listening to the various takes of it,
trying to decide which take we like the best.
Bernie hadn't said a word.
So, I asked him over the board,
I said, "Bernie, what do you think?"
There's a long pause, and he gets up,
and he stretches, and he says, "I think I'm going surfing."
And he left.
I was caught in the middle a lot of times.
And sometimes I would agree with Bernie,
but most of the time, I would agree with Glenn.
Glenn and I always wanted the band to be a hybrid,
to encompass bluegrass and country and rock 'n' roll.
There was a part of Bernie that really resisted that.
After a while, it became a real problem,
particularly between Bernie and Glenn.
Finally, we were at the Orange Bowl in Miami.
We were backstage,
and we were talking about what our next move was gonna be,
what our plans were supposed to be,
and I was animated and adamant about what we needed to do next
here, there, and everywhere,
and Bernie comes over and pours a beer on my head
and says, "You need to chill out, man."
I have no idea. It was a spontaneous thing.
I mean, I take that incident now quite seriously.
That was a very disrespectful thing to do.
Obviously, it was intended to be humiliating to him, I would say,
and is something I'm really not proud of.
It did illustrate a breaking point.
During that time, we got a couple shows
opening for the Rolling Stones,
and Irving was managing Joe Walsh.
Joe Walsh was a bona fide rock-'n'-roll guitar player.
So, for a couple of those shows, just for our encores,
we'd put Joe Walsh in a road box,
and we'd come back to do an encore, and we'd roll the road box out,
and just like the model jumping out of a cake,
we'd open the guitar case,
and there would be Joe Walsh with his Les Paul,
and he'd climb out of the box and plug in, and the Eagles...
We would play "Rocky Mountain Way."
I loved the way he played.
I'd loved the James gang when I was growing up in Detroit.
Now I started thinking, "Joe Walsh for Bernie Leadon."
Okay, maybe the vocals won't be quite as good,
but, boy, are we gonna kick some ass.
I think one of the things that I brought into the band
that was good for the band
was to bring it up a notch when we played live.
Just keep kicking it in the butt a little bit, you know?
All right, D.C., come on, give it up.
I went to a show maybe eight months later,
and the band are interacting with each other
exactly like we did with me onstage,
except instead of me, Walsh was up there,
and it just was, like, really, really odd, you know,
to be watching it and not be part of it.
So, I actually left that show.
I was just like, "This is, like, too weird."
So, we got Joe Walsh in the band.
That's another adventure
because Joe was an interesting bunch of guys.
Hey, I tell you what.
If you got firecrackers, just wait until you get home,
lock yourself in the closet, and light everything you got, okay?
Thank you, Joe.
He brought a lot of levity
to just about everything that happened,
which was needed at that time.
Heads or tails?
Heads.
Well, I could use a little head myself.
In those days, you didn't know what he was gonna do next.
It was fun most of the time, although not all the time.
It was fun, depending on how much you'd had to drink,
to see a television go sailing off the 14th-floor balcony
and into the pool, as long as nobody got hurt.
Joe Walsh was the American King of room trash.
He had studied under some of the best.
One of the most terrifying things that ever happened to me
was that Keith Moon decided he liked me.
All those Keith Moon stories are true.
This guy was full-blown nuts,
and you never knew what was coming next.
Keith was my mentor at chaos,
getting arrested, practical jokes, pranks, room damage.
One year, we gave him a chain saw for his birthday as a joke.
By this time, we were eating in nice restaurants
and buying expensive wine and staying in great hotel rooms.
There were a lot of hotels that we weren't allowed to go back to.
We were in Chicago,
and we were staying at the Astor Towers.
In Chicago, here's what happened.
There was a knock on the door, and in walked John Belushi.
John wanted to show me the finer restaurants of Chicago.
So, we went to the restaurant,
and they wouldn't let us in 'cause we had jeans,
and he got the maitre d' up to like $300 bribe,
and still they would not let us in.
And John said, "I know what to do. I know what to do."
And the next thing I knew, we were standing in the alley,
and he spray-painted my jeans black and made me do his,
and we went back, and we got in.
We were sitting in these Queen Anne-period chairs
that had needlepoint,
and when we stood up, that was all black,
and the butts of our pants were jeans again.
So, we had to kind of back out of there and leave fast.
But that was the beginning of it.
And so that night, with much glee,
Joe set about to set the world record for room trash.
John and I did $28,000 of room damage.
Glenn and Don didn't really ever approve
of the room trashing, but they understood it.
They wanted respect as rock 'n' rollers,
and Joe brought that respect.
I was insecure always and afraid,
so I hid behind all of my hang-ups with humor.
I was totally in awe of Don and Glenn.
I was intimidated by Don and Glenn
because they sang so good and they were writing stuff
I could never come close to writing.
After we just had a bunch of hit records
on "One of These Nights," we were under the microscope.
Everybody was gonna look at the next record we made
and pass judgment.
Don and I were going, "Man, this better be good."
Look at that.
It's gonna be quite a nice guitar.
Felder, you see this?
Who, uh, who tuned this?
Well, it has no nut.
With Joe in the band with me, I wanted to write something,
musically, that would fit two guitar players,
that we could play off of each other.
So, I was sitting on a sofa in Malibu
at this rental house that I had on the beach,
and I was playing this acoustic guitar,
and this introduction came out, that progression.
I kept playing it three or four times.
I had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder,
so I went back and recorded that introduction to that song
and laid down that progression, made a mix of it,
and put it on a cassette with, I don't know,
the other 14 or 15 pieces of music that I had assembled,
and I gave a copy of the cassette to Don, one to Glenn.
Don Felder used to send Henley and I instrumental tapes,
song ideas.
95% of them were cluttered with guitar licks,
and we would listen to these things and go,
"Well, where do you sing?"
As Don and I were listening through one of the Felder cassettes
and this song came up, we both sort of said,
"Hmm, now, this is interesting."
The music sounded to me like some sort of a cross
between Spanish music and reggae music,
and that one really jumped out at me.
So, we set out to write a song to that progression.
I'm pretty sure it was Henley's idea
to have a song called "Hotel California."
I think Henley's and Glenn's lyric writing really came to a head.
They became real honest-to-God songwriters then.
During the recording of it,
I thought that we were on to something.
I knew we were on to something.
We were in a really creative phase,
and it just so happened that Bill Szymczyk pushed record.
Thank God.
We've been asked a million times, "What does that song mean?"
Don and I were big fans of hidden, deeper meaning.
You know, you write songs,
and you send them out to the world...
