Don Felder Discusses the Business of Rock and Roll

rack on tour who tells wonderful stories. If you are at all interested in music or seventies, or the Eagles, or the eighties, or guitar history or the nineties, you will find this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. So, with no further ado, my interview with Don Felder. My

extra special guest this week is Don Felder. He is a legendary guitarist and songwriter, perhaps best known for his work with the Eagles, where he has written numerous songs, including Victim of Love and perhaps most famously, Hotel California. Don Felder, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you. It's fabulous to be back here again. So, um, you have really a fascinating background, and I was really you know stunned when I was reading you. You grew up in Gainesville, Florida,

which somehow became a hotbed of music. Is that a fair statement. Yeah, for some reason, and I don't know if it was something that was in the water or in something that we were all smoking at the time, that so many people came out of Gainesville that went on to become rock and roll legends, rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, platinum selling artist. We were all just kids in different garage bands down there. One of my guitar students was a kid named Tommy Petty who

I taught how to play guitar. He was little Tommy Petty, Little Tommy. He was playing bass in this band called the Epics, and he thought it was kind of awkward and geeky to be fronting a band playing bass and singing. So he wanted to learn to play guitar so he could write songs instead of playing bass. So I gave him guitar lessons. I helped a little little bit of the arrangement on a couple of their songs in their shows. I went to just hang out. We were friends. We

were in battles of the bands together, Uh. Steven Stills and I had a band together in Gainesville. I think we were fourteen and fifteen years old. My mom would drive us around to these little events because we didn't have a car, driver's license or anything. Uh. Dwyane Allman and Greg Allman were in different bands in that time, called like the Almond Joys or the Spotlights. Dwayne taught me how to play slide guitar one night on the floor of his mom's house in Dayton of Beach, about

two thirty in the morning. Who else was around their Leonard skinnerd was right over in Jacksonville, Florida. Bernie Leadon actually moved to Gainesville because his dad was given the appointment of heading up the nuclear research department at the University of Arida, so he moved his family, all eight kids,

over to Gainesville. And Stephen Stills had just left to move to California, and Bernie showed up and picked me up actually at a bus station where I was coming back from a little town called Lake City about thirty minutes away, where I had gone up by myself and played this little women's tea party in the afternoon. So he had a car. He was sixteen he picked me up at the bus station and actually wound up replacing Stephen Stills in that band, and Bernie went on to

become one of the founding members of the Eagles. We've known each other since high school. So Stephen, Bernie, and Tom and myself all went to the same high school, Gainesville High School together, so astonishing. I don't know how that all happened, but it did. And and what first got you interested in music? The legend is you see

Elvis Presley on television and not just sparks a lifelong interest. Well, there was a huge interest in that explosion of rock and roll in that time and had just a really strong, exciting energy about it, whether it was a little Richard singing two Dy Fruity or Elvis on stage shaking and gyrating and flipping his greasy hair around and snarling his upper lip and watching all those young girls screaming at him. I kind of said, you know, I think I'd like

to do that. That looks like fun. Uh. And so I traded a handful of cherry bombs to a kid that lived across the street for a broken guitar and had a crack and it was missing strings and I found the guy around the corner that helped me tune the thing, replace some of the strings on it. And I used to sit on my front porch down there on this dirt road in Gainesville, on this metal glider, just sliding back and forth and back and forth, trying to figure out how that guitar worked, where do you

put your fingers, how do you make chords? And there wasn't a music school. There was no money to be had in my family for lessons if there was a music school, so I was pretty much self taught. And it turned out that I gave myself kind of basic ear training by listening to stuff on the radio or listening to my stuff on my dad's tape recorder and just playing it over and over and over until I

could figure it out on guitar. And eventually, even today, I can hear something two or three times and just play it right away because I've trained my mind and my body and my insight into music to be able to hear something and play it. So from there, I moved from Gainesville. I think I was nineteen years old. Well, before we leave Gainesville, let's just stay stay in Gainesville,

Florida for another moment. Okay, you start um working at a music store like an instrument store, um, and you were working essentially to be able to earn money for instruments. Is that. Yeah? I wasn't getting paid money. I was given credit for every hour or every lesson that I taught there. I was given credit on the store card. They had this thing that they'd put in their register and give me five dollars or ten dollars for having much I'd earned. And I could use that money for strings,

for pedals, for cords. If I saved up a nump, I could trade in my old guitar and get a better guitar and or an amp or some tubes. Or if I blew out a speaker in my appen it needed to be replaced, which happened frequently in those days, I would be able to work until I got enough money to get a speaker replacement. So yeah, that's where I was learning how to make money. Was in uh, working in a music store. And and where did the

music theory in Gainesville first come into your experiences? There was a great guitar player that lived there whose name was Paul Hillis. He left Gainesville and went to the Berkeley School of Music in Boston and came back a few years later, but had given up guitar and it started playing piano because he thought you could see compositions and chord clusters and progressions much easier on piano than

on guitar, which is true. It's a repetitive octave on piano, and on guitar it's everything's a different feeding fingering as you go up the scale or up the neck. So he opened the School of Music, and for every hour that I taught there these incoming young kids that had gotten a guitar for Christmas and we're complaining about their callous is hurting on their fingers. For every hour I taught them, he would teach me music theory, composition, chord progressions,

