Heaven & Hell: My Life in the Eagles

TWELVE

The afternoon was perfect. It was July, and I was home for a few days, spending time with my family at our beach house in Malibu while Jesse splashed about in an inflatable wading pool nearby. I’d just been for a swim in my cutoff shorts and was still wet, sitting on a couch in the living room, looking out at the sun glittering on the water, and thinking how incredibly lucky I was.

Don at age 16.

Susan and I had produced two healthy, beautiful babies. We were rich beyond our wildest dreams and still very much in love. No matter what happened when I was on the road or in the studio, I never stopped wanting to come home to her and the children, and whatever she may have suspected about what went on when I was away, she never asked. Our wedding vows in Boston five years earlier had spoken of cherishing each other and nurturing what we had. Nothing had changed, including how I felt inside. To me, she was still the pretty little blonde with the angel face I first met outside the Howard Johnson motel in Gainesville. I’d fallen for her then and had never quite picked myself up off the floor.

Now here I was, sharing this beautiful life with her, playing music and being paid handsomely for it too. Regardless of the infighting, what we had achieved as a band was pure and bright and true. We’d created something far bigger than who we were or how we felt individually. The music we made really touched people. I promised myself never to lose sight of that and to try my hardest to make the others remember it too.

Feeling inspired and picking up an acoustic twelve-string guitar I had lying around, I started strumming absentmindedly while staring out at the ocean, inhaling the fresh salt air, and before I knew it, a few opening chords just kind of oozed out.

Malibu, 1975

I played with them, teased them, pushed them further than they’d ever intended to go, and suddenly had something that sounded pretty cool. It was about thirty-two bars long, with a verse and a chorus—a sparkling little gem that fell out of the spectacular view before me. When I had finished playing, the musical vibrations hung suspended in the air before fading into silence. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end. Duane Allman was right. If your spine tingles, it’s working.

I had a little TEAC four-track studio set up in the spare bedroom, and I ran back there to put the idea down before I forgot it. I wanted a reggae-sounding backbeat, but the closest I had on my drum machine, an old Roland Rhythm Ace, was the cha-cha, so I played the twelve-string on top of that. It sounded OK, but I knew I needed to leave it for a while, so I went off to play with my kids and came back to it later. Over the next few hours, I kept tinkering around with it. The tempo was right, but it needed another section and a chorus, the payoff. I tried three of four different chord progressions and then finally I went back down and put a bass track with a reggae feel on it.

“If Joe and I had to do this,” I thought, “how would we play it?” I was working to an exact cast, thinking of each band member’s strengths and weaknesses, trying to find just the right arrangement. With Joe on board, it was a new challenge for me to come up with parts that would outdo him, against which he could retaliate and come back with something that was equal to or one up on me.

Shopping for guitars

I knew I couldn’t write a complicated drum track for someone who was singing, too, but I could write a song that suited Don’s voice, and one that Randy could provide a good bass backbeat to. Joe, Glenn, and I could take center stage and blow the audience away with some haunting guitar solos, I thought, so I wrote two guitar parts in descending harmony, a hornline sort of thing, until I got to the end, alternating them the way my dad had taught me when he had me count one, two, three, five, seven, then two, four, six, eight on my little Voice of Music tape recorder.

By the end of the afternoon, when I’d mixed the whole thing to mono, there was a little bit of everything that had ever happened to me in that song. There was some Maundy Quintet bass, some basic Paul Hillis classical phrasing, some free-form Flow-style solos with a bit of Miles Davis thrown in, and some good old Elvis Presley rock-and-roll guitar. I could imagine the harmonies that would go with it would be very Crosby, Stills & Nash and sounded positively sun-kissed. It was, I later realized, the soundtrack of my life.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974-2001) by Don Felder