And maybe somewhere in that song is some stuff that's just yours
that they're never gonna figure out.
There has been a great deal of ridiculous speculation
about that song over the years.
I mean, it's really taken on a life or a mythology of its own.
You know, it's sort of like the "Paul is dead" thing
or who was the walrus?
It's been denounced by evangelicals.
We've been accused of all kinds of wacky things,
like being members of the Church of Satan.
People see images on the album cover that aren't there.
Just lunatic stuff.
My simple explanation is
it's a song about a journey from innocence to experience.
That's all.
Whereas Felder was technically very, very good,
Walsh brought spontaneity to it,
and the two of them playing off each other was just brilliant.
Out of great respect for each other,
there was always a little competition
between Felder and I.
We always tried to kind of one-up each other, you know?
And that's really healthy.
It always made the song better
when we were kind of, "Oh, yeah? Listen to this."
We got to the end,
where now is the harmony guitars that are playing together,
and Joe said, "We should do something that's like...
The ending of "Hotel California"...
that's one of my high points of my entire recording career.
To have a seven-minute single be number one...
that was unheard of.
The record company said, "You got to do an edit.
You got to do an edit."
And we all said, "No. Take it or leave it."
And they took it.
We had no idea that that song
would affect as many people on the planet as it did.
Thank you.
The rest of the album kind of developed around that song.
The album, you could loosely say,
is a thematic album, a concept album.
Not unlike "Desperado,"
"Hotel California" was our reaction to what was happening to us.
On just about every album we made, there was some kind of a commentary
on the music business and on American culture in general.
The hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor
not only for the mythmaking of Southern California
but for the mythmaking that is the American dream
because it's a fine line between the American dream
and the American nightmare.
All the songs we write for this album
can fit inside this concept.
Once the rest of the guys in the band
understood what the song "Hotel California" was about,
it became kind of a theme,
and they started to customize their writing to fit in with it.
I think that the Eagles started breaking up
during the recording of "Hotel California."
There were creative tensions,
but there was always tension tensions.
By the time we got to recording "Hotel California,"
if the song wasn't good enough
to survive the amount of time we were working on the record,
it didn't make it on the record.
Perfection is not an accident.
Our goal was just to be the best we could be.
We wanted to get better as songwriters and as performers,
and we worked on it.
Don and I felt like there was no space now for filler,
and Don Felder, for all of his talents as a guitar player,
is not a singer.
Felder wanted to write more, sing more,
and Felder had kind of demanded
that "I'm gonna sing two songs on 'Hotel California."'
We were all Alphas,
and we were all very assertive and powerful in our own way.
You could bring in a great track to Don and Glenn
and be really excited about it.
This happened to Felder.
I wrote the track for "Victim of Love."
It was gonna be a follow-up song
on the "Hotel California" record for me to sing.
I have no recollection of anybody being promised anything.
"Victim of Love" was not brought to the band as a complete song.
It was simply another chord progression
that Don Felder brought in.
It had no title, no lyrics, and no melody.
Glenn and I and J.D. Souther all sat down
and hammered out the rest of it.
We did let Mr. Felder sing it.
He sang it dozens of times over the span of a week,
over and over and over again.
It simply didn't come up to band standards.
"Victim of Love" had been recorded with Felder as the lead vocalist,
and my job was to take Don Felder out to lunch or dinner
while they went in the studio and put Henley's vocal on it.
Irving took me out and said that everybody in the band thought
that it was better if Don sang that.
And it was a little bit of a bitter pill to swallow.
I felt like Don was taking that song from me.
I'd been promised a song on the next record.
But there was no real way to argue
with my vocal versus Don Henley's vocal.
There was no way to argue with anybody's vocal in the band
compared to Don Henley.
Felder demanding to sing that song
would be the equivalent of me demanding to play lead guitar
on "Hotel California."
It just didn't make sense.
If you look at my vocal participation in the Eagles
over the course of the 1970s, I sang less and less.
It was intentional. We had Don Henley.
Don and Glenn's position was,
"This is the best thing for the Eagles."
And Don Felder never forgot that.
Get it! Get it! Run! Run! Run!
Shit.
This is a real healthy thing.
It promotes good feelings, you know, among the guys,
and it keeps us from killing each other.
Where's my glove? Who's got my glove?
We can yell at each other on a baseball field,
then we don't have to yell at each other when we're working.
Get all my frustrations out.
What frustrations?
I haven't been getting laid.
We try to get out and play softball with the crew
if we have a day off.
Swing, batter!
Oh, it's gone, it's gone. It's gone.
Something to help release the tension.
That's really what I do to keep from going crazy.
How do you keep from going crazy, Joe?
Well...
I tell you, I just, uh...
In the press and the media,
it was presented that we were constantly at war,
and I can't say that's exactly the case.
We were interacting, and we were all intense.
Glenn said to me one time,
"I get nuts sometimes, and I'm sorry."
Hey, Joe.
But that tension had a lot to do with fanning the artistic fire.
Having that dynamic was important in making the music.
Well, we're rehearsing now, and before we're even playing
and guys are just noodling around
and getting their amps going and stuff, we hear Joe go...
You know, and everyone would kind of go, "What did you play?
Play that again."
That was an exercise I was doing because it's a coordination thing.
You know, it's like one of these deals.
So, I was doing that to warm up,
and they said, "Well, what is that?"
And I said, "Well, that's just something I have, you know?
There you go."
That's the lick.
That's what we should build the song around.
I was riding shotgun in a corvette with a drug dealer
on the way to a poker game, and the next thing I knew,
we were going about 90 miles an hour, holding big time.
I was like, "Hey, man. What are you doing?"
You know, and he looked at me, and he grinned.
He goes, "Life in the fast lane."
And I thought immediately, "Now, there's a song title."
Then they put out the greatest hits.
There was a period
where we sold a million records a month for 18 months.
It's a little-known fact that the Eagles
had the biggest-selling album of the 20th century.
But the music business never ever got honest of its own volition.
No record company ever went to an artist and said,
"You've done a great job.
We're gonna increase your royalties."
So we created our own promotion company.
We created our own management company.
We had our own booking agency.
Stop any time.
We achieved an amount of success beyond our wildest imagination,
and Randy really had trouble with it.
Bam! Bam!
Randy used to have trouble singing the high note
at the end of "Take It To the Limit."
Oh, yeah, I was always kind of scared, basically.
"What if I don't hit it right?"
It was a pretty high note.
And in the middle of the fade,
you crank the volume knob and go, "What?!"