how to read music. And I basically got the cheap version of a Berkeley College of Music education from Ball, the cheap version. Um, there was one of the person you did not mention. I recall reading about from the area, and I want to say it was the keyboardist for Stevie Ray Vaughan. Is that right? I don't know anything about That's off my that was that might have been

a little a little later. Um, so, so what finally motivated you to say, all right, Gainesville has been good to me musically, But on the other side of the country is this place called Los Angeles, and there seems to be a burgeoning music scene going on over there. There were a couple of stops along the way. I had a band called the Mondy Quintet that Bernie Leadon

was in with me. We played opening for this band called The Circle, and The Circle were being managed by Sid Bernstein, who was a huge manager here in New York. And their road crew decided they were going to take us up to New York and do some showcases up here in different clubs, and we had a sixteen year old drummer that actually owned the van. Uh, So we loaded everything into this van and drove from Gainesville up

to New York. I think we were up here about a week and we had done some showcases and Sid's organization was really interesting and signing us, managing us and kind of building a career. But our drummer started crying I think the second or third day in the bedroom because he missed his mom and he was frightened by New York City. So we had to pack everything back into the van and moved back down to Gainsville to

It was his van, he had to go home. Um So later I had another band that I put together called Flow and I packed up with a guitar in one hand, a suitcase and the other and moved back up to New York with that band, starved her on the street for about a year and a half. The very first thing I did when I got here the second day was I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There was no art in Gainesville at all, probably nothing south of the Mason Dixon down there that rivaled what I had heard about them at So I spent the entire day there at the met my second day here in New York, just soaking up all the history and the amazing artwork that's there, and the sculptures, and the Egyptian history going back thousands of years, and just had a newfound appreciation for what I had never seen or had before. Anyway. Um I worked here for about a

year and a half. We made a record with a band called flow Uh, signed by a guy named Creed Taylor for CTI Records. Creed was one of the biggest blue note and verve jazz producers in the business. I think Quincy Jones was on that label with me. Uh, Hubert Laws was on that label. It was kind of Hubert Laws, Yes, that's right, we had. It was kind of a jazz label, and we were a jazz fusion rock band. He saw us play at the Film or East one night and signed us literally the following week

to his record label. After about a year and a half, I decided I just didn't want to live in New York City. It's a try. It's a tough transition from beach bum in Florida up to Eskimo here and living on the city was a little a little difficult for me. And my high school girlfriend had moved back to Boston, uh, and so I went up to visit her a couple of times and decided I was going to move to

Boston because we wanted to get back together. And I asked Creed Taylor if he would help me, and he called Berkeley School of Music and set up an appointment there for me to go in and UH call two or three recording studios up there to give me an introduction to that area. So I went in and started doing jingles and sessions in these recording studios, and actually went over to Berkeley College of Music and they offered me a job teaching, And I didn't want to be

a teacher. I wanted to actually be doing music, teaching music, so I humbly declined uh their offer to teach there UH, and wound up working in this one studio. I think I was working there six days a week, and I made fifty dollars a week. Now, if you went to a recording school today and you spent that much time and effort learning how to record, you'd probably spend fifty

grand a semester to get that kind of education. So I think I got the better end of that bargain, and I got the better end of the bargain on a handful of cherry bones for a guitar. All these trades and things that I did along the way for the free Berkeley education and learning how to make records in that studio in Boston for three years really served me well. So finally, my friend Bernie Lyndon kept calling me and going, what are you doing in New York?

What are you doing in Boston? The music businesses out in California. You need to move to California. I want

to talk about California right now. Hotel California. Let's talk a little bit about you're writing that song, because my I mentioned my pet theory is the Eagles were kind of thought of as like a kick back mellow country, not quite rock bands, and I know the rest of the band really wanted to be more of a led Zeppelin type of um, both with Hotels Destruction and with rock and roll, and Hotel California just took the band

to an entirely different level. Not only is the song ranked forty nine on the list of Greatest Songs of All Time, Uh, the album sold seventeen million copies in the US thirty two million worldwide. I think it was number three on the Old Time List something like that. So so you deserve a whole lot of credit for really taking the band up until the next level. I have to ask, because it's so different from everything else that was done, how did you come up with that

that intro? And then how did you basically just write the music for that song. At the time, I was living in a rental beach house on Malibu Beach, and