Randy could do it, but if you made him do it,
"Oh, no, man, I, uh..."
Thank you.
Randy Meisner.
He'd call the road manager and say,
"Tell Glenn I don't want to do 'Take It To the Limit' anymore.
Take it out of the set."
I confronted him about this.
I called him up, and I said, "Randy,
there's thousands of people waiting to hear you sing that song.
"You just can't say, 'Fuck them. I don't feel like it.'
Do you think I like singing 'Take It Easy'
and 'Peaceful Easy Feeling' every night?
I'm tired of those songs, but there's people in the audience
who've been waiting years to see us do those songs."
We just got fed up with that and just said, "Okay, don't sing it.
Why don't you just quit? You say you're unhappy. Quit."
Randy never knew how great he was.
He wasn't Alpha.
Confrontations were really hard for him.
All I want to see is five guys happy playing together, you know?
And that's what makes the music.
We were backstage, and the crowd was going wild.
And our encore number was "Take It To the Limit."
People loved that song.
They went crazy when Randy hit those high notes.
But Randy didn't want to do the song that night.
He'd been up partying all night
with a couple of girls and a bottle of vodka.
And Glenn kept trying to talk him into it.
He said, "Man, the people want to hear that song.
You got to do it."
And Randy kept saying, "No."
So after about the third or fourth time that Randy refused,
Glenn just backed up a couple of steps and said,
"Well, fuck you, then!"
There were police officers standing backstage,
and when they saw us about to go at it, they started to move in.
And Henley turned right to the cops and said,
"Stay out of this.
This is personal, and it's private...
real fucking private."
The writing was on the wall that Randy was gonna leave.
There was only person to ever replace Randy Meisner
in the Eagles in my mind, and it was Timothy B. Schmit.
He replaced him in Poco
and plugged in and sang the same parts.
And I remember sitting with Irving and saying,
"Irving, I think we should get Timothy Schmit."
He said, "Well, I just saw Timothy. I was out on the road
when the guys in Poco were in the hotel bar,
and Timothy was smashed out of his mind.
He was gacked up. Are you sure about this?"
I said, "Irving," I said, "If you'd been in a band
for 11 years and you were still making $250 a week
working 40 weeks a year,
maybe you'd be a little smashed and gacked-up yourself."
They asked me to join their band
before I even played a note of music with them.
I just said, "You know, where do you want me? When?
I'm definitely in."
We want to introduce you to the newest member of our band.
He's our new bass player,
and we got him from a really fine band... Poco.
Please give a nice Houston, Texas, welcome to Timothy Schmit.
I went on the road with them in 1978 as the new guy.
And I heard a few, "Where's Randy's" from the audience, you know?
But I knew it was a good move for them and me.
There were a lot of decisions, business-wise,
that needed to be made in a secret session...
Glenn and Don and Irving in the back of the plane.
I didn't like that I wasn't part of that,
but I knew that it was good for the Eagles.
Don Felder really didn't like it.
Glenn and I saw ourselves as the leaders of the band,
but other people saw us as dictators.
You just cannot have five leaders in a band.
It doesn't work. People have to do what they do best.
There was all this undercurrent and resentment
and, you know, plotting and complaining.
And I'm sure Timothy thought, "What have I gotten myself into?"
I was just really happy to be there,
and all these tensions... it's not that I didn't feel it,
but I had no idea how deep it was.
In my experience, all rock-'n'-roll bands
are on the verge of breaking up at all times.
The band at that point had begun to split up into factions.
Don Felder, in an effort to gain more control,
had co-opted Joe Walsh.
So much of the time,
it was Felder and Walsh against me and Glenn.
At that point, even Glenn and I
were beginning to have our differences.
And it was tearing the band apart.
The magic ingredient that made the band successful
was the relationship between Don and Glenn.
Through years of touring, years in the studio...
all of that friction really started driving a wedge
in between that relationship.
It reached a point where we were just tired of each other...
tired of the hoopla, tired of touring,
tired of pretty much everything.
At that point, songwriting was becoming very difficult.
How much sleep did you guys get?
When did you get finished loading out?
- 2:00? - 5:30.
- 5:30 this morning? - Yeah.
Okay.
After the success of "Hotel California"...
Grammy winner, mega sales... top that.
And we show up at the studio, and nobody has one song done.
I don't know what we'll do first, but...
I had enough of a piece where they both went,
"That's great. Let's develop that."
And I was really pleased that they wanted to develop that one
because it came out more as an R&B song.
And it's very simple.
Very simple instrumentation.
Very simple arrangement.
There's a lot of air in it.
That's why it works.
About halfway through, Don comes up to me and says,
"There's your hit."
We're on top of the world. We're young.
We were overdoing everything.
There was a lot of chemical dependency going on within the band.
And that was rough.
During all of that time of writing and recording
"The Long Run" and all the time on the road...
we were on the road during "The Long Run,"
we were all using cocaine.
When we first started snorting coke, it was like a writing tool.
Do a couple bumps and kind of get started talking about stuff,
get yourself going
and launch into some sort of idea for a song.
But in the end, cocaine brought out the worst in everybody.
Yes, this half-hour of the show is brought to you by cocaine...
the makers of hits.
Making that album was excruciating.
We were just completely burned out.
We had driven ourselves really hard for almost a decade,
and we were just fried.
It was long, too.
I mean, the days and hours would drag on,
and it would feel like we weren't getting anything done.
It was more painful than "Hotel California."
It was more of a painful birth
because all of this stuff was going on,
and we were getting pretty frazzled.
And the record company didn't care if we farted and burped.
They would put that out. They didn't care.
"When can we have it?"
Because that was their whole corporate quarter.
At that point, we inked in "The Long Run" as the title.
I think Henley said, "Well, I know what to call this one.
Look at us."
Hold it. Stop.
That's it!
Song two.
Eagles... "The Long Run"... song two take one.
It was a struggle... an endless start-stop-start-stop.
We called it "The Long One."
It was the beginning of the end,
even though I don't think I saw it right then.
There were a lot of things building up
and a lot of things I tried to overlook for the good of the band.
And ultimately, I just couldn't look past some of this anymore.
And it festered because we didn't talk about these things.
It finally came to a head in Long Beach.
We were doing a benefit for Senator Alan Cranston.
He was concerned about a lot of the same issues
we were concerned about,
including environmental destruction and the war,
so we wanted to support him.
Now, Felder didn't like us doing benefits.
He just thought that was money that should be going into his pocket.
Why were we doing it for Jerry Brown or anti-nukes?
Alan Cranston and his wife are coming around
to personally thank every member of the Eagles for doing this.
I was very uninformed about politics.
I could care less about politics.
I didn't even know or care who Alan Cranston was.
And Senator Cranston went up to Felder and said,
"I want to thank you."
And Felder looked at the Senator and said, "You're welcome."
Then as he was turning away, he said, "I guess."
"I guess."
"I guess." And Glenn heard it.
And I just got really mad.
I was drinking a longneck Bud and then walked into the tuning room
where Walsh and Felder was and took the beer bottle
and threw it against the wall and smashed it.
I stormed out.
I got more mad and more mad.
By the time we went onstage, I was seething.
I wanted to kill Felder.
Thank you again very much from all the Eagles
and from Senator Cranston
for coming out here and checking it out.
One, two, three, four.
A lot of tensions between Glenn and Felder,
and the real manifestation of it came that night.
So now we're playing the show
and trying to act like everything's okay,
and we'll get through a few songs.
And I just keep looking over at him.
"You ungrateful son of a bitch."
The scene there...
I really saw how serious it was at that show.
They were fighting onstage.
Szymczyk's got audio of it.
So we started getting towards the end of the set,
and I'm looking at him going, "Three more songs, asshole."
You know, and I'm looking at him, and I am ready to go.
I can't wait to get my hands on him.
"When we get off the stage, I'm gonna kick your ass."
Whoa. When that kind of stuff is onstage
and you're in front of people, you got problems.
Thank you very much.
We got through the show, and it just...
all hell broke loose backstage.
When the set ended, he was out ahead of me,
took his cheapest guitar...
...busted it in a million pieces
and jumped in his limousine and drove off.
And that was it.
That was really the straw that broke the camel's back.
Someone wrote, "The Eagles went out with a whimper, not a bang,"
which was true.
I didn't want to hear it.
This was, like, my super dream had come true.
So I called Glenn, and I said, "What is the status?
What's going on? Is this thing really broken up?"
He said, "Yeah, it's over."
We were beat,
and it was really affecting the foundational core...
the soul of the band.
We hit the wall.
You work, work, work, work, work.
You get up to a peak, and then it's almost, you know,
invariably people head-butt and, "Whose band is it?"
And, "I'm in charge," and, "No, you're not," and there you go.
We had always said that we wanted to step off the wave
just before it crashed into the beach.
And we did.
The Beatle guys say they never thought...
McCartney never thought that band was gonna last
more than two years because no pop band did.
I think it's part of it.
It comes together.
It's magic, and it falls apart, you know?
But, you know, how cool that it even happens at all.
It was magical.
They wrote a lot of great, great songs
that will be celebrated and listened to
and loved for a long time.
We managed to represent that period of time in the '70s,
Southern California, which was very artistically creative.
I hope that's remembered like the Roaring '20s are, you know...
our generation and what we did.
We set out to become a band for our time,
but sometimes if you do a good enough job,
you become a band for all time.
A funny thing happened right when we broke up.
1980 is when the format "classic rock" hit American radio.
So even though the band broke up,
they kept playing our songs all the time.
It was like we never went away. We were still on the radio.
Somebody once told me
people didn't just listen to the Eagles.
They did things to the Eagles.
They went on fandangos and drove across the country
with three of their high-school buddies.
People broke up with their girlfriends.
People quit their jobs or changed their lives.
They did things to the Eagles.
Songs from that album have even been played in outer space.
And they used to pipe the music up to the space shuttle
to wake the astronauts up in the morning.
Shortly after having their breakfast of steak and eggs and toast,
he then put on his space suit and helmet.
That song has really gotten around.
There's been a lot of conjecture
about how and why we got back together.
We began to realize that we'd been away for 14 years.
Maybe we could have that rarest of things in American life,
which is a second act.
You know, a second chance.
Thank you.
When we stopped, I was really sad.
Like, "What are we gonna do?"
No!
I was pretty devastated.
I had only been part of it for barely three years,
and I'd loved it.
We created this monster,
and it took its toll on all of our lives.
Somebody was quoted as saying
the Eagles would get back together when hell freezes over.
So, hell froze over.
We're all ready.
The gentleman in blue over there.
After the acrimony and the bitterness
that marked the demise of the band,
it must have been a long road to reunion.
Can you just take us through the steps that you went through
on the road to reunification?
No.
Anybody want that one?
No, really, it's a fair question.
From the time that we disbanded in 1980,
there were always offers on the table
for us to get back together.
It started with the first US festival,
and Steve Wozniak wanted to pay us a million dollars.
I said no.
I needed to do something else.
I called my first solo album "No Fun Aloud"
because I was having so much fun.
It was so liberating to know that whatever I did
was gonna be more fun than what I just did
for the last three years on "The Long Run" album.
I knew I wanted to have a songwriting partner,
so I asked my friend Jack Tempchin
if he wanted to write some songs together.
And Jack's a very bright guy lyrically,
and so I started working with him.
He had become a disciplined co-writer with Don Henley,
and when the Eagles broke up,
he just wanted to let go and have some fun with music, you know?
So we were fiddling around with some grooves,
and one of us said, "You belong to the city."
And then we're going, "Oh, yeah, yeah. That's it."
You just show up and good things happen.
Henley's solo career was really, really successful.
Going solo was the scariest part of my life.
The whole MTV thing was a difficult transition for me to make.
You know, the Eagles, at one point,
had been accused by some critic of loitering onstage.
So it was difficult for us loiterers
to make the transition to the world of choreography
and costume and acting.
Did I benefit from MTV? Yes, I did.
You know, I made a couple of videos that won some MTV awards.
Nevertheless, I would just as soon have skipped the whole thing
because I considered myself, first and foremost,
a songwriter and a recording artist.
I didn't really want to be an actor, too.
Nice, huh?
The guy who sold it to me said it was a lemon.
But I'm telling you, it may look like a cow,
but she runs like a stallion.
I always like to take a good-bye look at America.
Just in case it's my last.
I acted in television, in movies.
I wasn't really thinking about getting back together with the Eagles.
The guy's got an attitude problem.
Yeah, well, he listens to me. I can help you with that.
Cameron would call me up and say, "Glenn, I got to find somebody
that's not gonna take any shit off Tom Cruise,
and I think you're the guy."
We have history, Dennis.
Oh, yeah. We got history all right, Jerry.
No, no, no. No, no, no.
Dennis! Dennis! Dennis! Don't! Don't!
I signed Don Henley to Geffen Records.