I had two little kids. One was about a year old, one was about two and a half years old, and I was sitting on a couch one day just playing acoustic guitar and looking out at the sun glistening on the Pacific Ocean and watching my two kids playing in the sand and this little swing set we had on the beach, and I out came that progression two or three times, and I had to go record a little

bit of it so I wouldn't forget it. Much like a dream, when something comes through me, I have to write it down or record it, or you know, two days later, I can't remember what it was. It was gone, you know. So I run into my daughter's back bedroom, who was almost a year and when she was awake, I had set up this little recording studio back there where I could go in and make demos. So I went back and recorded that little progression three or four times and turned it off and went out and played

with my kids on the beach. Years well months later, when it was time to sit down and write the songs that were going to become candidates for what was going to be the Hotel California Record, I had put together about fifteen or sixteen song ideas, and I heard that little three time loop through the progression, I said, I gotta finish that. So I really rebuilt the whole idea of playing acoustic guitar, twelve strings starting it off,

and I played bass on the overdub. I played a drum machine that ran through it, the sound kind of like a cha cha beat or something, and I thought Joe Walsh should just join the band, and was going to be the first appearance on this record. Joe and I had been playing together a lot before he joined the band. If you go online and look at Joe Walsh and friends, you can see him and I doing

all this guitar trading and jamming together. I wanted to have something on this record that he and I could do together that that was by design from the very beginning. It wasn't an afterthought, Hey, let's put a little guitar duel at the end. That was conscious. That was conscious aimed at trying to have a bed that we could

do that on. So when I got to the part where I was recreating or making up or ad living these solos, I said, I'd play something kind of like this, and Joe had plays something kind of like this, and then I'd play this and he had play something like that, and so I made a little mix of that and I think fourteen or fifteen other song ideas. One became Victim of Love uh, and put it on this cassette.

Made copies of the cassette. If anybody knows what a cassette is anymore, I think you've got to be over fifty understand what a cassette is, right, and forget eight tracks. Nobody knows what that. It's a it's a little plastic MP three. It's just hard to get it in the CD players. It's a little fat anyway, So I made copies, and I gave a copy to Don Henley, Glenn Fry, Joe Walsh, and Randy Meisner, who was the bass player

in the band at the time. I said, if there's anything on these songs you guys like and you want to finish writing with me, gimme call let me know and we'll figure it out. You know, we'll start working on and him they called me a couple of days later, said, you know, I like that track that sounds kind of like a Mexican reggae and I knew exactly which track evens almost a little Spanish influence, and so so let me ask you a few questions about that, because I'm

fascinated by this process. First, the guitar duel at the end, So you want to incorporate Joe Walsh Moore into the band. What what did you use as inspiration for that? Because when I was thinking about this, I immediately think of the end of Layla or the Beatles Abbey Road medley where there's three guys swapping h guitar looks back and forth. What what was the driving force that said, hey, let's do a little guitar duel on here. Thank Joe and I had already been doing that and you were talking

about Layla. That was Dwayne Alman play the high slide guitar part on that and Eric playing below it. It was just it was something that all guitar players like to do, to go together against somebody that plays really all and it pushes you up to another level. And so I wanted to do that with Joe on this record, So I kind of designed that whole track with that in mind. Now, after I gave him that cassette, it was like a year and something later we were actually

in the studio. We had recorded that basic track three times. First time it was in the wrong key for Don Henley to sing in, and he's got a pretty high range, but yeah, but even that was too hot. We had to go lower it from E minor down to B minor,

which is not a particularly friendly guitar key to play in. Uh. And then finally we got everything laid out on the track and the overdubs done and the intros recorded and everything done, and Joe and I, as I always kind of foresaw it, We're sitting in the control room with two guitars plugged into amplifiers out in the studio and miked up, and I was going to play a lick and Joe would play a lick, and we just started

doing what we had always done. And Don Henley opens the door and comes walking back in a stands there for a minute and goes, what are you doing. I said, well, we're recording the solos on the end of this record. And he says, that's not right. You had to do it just like the demo. I said, I don't know what that was. That was a year ago that I made that demo idea. So he said, no, no, no no, no, you've got to record it like the demo because he had been listening to it over and over and over

and over. Well, it is cat You have to admit it's really catch Well, I have to say, some of the best first shots that come out when you're improvising are usually your best. You know, that moment of just first inspiration comes out. So I had to call my housekeeper back in Malibu and have her go through my cassettes, find that copy, put it in a blaster play it, hold the phone up to the speaker so we could

record it in Miami. Then I had to sit down and learn what I just made up off the cuff and wait a second, Hold on Hotel California was recorded in Miami. Yeah, not in not in l A. I of all the research I did, that's the one thing I didn't even think of looking up. It would make sense for you to record that in uh in California? But why why am I Auntie? Well? You know it's funny because nobody in the band was from California. Handley was from Texas, Grands from Detroit, Joe was from Ohio,

and Randy Meisner was from Nebraska. I was from Florida. Yet we became the California band that everybody identified with, you know, and so especially after Hotel California came in, it had just such an iconic you know, sure everybody hears the word California and you think of palm trees and beaches and stars on Hollywood Boulevard, movie stars and all these images that we have just pounded into our head over the years are associated with that word California.