Now, you might say,
since the Eagles sued me at Asylum Records...
DAVID GEFFEN FOUNDER, ASYLUM RECORDS
...why he did come with me at Geffen Records?
Well, David uses the same pickup lines
every time he comes a-courtin'.
"You know how much I care about you as an artist.
You know what a big fan I am of yours."
And so I bought it a second time and I signed with him.
And then things started to fall apart.
I produced several hits,
but I could feel the support somehow waning.
Don got into arguments with them
over things like budget, videos, artwork, things like that.
I recall Don starting to write letters to them
referring to them as Nickel and Dime Records.
When you feel like your label is not supporting you,
it's completely deflating.
I used to call him "Golden throat."
I thought he was an incredible singer.
But, by nature, he's a malcontent.
He's always been a malcontent.
And, you know, that's just life.
So I just said one day, "I'm not gonna record for you anymore.
I'm leaving."
And so he sued me for $30 million.
My wife has M.S., and they deposed her,
dragged her all the way from Texas to Los Angeles
to sit her down in front of his attorneys
and ask her a bunch of pointless questions,
because she didn't know anything.
I thought that was really low.
I said to Irving over the Henley contract,
"I'd sooner die than let you fuck me.
You'd better win this case."
It was settled, you know,
and that was the end of that relationship.
I've realized now that we have adult rock stars.
You don't have to give this up when you turn 30 or 35 or 40.
I'll always make records and write songs.
I got to do them. Otherwise, I'd go nuts.
This is a tune that was written with my new friend Mike Campbell
and my old friend John David Souther.
When the band broke up,
Glenn started writing songs with Jack Tempchin.
I guess the rift between Henley and Frey
probably spread to between Frey and me.
Glenn and I had had some outrageously fun times together.
And then Don and I did for a decade or so.
How have you changed as musicians over the years,
both as a group and individually?
Well, your whole mandate is just to improve.
You know, life is about improvement,
whether it's as a musician or as a singer or as a songwriter
or just, you know, all the other different hats we all wear.
So, hopefully, we're just getting better.
We've been doing this quite a long time now on and off,
and we feel like we've got it down pretty good.
And, in fact, we've had five days off,
and we're ready to go now.
When the Eagles first broke up,
I wasn't quite sure what I was gonna do with myself.
So I just hustled.
I went just as a singer with Toto,
I played bass for Jimmy Buffett,
I went out with Warren Zevon and Dan Fogelberg,
and stuff I wouldn't have necessarily done.
I sang on Poison records and Twisted Sister,
although you'll never see my name.
They never gave me credit.
That was more like yelling.
It's not all gonna be the greatest thing in the world.
But if you can work and support yourself and your family,
it's good.
Okay, next question.
Gentleman in the front here, Richard.
What position do you think rock 'n' roll takes now about drugs?
We came from a generation
that experimented with all kinds of substances, of course.
I think our message is that
you can be a damn good rock band without all that stuff.
I'd like to propose a toast
to dedicate this song to you, to us.
The drinking man's musician, Joe Walsh!
I ended up an alcoholic.
And very fond of cocaine.
If I was awake, I was doing that stuff.
Good morning, rock fans.
In the very early years, it had briefly worked.
Wow.
And then you chase it when it doesn't work anymore.
And I chased it for years and years.
"Could Hemingway have written like that if he was sober,
or could Hendrix have played like that
if he didn't experiment with hallucinogenics?
Well, probably not."
I used that one for years and years,
and it never occurred to me that all those people are dead.
They got further and further away from reality.
Should I look at you or the camera?
Look at me.
I ended up in bad shape.
I had hit bottom.
And I knew that I was done
and that...
...I would probably die if I kept going.
Joe was a mess.
He was around a bunch of people that were really just enablers.
Nobody wanted to intervene.
Nobody wanted to tell him he had a drug problem
or a drinking problem.
Everybody was just going along with Joe.
I remember what we all did when it was an art form, you know?
And I'd like to fight to get it back to that.
And I was very, very happy in the Eagles.
I was just gonna say I'm sorry we broke up,
but we didn't break up.
We just stopped, I think.
We just said, you know, "The heck with the '80s."
Song 3, take 6.
In 1990, we tried to get together to refuel it.
Everybody was in on that, but Glenn wasn't involved yet.
Irving got us together...
Timothy, Joe, myself, and Don Henley.
Glenn was supposed to join us in the studio,
and he was gonna bring some songs in,
and we were gonna start making another record.
So, we started rehearsing, the four of us,
then we got a call,
I think, about the third or fourth day in the studio
saying that Glenn had refused to come be part of it,
to join the party.
So we just stopped.
He was still, "I'm not doing this."
Well, you know, to tell you the truth,
I was having a fine time doing what I was doing.
I mean, there's more to life than being in the Eagles.
The moment was always gonna be
kind of when Glenn was ready to do it again.
I think Henley would have been more willing than Glenn.
For me, personally,
I think that I had proved pretty much everything
that I needed to prove in my solo career.
I had won a couple of Grammys
and had a few hits and some successful tours.
And I had founded the Walden Woods Project.
When you're a solo artist,
you have to take responsibility for everything...
every mistake, every bad record, every sour note.
But when you're in a band,
you get to share the praise and the blame with your bandmates.
So, I was okay with the notion
of maybe going back and being in a band again.
The thing that sort of turned my head
was the release of the "Common Thread" album.
Irving and Don went to Nashville
and they talked a bunch of people into recording some Eagles songs
with the royalties going to the Walden Woods Project.
I don't know who asked me, but they said,
"Travis Tritt's gonna do a video of 'Take It Easy'
and he wants to know if you guys will be in the video."
I said, "Well, okay."
Never really talked to Travis about whose idea it was.
I think Irving probably had a hand in that whole thing.
Was I trying to put the band back together
by doing "Common Thread"? No.
Was I waiting for the moment? Yeah.
In the Travis Tritt video, there was a little bandstand scene
and we all picked up our instruments and started playing.
I was thinking, "Guys, come on." You know?
You know, it's interesting. After years pass, you know,
you really sort of remember that you were friends first.
You have a lot of common history together
and a lot of shared experiences.
I remembered mostly the good stuff.
I didn't really think about the bad stuff.
I just remembered how much we genuinely had liked each other
and how much fun we'd had.
We realized, after the success of the "Common Thread" album
that there were still a lot of people out there...
a whole lot of people... who wanted to see us play again.
You know, sometimes there's a little bit of serendipity involved in this,
and I think what happened
is everybody's life started to line up in a way
that now it made sense for all of us.
And we discussed it.
Joe and Don came up and sat in at a benefit that I did in Aspen.
We had a meeting in Aspen.
I was one of the first guys that they wanted to try it out on.
You know, Joe was buzzed. It was 1:00 in the afternoon.
You know, and he would say, "Hey, I'm there, man.
I'm fine. Don't worry about me."
But Don and I could both tell that he wasn't fine,
and we were worried.
They said what they wanted to do.
They wanted to try it, get back together again.
They didn't know what I would say,
but I said, "I understand, and, yeah, I can get sober."
We had to get Joe into some sort of rehab,
and we couldn't be sure it was gonna work.
So we better have Felder.
The Eagles reunion had better have at least one of the two of them,
and hopefully both.
Irving called me up and said
that Don and Glenn and Joe had gotten together,
and they were talking about doing something,
and would I be interested in doing it?
I said, "Absolutely."
One thing led to another,
and finally Irving and Don Felder picked him up
and drove him to rehab.
I made a commitment to them that I would clean up...
...and that I would be in the band
if that's what they wanted to do.
I'm really, really grateful to those three guys...
...because I had...
...a really good reason to get sober.
And as soon as I got sober, we started rehearsal.
From that first phone call from Irving to showing up on a rehearsal stage
to start putting together a show for MTV
was only a matter of weeks, if not a month.
It was a little scary rehearsing for the MTV thing.
Normally, I think people would have their act down
a few weeks, at least,
before entering into something like that,
but we just dove in headfirst.
Well, even though we had rehearsed really well,
for the first time to walk out on stage
and actually play as a band in public
and kind of put the key back into the ignition
and turn it over for the first time,
it was really a lot of nerves.
Are we going the right way?
Glenn.
Not having played as a group in 14 years,
the first night, there was a lot of terror.
Gentlemen, good to be with ya.
Hope I'm with ya all night.
- Have a good one, okay? - Okay.
- Showtime! - Showtime! Showtime!
The audience was very kind, and they were with us.
And that was good, but it was rough.
Even when we went onstage, we were definitely a little tight.
Until, I think, Henley forgot the words
to one of the new songs...
You want to start again? I'll tell you what.
This is television, so we get to do this till we're happy.
Now, I thought you didn't remember the third verse.
That was only the second verse!
I know. I know the third verse.
That was sort of the icebreaker, though.
That was a good thing, ultimately.
I feel like Tommy Smothers. All right.
We didn't think getting back together was quite as legitimate
unless we had some new material,
so we're gonna put forth several new songs for you this evening.
This first one Timothy B. Schmit is gonna sing for you.
This is called "Love Will Keep Us Alive."
After selling 100 million records worldwide,
was it real pressure on you to write the new material
for the "Hell Freezes Over" album?
We didn't really look at it as a body of new work.
It was more of a retrospective piece of material.
And we look forward to writing some new material,
perhaps in the future.
We can't keep recycling this material,
although it seems to be working just fine.
Don and I were trying to figure out how to write another song,
and, I mean, really, if we could.
We hadn't written anything together since, like, '78.
So it was a little awkward at first, just getting back into the groove.
Yeah.
So, we go, 1...
Okay, here we are starting out at 1, 2...
During "The Long Run" album,
there were a lot of sessions with Don and I
where nothing got done.
We were both a little bit reticent to introduce our ideas
for fear that they weren't good enough.
So when we sat down to do it again in '94,
my first worry was, "Is it gonna be as hard as it was in 1978?"
We were sitting around, "What are we gonna write about?" and stuff.
And he said, "Well, I've got this one title, 'Get Over It."'
And he sort of proceeded to tell me
what it was that was pissing him off...
all these people going on television
and everything that's wrong with them is somebody else's fault.
"I'm just sick of all this whining,
and so I'm gonna write a song called 'Get Over It."'
The intro, straight Chuck Berry.
Never play a 7, right?
So, then I said, "I think maybe a Chuck Berry riff
would be a good way to tell that story."
Time out.
Do you want to play the?
You want to do it on slide?
And then Felder and I will just play power chords low and high.
And those guys will play Chuck Berry low and high.
And we can do "Get Over It".
A couple little of them slide answer licks is cool.
My favorite thing is when Don and Glenn co-write stuff.
I like to play guitar to that.
You want me to sing it, or do you want to wait?
It's 10 to 6.
You can sing it at 10 to 6 or 5 to 6.
- Do it again? - Yeah, we'll do it twice.
Yeah, you could write it in with the mike.
Captioned for hard of hearing.
It was really liberating.
We both walked out of the session and went,
"God, we can still do it. I can't believe it.
We just wrote a song together. Maybe we can write some more."
That was a really good feeling.
It was a great sort of artistic reconciliation
for us to have been able to sit down and write that song together.
Get over it!
We did "Hell Freezes Over," and then we went out on the road.
That was the question on everyone's mind...
what if we got back together, and no one showed up?
We set it up to be a three-month reunion.
I went back to my wife, and I had two young kids at the time.
I said, "I don't know if you're gonna recognize me.
I don't know what this is gonna do to me.
But I hope I don't change too much.
Hang in there with me."
I was on the side of the stage once at one of their shows
when they first got back together,
and Jack Nicholson was euphoric
listening to this band play again, you know.
And he said...
"Repertoire."
What do you want to hear?
We didn't know how many people are gonna show up for us to reunite,
but people came out in droves.
We were sold out everywhere.
Audiences were having a fabulous time.
We were having a good time, too.
Heartache, baby!
I listened to the guys, and Joe Walsh, for example,
is playing better and singing better
than I've ever heard him play in his life since I've known him.
I didn't have time to really sit around and miss alcohol
or cold turkey from more cocaine or anything.
And I had to go in front of people and play and sing sober,
which I hated, at first.
Ooh, that was scary.
When Joe first got out of rehab and we started rehearsing,
he was still pretty dark.
But over the course of that first year getting sober,
I think he found happiness again.
He found a way to be happy.
You look very pretty.
It's okay. Once more.
Oh, now, are you ready?
Father, daughter, take one.
We got that family thing to ground us all now.
It's really sort of our common thread.
We've all got kids.
It changes your life
and your perspective on your work, as well.
So, the tour was so enormously successful
that we sort of didn't want to give that up, you know?
It's like, "Okay, this is good. I could do this for a while."
Doing a concert is a strange combination
of conscious and subconscious acts.
You're not really thinking about what you're doing
because you know it so well, you're just doing it.