Whether you've been there or not, you have images in your mor So, um, you know, to be the California band and nobody from California's kind of a unique thing. But we recorded in Miami, so last Hotel California. Question, there is a version of the song played live and acoustic, and for that version you rewrote this beautiful sort of

Spanish introduction. What what was the inspiration for that? Well, in the middle of the nineties, everybody, including Eric Clapton, did an acoustic, unplugged version of like Layla right for for MTV they had m t V and plugged in again, the same people who won't know what cassettes are won't know what MTV is, but f the audience will get it,

that's right. So, um, we were putting together a bunch of different things for that filming of the health freezers over film, and Henley finally says about three days at the very end of Rehearsally says, we need an acoustic version of Hotel. Now. We have been playing this thing with electric guitars and distorted amps for years, right, and that's what everybody knew. And I thought, well, if we sit down with a couple of acoustic guitars and try to play, we're gonna sound like a couple of country

bumpkins playing, you know, acoustic steel string guitar. So I had spent a lot of time sitting in a holiday inn in Cambridge Square playing nylon string guitar while people ate their dinner and ordered more wine from the later and stuff. I had developed some pretty good technique on acoustic guitar nylon string guitar. So I went home that night and I took out my nylon string guitar and I started playing around with it, and I go, okay, I've got to order tomorrow to acoustic nylon string guitars

with pickups in them. Put one in Joe's hand, one in my hand. Here's how we start, would play it, and da da da da da, And so we just put it together at rehearsal one day. We rehearse it for two or three days. We get on the sound stage to record. I think there's like twelve or fourteen cameras rolling. There's an orchestra behind us, uh two recording trucks recording all the audio, and at sound check we do the song. It starts right at the beginning like

it started on the chord. Don Hanley says, this song needs a special introduction. So I said, well, what are you going to say? How are you going to introduce this? He says, no, no, no, no, not talking introduction, and this needs a special musical introduction. I said, uh, okay, So I said, you guys, play a chord, I'll doodle around. When I stopped playing. You play another chord, this chord, I'll doodle around, third chord. I'll dool into a kind

of a frantic arpeggio. And then when I finally hit the slow, retarded part of that arpeggio, you hit the final chord and we start the percussion. So, literally, sitting on the stage thirty minutes before we start taping, we run through this thing and I go, okay, I'm just gonna make it up hope. I'm funny, you know, like all the jazz stuff that I learned in New York improvisation has become really important to me to be able to do that walk into a studio, plug in, makeup

a solo. So anyway, we recorded that. We made two takes. We were filmed the show twice. The first take obviously was the best. The second one I did okay, but it wasn't as good, it wasn't as fresh. It just wasn't as exciting as the second one. So we chose the first take. And it's really the only song that I know that was the same record recorded by the same band that has been nominated two times for Grammys. Uh,

quite the original and that one as well. Let's talk a little bit about your new CD, American Rock and Roll. This reads like a Grammy Award list of of guest musicians Sammy Hagar, Bob we Are, Slash, Joe Satriani, Mick Fleetwood. I'm sure I'm missing lots and lots of other people. What what made you want to record a sort of supergroup c D Well, it didn't start out that way. Originally had the initial concept for this record based on the song American rock and Roll. I was at Woodstock

nineteen sixty nine. I saw Jimi Hendrix play live. I saw Crosby, Stills and Nash, I saw Santana, I saw Janis Joplin, I saw the Grateful Dead. Three days worth of just drenched, soaked your shorts, uh covered with mud, of probably the most historic rock and roll performances I

think in the history of rock and roll music. As a matter of fact, that nuclear rock explosion that took place at Woodstock in nineteen sixty nine, the fallout from that event really succumference the entire world, and everybody was influenced and impacted by that. As a matter of fact, Slash is a huge Jimmy Hendricks fan. He cut his teeth learning Jimmy Jimmy Hendricks Licks and everybody that I invited him to play on this record, in one way

or another, were influenced by the artist at Woodstock. So this song American rock and Roll is a little bit of a rock humnary musically, starting back in nineteen sixty nine with Hendricks and all those guys from Woodstock, and through the decades, every one of the artists that has risen out of the ashes of woodstock and gone on to be huge artists themselves. Successful artists themselves. I thought was really a nice salute to the history of rock

and roll. So who helped you put this album together? Who produced it? Tell tell us a little bit about the backdrop for this. I have a studio in my home. I've had a studio since uh and I spend just about every single day in my studio when I'm home, not outlaying on my pool by my pool and Beverly Hills,

but in my studio working. So um. I always doodle around with different ideas, whether it's driving down the four oh five and grabbing a cell phone and singing lyrics into a cell phone, or sitting on a plane with the laptop writing lyrics, or doodling around in the studio just plugging in a guitar and writing little parts, whatever it is. I'm just obsessed with music, and that's what

I do. So um. The inspiration for this whole record was to be able to take these little bits and pieces and invite friends of mine into play on it. My last record, wrote it forever, I played everything on it except for one guy came in, Steve Luca there and played guitar on the title track, wrote it forever with me um and it really turned out beautifully well,

but it was very controlled. There wasn't that inspiration in that fire and that energy that comes together when you're sitting in a room with Joe Satriani, who's an incredible player, and we're trading off licks and writing harmonies and just that excitement that's there. Or Peter Frampton and I play on an Alex Lives and Richie Sambora Oriental, the tons

of great players. It just really got me excited. And there's a song on this record called Charmed, and it's about once you go through the success, the rise of success, and you have all the money and the fame and the adulation and private jets and cars and big houses, if the music doesn't have the passion, all that other stuff has lost its charm. It just doesn't. It's not

worth it. And so to me, my original inspiration has always been the excitement and love of music, from the time I was doing till the time even today when I walk out on stage, I don't have to go out and play anything, but I love to be on stage playing for people. So all of these people that came in feel the same way. We didn't have to negotiate with managers and lawyers and all that stuff. I just call up Slash and say, hey, I got this

song I'd love to have you play on. And he'd come in with a guitar and we'd sit down and jam on stuff and have a great time doing it. A couple of hours later, he's given me a hug, he's off and we're editing and putting stuff together that we recorded. Same thing with Uh Sammy Hagar on this I wrote this song called rock You. It's like a big stadium power rock star for Hagar, absolutely, and so I really wanted to do a raw duet with somebody that had that really strong rock and roll, gravelly voice.