On the other hand, you have to put some emotion into it.
When you've got a crowd that's cheering you on,
it doesn't matter how many times you've sung the song.
You just do it.
We've played all over the world,
and probably, if we could write the script,
it was probably a genius move.
'Cause when we come back, it's bigger than ever.
How much money do you expect to gross with this European tour?
Irving?
I actually haven't added it up, but I will tell you that...
Good answer.
One thing,
the cost of being a touring rock-'n'-roll band in Europe
are beyond our wildest imaginations,
but this band is here in Europe
because there was demand for us to be here.
And it's not nearly as lucrative as anything we've done before.
It isn't?
Offers started coming in for us to do more shows,
and I just sort of said,
"Well, book some more. It doesn't have to end now.
Book some more. Where else can we play?"
"Well, you haven't been in Europe."
"Well, let's go there."
How's it go?
We had drawn a line in the sand
and said, "No drugs or alcohol during any band activities."
And as a result,
we're playing and singing pretty damn good.
I think the thing that brings them together is the harmony.
When they start hearing that and how seamless and how perfect,
they get as thrilled as the audiences do,
that "We can still do this."
We can't really understand it.
It's just the chemistry that works.
And we gave up trying to understand it.
It just works.
We're just gonna do one verse the "New Kid."
- One verse the "New Kid." - Okay.
- Joe's singing "Smuggler's Blues." - Okay.
I'll just do the beginning of "Funk 49."
And then I'm gonna go pee.
- Yeah. - Then I'll go pee.
1, 2, 3.
All right, boys!
We ended up going all around the world
in about two years and nine months.
Thank you, Dublin!
We've learned not to make career decisions
at the end of long tours.
If we break up again, though, you won't hear about it.
We'll just go quietly.
And we'll say we're still together.
Yeah.
They've laughed, cried, fought,
but most of all, they have beaten the odds
and are as popular today
as they were in that incredible summer back in 1972.
It is an honor and a pleasure to introduce the Eagles.
A lot has been talked about and speculated about
over the last 27 years about whether or not we got along.
We got along fine. We just disagreed a lot.
I was not in the trenches with this particular band,
so I'd like to thank my predecessor, Randy Meisner,
for being there.
I'm glad that Randy and Bernie got recognized.
I think that's appropriate.
Hey, how you doin'?
It's a good feeling.
Looks good on my resume.
I'd really like to thank Don and Glenn for writing those songs.
Thank you, guys.
It makes my job real easy.
Thank you!
Charming outfit, Joe.
I'd like to, again, thank Don Henley and Glenn Frey
for writing an incredible body of work
that's propelled this band through 20-some-odd years' worth of life.
Thank you, guys.
When a kid first picks up a guitar or a drumstick,
it's not really to be famous.
It's because that kid wants to fit in somewhere
and he wants to be accepted,
and he wants to be understood, even.
And so, I like to think of this award
as something that is acknowledging us
not for being famous, but for doing the work.
And I appreciate all the work
that all these guys behind me have done.
I want to thank Irving Azoff,
without whom we wouldn't be here today.
As I've said before, he may be Satan, but he's our Satan.
We're in a dog-eat-dog business.
Show me anybody that's gonna be responsible
for guiding or managing an artist's career
that's made too many friends,
and I'm gonna show you somebody that's sold out their artist
and done a crappy job.
So, I was quite proud of Henley's reference of what he said.
It was more or less, for me, a validation of a job well done.
A lot of my job was trying to keep the band from breaking up.
In the '70s,
we formed a corporation called Eagles, Limited.
And that was all-for-one and one-for-all.
Well, it wasn't the three musketeers.
As our friend J.D. Souther used to say,
"Time passes, things change."
In talking with Irving
about putting the Eagles back together in 1994,
I said, "Irving, I'm not gonna do it
unless Don and I make more money than the other guys."
"We're the only guys who have done anything career-wise
in the last 14 years.
We're the guys that have kept the Eagles' name alive on radio,
television, and in concert halls."
So we came up with a deal
that I was happy with, and Don was happy with,
Timothy was happy with, Joe was happy with,
and Don Felder was not happy with.
And I called Felder's representative.
And I said, "Hello, Barry. This is Glenn Frey.
I'm sorry you happen to represent the only asshole in the band,
but let me tell you something.
You either sign this agreement before the sun goes down today,
or we're replacing Don Felder.
That's the final deal.
He signs by sunset, or he's out of the fucking band."
Hung up.
So, he signed the deal, and we started out on the tour.
I didn't sense a great deal of comaraderie.
You hardly saw anybody
if it wasn't walking on the plane or walking onto the stage.
Everyone thought, "Well, if we don't get together,
we won't have problems."
And I think instead of being able to sit down and have a beer
and talk about stuff and renew a relationship with everyone,
that independent isolation
really didn't add the comfort necessary to make it work.
Don Felder was never, ever satisfied,
never, ever happy.
A rock band is not a perfect democracy.
It's more like a sports team.
No one can do anything without the other guys,
but everybody doesn't get to touch the ball all the time.
Time went on, and time went on,
and Felder became more and more unhappy.
Couldn't appreciate the amount of money he was making,
more concerned about how much money I was making.
If Don Felder really thought about it,
it really was he wanted it to be a "band" band
in the purest sense of the words,
you know, we're all gonna get equal songwriting,
singing, expression stuff,
and this was not a hippie commune.
You know, and everything for them
really goes back to those two words... song power.
We finally made the decision
that we won't be working with him anymore.
It just broke my heart.
It's not just playing with Joe.
I missed these guys.
But I really missed the friendship and the music.
Okay.
Strong.
Good. Good, good, good. Good shot.
Glenn and I, when it comes time to make band decisions,
usually stick together.
It's difficult for four or five people to have an equal say.
Here we are 40 years later, and we're doing okay.
We're one of the few bands that can say that.
The novelty of the Eagles being back together
and those few new songs that we had
on the "Hell Freezes Over" album is one thing.
But we needed to make a record.
Considering that we haven't made a record in so long,
we spent a good two and a half years making "Long Road Out of Eden."
We finally figured out that we just needed to do what we do.
This really goes back to the essence of what we do best,
which is singing and songwriting.
A lot of harmony singing on this album.
Big tragedies like that make you think, as a parent,
what kind of world is coming up?
What's gonna happen next?
What's the world gonna be like when my kids are grown?
After September 11th, our immediate visceral reaction,
our gut reaction, resulted in "Hole in the World."