I called up Sammy and hey, I got this song I'd love to have you sing on. He said, sure, come on up to my studio. So I hop on a plane and fly up Sasolito with my little hard drive in my bag and go in and literally an hour later, he and I have sung a verse. He sings a verse, I sing a verse. We trade off on the choruses we do vocally, but just sharing the stage there on that song. So well, and Sammy was such the perfect person to play on that. Just as

we're finishing, Joe Satriani comes walking down the hallway. He keeps his guitars and stuff in the back of Sammy studio. I said, Joe, go grab a guitar, come in here. I got something I want you to play on. So he comes in and I set up my guitar and we just, out of nowhere create this thing, much like I wanted to do with Joe, but we had to go back and reenact the exact demo perfectly. It's so much fun and excitement when you do it live right there, and Joe is an incredible player. Pushed me and I

pushed him, and that's what it's all about. And then as we're finishing Opposatrion and Bob Weir has a studio about two blocks away. Come on, hea, Yeah, he comes over to just hang out and get a freak cup of coffee and hear a few jokes and I see him. I say, Bob, come here, go out on that mic and just saying rock you, which is the chorus, and I think we've got five or six Bob, We're singing on the chorus, but it all just fell together in such a sweet way. And the title track American rock

and roll. I wanted it to start off sounding like the late sixties seventies. Mick Fleetwood has a way when he plays, he just sounds like Mick, and everybody so identifies with that feel in that era that he starts off the song playing drums, another another drummer. Vocalists, not a lot of them, and we worked with two of the best. Yeah, and about halfway through, Chad Smith from the Chili Peppers comes in, feeling like a five thousand

pound gorilla on steroids. He plays so loud and so strong, and the track just kind of lifts up off the runway and takes off when he starts playing. But that's really the migration from like the sixty nine all the way through the decades, and when we started hitting the eighties and that more intense, you know, Chili Peppers, Fighters and the nineties kind of feel just kind of took over. I wanted the song musically to my great as well.

So there's so many great people on this record. You know, Todd Suckerman from Sticks plays drums on a Jim Kilton or a couple of guys from Toto, David Page and I wrote a song called Hearts on Fire that he's just got this greasy keyboard player feel about him. Steve Carro, their keyboard players on it, Nathan East, who used to be Clapton's guitar player, and before that are bass guitar player Clapton's bass player, and then before that he was with me, and before me, I had stolen from Kenny Login.

So he finally got to work with Clapton, and I don't have time to see him anymore anyway. The record was mixed by Bob clear Mountain. I don't know if you are an audio file, but Bob clear Mountain is probably the most high fi legendary mixer in record history, to tell you the truth. He mixed it for me and did an amazing job. There's a guy named Bernie Grunman who was a mastering engineer that Bob clear Mountain recommended that I use. So I go over to Bernie

Greenman's mastering lab. This is oland, saclito or no, this is okay, And so Bernie calls one of his guys over whispers something in his ear, and the guy comes walking back in. He's got this big box of tape. Uh. And it actually turns out to be the original two track mastered version of Hotel California from nineteen seventy six that Bernie mastered originally and has remastered for CD and remastered for vinyl release and remastered for the Greatest to it.

So all the stuff, and so I'm sitting there holding this box. I've got a picture of it. I'll show you of me holding this box of the original master while he's mastering this record American. So this really was an opportunity to do what you couldn't do on Hotel California, which was jam with Joe Walsh, and instead you jammed with all these other people. That must have been very satisfied. Yeah,

it really was. It just expired inspiring. The other thing that's a little point side, noticed that Bernie Taupin did the artwork for the cover of it. That's his American John's song co writer. He's a brilliant artist. And my soft Stone was working Nashville at a party and I said, would you mind if I use one of those American flags for the cover of this album. Don't call American rock and roll. I know you're British, but you have had such an influence on American roll with you and

bird are You and Elton, that I'd be honored. He absolutely let me have it, so that somebody on this record has an unbelievable pedigree, a great friendship. And uh did a wonderful job. You wrote the I almost forgot you wrote the theme song to Heavy Metal, didn't you. That's right the movie. I love that movie back in the day. As a matter of fact, that track was a track that I wrote for the Long Run record.

It was going to be a follow up to Hotel California, where Joe and I would have been able to play these harder electric guitars, trading off in the harmonies and all that stuff. And we just never got to the point. I think we left three or four bits and pieces unfinished in the studio and we just had to get out of the studio. We had a tour book, and we were right up to the deadline, running out of time before we had to finish, and we just said,

we don't have time to finish these. So I got a call from a director who wanted me to come over and look at this animated movie. And I had never seen anything like this in my life. It was because there never was anything like that. You're absolutely right. It was like an animated adult stoner movie. And I went, what do I write to that? And I thought about that song that I had written that was tentatively entitled

You're really High, I Aren't You? And I thought that would be in a perfect appropriate vibe that would go into that movie, and so I rewrote the lyrics, re recorded the track, and it turned out to be really a good successful track for me. So so before we talk about your book, I just have to throw some numbers out about some of the accolades and and records set by the Eagles. So the Greatest Hits Album comes out the same year as Hotel California, right within a

couple of months of that. That goes on to be the best selling album of the twentieth century and the second best selling album of all time. The only reason it felt a number two is after Michael Jackson passed away, Thriller surged and it just slightly notched I want to say twenty nine million in the US, forty two or forty three million worldwide. Actually, the R I A A went back and they started analyzing all the screaming numbers

and counting so many streams as a sale. And so now the number one's best selling album of all times is Greatest Hits Volume one. Eagles Greatest Hits Michael Jackson is at number two, and number three is Hotel California. So having two out of the three top selling albums of all time is okay, not bad. So the Eagles go through two periods. They they break They started in the early seventies, they break up early eighties, right, So decade is what are the Beatles last eight years? So

ten twelve years is actually a pretty good run. What motivated everybody to get back together? Well, you know, I think Don Henley put together this U Salute to the Eagles recorded in Nashville by country artists. I recall Vince Gill and a number of other trips and a bunch of people are on it, and it did so well. It was a bit of an eye opener about the

demand and appreciation for Eagles songs. So I I keep hearing that and I always want to call BS on it because Hotel California was a monster smash and the greatest It's sold a ton And if you remember what was it, late eighties, classic rock kinda takes over the air waves. Why wouldn't anybody think that there would be a demand for that? The boomers were aging, it was just you know, ready made to keep selling for the next few decades. Or is this just hindsight? No? No,

I think you're right. I think that Hotel California was always there is kind of the shining star of the catalog that the Eagles put out, But I think the countryside of it when it came out with country artists doing it, it was completely different. It wasn't Eagles performing it. It was just an acknowledgement. It was called Common Threads

and it was a great country record, right. The closest thing to that would be the dedicated album of all the Grateful Dead covers was not not much earlier than that. Is that about right? But it really just kind of brought to everyone's attention the viability of the possibility of a reunion. We had tried numerous times to get back together unsuccessfully before that, and why why there was one

hold out? Wasn't there? It was Glenn Fry yet Yeah, I mean both him and Don Henley had a fairly successful solo career and and Fry started doing TV and Miami Wis and movies. I think he liked his second act as a as a star. He did. He enjoyed it, and he was free of all the pressure and demands of having to follow up songs like Hotel California and make another album. The stress and difficulty of being in the studio after reaching the height of a successful song

album like Hotel California was just intense. Uh. Glenn used to call it the hardening of the artistry. That's a dreaded disease, you know. That happened is when you have this huge success that you have to surpass anything is like a huge hit movie and you come out with sequels, it's always a little less than the original riot original movie, so Godfather Too being the only exception to that. Well, thanks,

but you're right. I think that Common Threads record really kind of brought everybody back to going, you know, we should get together and see how this works. And so we went on to a shoot for Travis Trip for Take It Easy, the first time we had been in the same room together for fourteen years. That was a video done from the album for MTV. That's right for common threads, that's right. And we all played, we all

hung out, we shot pooled together, we told jokes. It was it was like, hey, this is okay, we can do this. All the old bad water is under the bridge. And so we decided would get back together and do a tour and a new record and that MTV show that we've taped for MTV, and uh, it all started off really well. But as these things happened, they tend to It only is a matter of time before all

the bad memories start coming back. Eventually, you leave the bands and you write a book, which is not what I typically think of when I think of Fingers Felder. So what made you decide? And by the way, the book isn't merely a throwaway. If you read the book, it's well written. It's clear you put some time and effort into this, didn't you. Well, I never started out

to write a book. As a matter of fact, I failed ninth grade ninth grade English and had to spend the summer back in the same class in Gainesville and a hundred degree temperature where everybody else was going to the pool into the beach with the same English teacher that had failed me. To make it up so that I could go on into the tenth grade. So I didn't start out to try to write a book. I started out after I had left the band and also in the same twelve months had gone through a divorce

and separation from my wife. That everything that I knew that I had built up to that point in my life had been taken away. My fatherhood, my wife, my home, my family, my job, my celebrity, my association with the Eagles, it was all gone. And so I don't know if you've ever thrown pots, but when you sit down on a wheel to throw a pot, you have to take a piece of clay and throw it in the middle of this wheel, and then you have to center it

by leaning into it. And if it's a little bit off center, as you try to make something, it goes more and more and more out around as you go up. So I needed to recenter myself in my life to get a clear understanding of what had happened to me to where I was today, and so that I could go forward, not out of round. I could recenter myself and go forward with a clear understanding and kind of