The Eagles have written and sung
plenty of love songs over the years,
but we've also written and sung
songs that have to do with what's going on in the wider world.
We've never shied away from social commentary.
We think it's part of a rich tradition
that dates all the way back to medieval times.
And so we still engage in it.
The writings and the ideas
of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
had a huge impact on me.
They got me through some very difficult times in my life,
one being when my father was stricken with heart disease,
and provided a lot of spiritual support for me.
When I found out in 1980
that part of Walden was going to be destroyed
by commercial development,
I decided that was something I needed to help fight.
So I ended up founding the Walden Woods Project.
And we are in our 27th year now, and we've accomplished a great deal.
It's been one of the most rewarding things that I've ever done.
The lyrics to that song were originally a poem
written by a great American poet named John Hollander.
Don had this title, "Long Road Out of Eden."
Timothy goes over, and he picks up an acoustic guitar.
And I go over to the keyboards
and Joe grabs a guitar and Don goes on the drums.
And we start making up this sort of musical story
called "Long Road Out of Eden,"
a story of, really, the war in Iraq.
And it was, like, the last resort.
It was another opus, another David Lean movie.
We finally got through,
and we finally made "Long Road Out of Eden."
And we didn't give it to a record company.
We made a deal with Walmart.
This was the first major artist to do a direct-to-retail release
and bypass the major record companies.
It was phenomenally successful.
The album entered at number one.
It gave, I think, the whole industry hope
that it could find a new and different way to reach its fans.
They're becoming a much greener company,
and that was important to me.
And the other good thing was that our fans got 20 songs for 12 bucks.
It was basically a double album,
and they weren't charged double for it.
Don said, "I got a title for a song...
'Busy Being Fabulous."'
And I thought, "What a great title."
And then Don wrote,
"'Don't wait up for me tonight, ' that was all she wrote."
And then we were off on the story.
"Busy Being Fabulous,"
Don and Glenn had gotten it to a certain state,
and I came up with some stuff for the bridge
and tweaked what already existed.
I was very involved in the "Long Road" record.
I've always been a lot happier getting into the entire project,
arranging stuff, producing the stuff, co-writing the stuff.
Like, "Waiting in the Weeds" and "Business As Usual"
were co-writes with Don.
Getting Steuart Smith in the band was a real shot in the arm.
He's such a terrific musician.
It's a great solo.
It's like stepping into a space suit.
It is strange to be playing that song.
The reaction is terrific, and you bask in that excitement.
But I didn't write it.
I'm one part hired gun, but also one part collaborator.
I'm one of the guitar players.
But I'm not an Eagle.
I don't know what it's like to be one of those guys.
...3, 4.
My kids were looking on the Internet,
and they found this show that the Eagles had done in 1974.
I was in my office watching TV,
and my kids come in and say, "Hey, Dad, come here.
You got to take a look at your hair."
And one of the songs was "How Long."
"How Long" was from my first solo album.
They found that, 'cause Cindy saw it on YouTube
and said, "Glenn, what's this?"
And he said, "Oh, it's a song of J.D.'s."
She said, "Well, you didn't cut it, did you?"
J.D. Wanted it on his solo album, so we never recorded it.
My wife said, "Hey, that sounds like a hit Eagles song."
They are the American band.
Yeah, they pretty much encompassed the '70s, didn't they?
And took it all in.
That's a long time to still have a musical impact,
and it's due to this incredibly crisp, tight,
extraordinarily good record-making band
and the presence of good songs.
But it's also now taken on this other thing, too,
where it's everybody through the band wants to remember a '70s
that they may or may not have had.
This band could go play stadiums all over the country,
and people know these songs so intimately.
They last.
The songs last.
I have one small plaque on my wall.
It says, "Presented to the Eagles
to commemorate the best-selling album of the 20th century
with sales in excess of 26 million units."
That century's gone, so nobody's gonna top that.
What's it like to be an Eagle now?
It's just part of my life.
I do normal things.
I go to the market,
and once in a while, somebody comes up to me.
I don't walk around being an Eagle.
I'm an Eagle when it's time for me to be.
I made sure the dishes were done before you guys came today.
You know?
I love everybody in the band like a brother.
To be part of a real band,
a real band,
is something that not all musicians get to do in their life.
And I'm real lucky to have that chapter in my book.
Rock 'n' roll saved my life.
It changed my life tremendously.
And as Mick Jagger so famously and eloquently said,
"It's only rock 'n' roll, but I like it."
I think that one of the reasons
that Glenn and I wanted to write songs
is because rock 'n' roll music got us through junior high
and through high school
and those difficult times
when you're searching for your identity
and wondering who the heck you are, trying to get girls to notice you,
and wondering why the football players
are doing so much better than you are.
At the end of the day,
it was and still is about the music.
I regret that I didn't handle some of the adversity
that the Eagles faced in the late '70s better.
Fortunately, for me,
I've had another chance to be the leader of the Eagles,
another chance to be Don's partner
and do this work again and play this music.
And in this second run, I think I've done a pretty good job
of keeping the peace and keep the band together,
keep everybody happy.
So here we are, still doing it.
Thank you.
That's it! That's it!
- Bye-bye. - Bye-bye.
We wanted longevity.
It wasn't a hobby for us. It wasn't a game.
It wasn't a pleasant diversion.
It was a life.
It was a calling. It was a career.
It was worth it.
We went to China last year.
We're still breaking new ground 40 years later.
Back in the late '70s,
Neil Young sang a song about the emerging punk ethic.
And the pivotal line in that song was:
"It's better to burn out than it is to rust."
And I'm not sure that even Neil, himself,
subscribed to that sentiment,
but I don't see rust as a bad thing.
I have an old 1962 John Deere tractor
that's covered with rust, but it runs like a top.
You know, the inner workings are just fine.
To me, that rust symbolizes all the miles driven
and all the good work done and all the experiences gained.
From where I sit, the rust looks pretty good.
When somebody is around 40 years,
it means they've got something, something that people want.
And the Eagles have that.
To me, the Eagles really expressed a mood.
California was the place of dreams.
It was a time of limitless possibilities.
I think they were a defining moment
in the rock-'n'-roll world that I love.
You couldn't really love the Eagles music
and be an Eagles fan and actually know them
and not aspire to greatness yourself.
I'm not really into legacies.
People talk to me, "What's your legacy?"
I'm here now.
I'm doing what I want to do,
and I'm trying to make stuff happen.
I see the Eagles in the same way.
They're not in the '70s.
They're in 2012 and 2013.
And whatever they're doing now artistically, that's what's important.