shed a lot of that baggage. So I started doing these morning meditations every morning at about five thirty in the morning, when it was really quiet and still. I'd met a tape for about fifteen minutes on specific areas of my life. And as I came out of those meditations, I would write them down on legal pads, just Philip

three four five pages of memories from that time. I started filling up these piles of legal pads after a couple of months, and my um fiance at the time went in unbeknownst to me, and started reading these things and said one day, you know, this would make great book. I went, I can't write a book. She said, no, no, these are these are no I'd never written anything. No. No. When you when she was saying to you, this would make a great book, you said I couldn't. I can't

write a book, Car responses, effectively, you already did. Yeah, that's right. She said, these stories are great. This, this is fantastic. So she introduced me to a guy named Michael Ovits, who at the time was was a big hitter right right, and he had a literary department and a television production department in a film department blah blah blah. Managed Leo DiCaprio, and these different things they had going

on in this new company. So I went to him, and after talking to him for about five minutes, just describing some of the stories that I had written, he said, you go to my office tomorrow and ask for the head of the literary department there and he'll take care of it. So I go in. I don't even have a book, I don't have anything in writing except my hands scribbled notes on legal pads. So I meet with this guy, tell him some of the stories and some of the thoughts and stuff I had had and how

this came about. The week later, we're on a flight from l A to New York to meet with five publishing companies. And when we get back on the plane, by the time we land back in l A, we have five offers for me to write a book. And I had never been so petrified my life about how to take these chicken scrawls of my memories and turn him into a real book. So, with the help of a co editor and co writer, Wendy Holden, and the

publishers editor themselves, we went through all this. I started transcribing my memories, my meditations onto tape, and then that was transcribed into keyboard writing onto a word document so I could look at it and edit it and stuff, so I wasn't writing it all out by hand. And it turned out that we finally got to a point where we wanted to publish it, and I had to put together a bunch of pictures in it, and the

next thing I know, I'm an author. I come to New York a couple of weeks after that and release of the book. I'm sitting in a friends apartment and I'm looking on Amazon to see where my book is, and it's like a hundred and twenty eight or something on the rock bios. I go in that morning at like six am or something to be on Howard Stern Show. I've seen those clips. They're quite amusing, and we had a great time. I think I played Hotel California and head him and everybody in the in the room saying

a Hotel California with me. And I go back to my apartment when I'm done, and I go to Google Amazon to see where my book is and it's number one, sure, And the following week that actually went on the New York Times Bestseller's list. Like that, the power of Howard was just unbelievable. So here's the question for you. There was all sorts of interesting responses to the book. What's the most vivid pushback that that stands out in your

mind to to what you had actually written? You know, I think a lot of people thought that I was actually going out to like slam the guys in the band and reveal a bunch of dirty inside. Really wasn't a lot of dirty. No pun intended dirty laundry, and no, no no, no, I deliberately left all of that aside. I did not want to come out angry, bitter, retaliatory

in anyway. I have the highest respect for the work and the art we made together, and I really like to cherish that and keep that in a very positive light. Despite all the arguments and you know, stress of having to create something a past Hotel California and all of that tension, the ultimate outcome of the whole thing has been phenomenal. What we went through to produce those records

was well worth the effort in time and hassle. So I held that in the highest and still do held that in the highest regard, and would never slander that or slander the people so it was really as as unbiased as I could be, and as that comes across in the book, Yeah, just honest and unbiased and truthful about what And some people will go, oh, you just want to make these guys look bad, and I went, no, that wasn't the intent at all, And to be fair, Subsequently,

the the Eagles do this two part documentary and that's completely unvarnished, warts and all. In fact, your buddy Joe Wolf said, after he saw some of the honest things that Glenn Fry said, he went back and said, oh, I could be a little more honest also right, fairly, fairly, completely transparent and unvarnished. Well, I didn't see anything anyone said until I was asked to go in, and at one time I thought, well, maybe I don't want to

be part of this. But then I thought, well, if I went in and I was just telling the honest truth, much like I had told him my book, I'm not going to use an opportunity to punch somebody in the nose, but just be respectful of what we had done together. Uh that I thought, Okay, I'll go into it. So I didn't even get to see the footage that I was in before they put it in the film, much

less see anything else that anybody had said. The only regret that I have about that documentary was that the only two people that were had any history, which it was the history of the Eagles prior to the Eagles forming was Don Henley and Glenn Fry. Now Randy Meisner was in much bigger bands before done Henley and Poco. He worked with the Stone Canyon Ban, Rick Nelson, Stone

Canyon Ban, He did a lot of touring. I think he was with a lot of other bands other than the Eagles prior to the Eagles, and had a lot of success doing it. And yet there was no mention of his prior history, no mention of my history and the people I had worked with in Gainesville and grew up with, and all of that stuff that led to the whole Eagles being who and what they are. So I thought it was a little bit more like the history of Don and Glenn versus the history of the Eagles.

But but all told, I think everybody was pretty satisfied with how it came out. Yeah, I enjoyed it. We have been speaking with Don fingers Felder, lead guitarist for the Eagles, and all sorts of other musical ventures. If you enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure and stick around for the podcast extra when we keep the tape rolling and continue discussing all things music related. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast

at Bloomberg dot net. You can check out my daily column on Bloomberg dot com slash opinion. Follow me on Twitter. Are at rid Holts. I'm Barry Hults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast. Don thank you so much for doing this. I'm I'm my a fan of your work for a long time, and I'm really intrigued by some of these stories that

you don't hear all that often. There are a couple of questions I didn't get to that I have to ask before I get to my standard questions we ask all our guests. So what you mentioned a couple of people who played on the new album. Let me ask you this. Who are the guitarists that you admire? And why I like players that actually right sing and perform

their own songs. Okay, to have a triple threat, which is what everybody in the Eagles did to me, is the highest level of development and the highest of artistry. If you look at people like John Mayer, to me, I knew you're going to go there, because he's the modern day Eric Clapp. He can write really well, he sings really well, he plays really well. He's like the whole package. He will have a career that spans decades.

He's not like a great singer that has to find a great guitar player to play a solo or a songwriter to write him a song, or he self contained. Alicia Keys is the same way to me. Um, so I like and admire players that really carry the whole um, the whole triple threat to tell you the truth and um what about you know, after you do show after show, night after night, I'm sure they all kind of blur together.

Any gigs stand out as unique or special, weather it's solo with the band, Any particular performances stand out in your mind as wow, that was really a special show. Couple of things. One we did right after I joined the band. I think Joe Walsh wasn't in the band. He was on the show. Bernie Ladman was still in the band. We played a show in Wimbley Stadium in England.

Giant Right Elton John was headlining, uh and I think there were four or five other bands on the show as well, But it was for a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty thousand people. And if you've ever been to a baseball field and you watch somebody strike a baseball and then you hear the delay a second or two later, the further way you are, you really get to appreciate the distance and the speed of sound.

So when we were standing on this stage and people were jumping up and down, you could see this wave of jumps across the floor of Wimbley, and Wimbley's got these overhanging kind of like terraces that hang out over the round the stadium there they're actually going up and down. Structurally, I hope they were engineered to carry that kind of weight, but it was just a phenomenon to be able to witness the speed of sound at a hundred and twenty

thousand people in one room. The other thing is like I had to walk in and sing and play at six am, which is three am in Pacific time, the Howard Stern Show. I've done thousands of radio interviews, thousands of TV interviews, and I have never been as scared as I was walking into Howard Sterns radio show, because in those days, if he didn't like you, he just went straight for the goods, you know, and absolutely and I just went in, you know, with my fingers crossed

and hoped. So I think that might have been one of the performances that I was really petrified to step in and play. But it ended up turning out great, and it catapulted the book to the top of the bestseller Howard was great kind to me. Really. He and Joe had spent a lot of time together before, in Joe's pre sober time, and uh so he knew from

Joe that we had had a great relationship. If you want to repay the favor, he's got a new book coming out and he's starting to do the circuit, so you can bust his chops or or tell somebody else to bust his chops when he comes in begging for some for some publicity. Um, I think this is first book in like a decade, so he's really trying to trying to push it. So let me get to my favorite questions. I asked these of all my guests more or less. Um, let's let's plow through these. What was

the first car you ever owned? Your making model? I think it was a sixty one sixty year sixty one Simca for Simca, That's exactly what I said. My older brother, who was just a brilliant academic in high school, got a scholarship to the University of Florida, got a scholarship to law school. Was like one of those five point nine g p A uh students. Uh. He got like a Chevrolet convertible, like a fifty seven Chevrolet convertible, beautiful

car and a dual exhaust. And I got to wash it on Saturday if you give me a ride to teen time dance or something that night, you know, because I was still riding a bike anyway. So my dad decided he was going to go over to Jacksonville where there were all these car lots, and who was a mechanic. So he comes back driving back into the front yard the Simca. And I had never seen or heard anything like this. It was like a made by Citron or

some French company. And I wanted to say, where's my fifty seven Chevy convertible, you know, But I was the kind of black sheep of the family. So I got the simca, what's the most important thing people don't know about you? Wow? Um that most people expect me to be a certain type of cliche rock star. You are not sure, not just a totally chill dude. You are not a cliche at all. Yeah, I think I'm surprisingly normal.

The black leather coat and the boots are the closest thing to the rock star vibe, only because I was doing TV in there with sweats and you know, a T shirt and flip flops on. So but um, I do think people kind of jumped to the conclusion that what they see in typical rock personalities is part of me, and that's so not the case. So who were some of your early musical mentors you You mentioned Dwyane Allman and Elvis Presley who helped shape your worldview of music.

You know, I learned and studied everything I could steal anybody that could play really well. I was fascinated by learning how they did at chat. Atkins was a huge influence on me. Bb King was a you. Albert King was a huge influence. A matter of fact, I think I have to acknowledge that Chad Atkins is the reason I wound up playing that double neck, and the reason was on Hotel Californ Hotel California. Um, my dad had been trying to learn thought that was Jimmy Page. I

had no idea you're going to go with. I had been trying to learn a lot of chet Atkins things. Now. Chet has a special way of playing where he takes the low three strings and he plays much like the left hand of a ragtime piano on the low strings right and on the top three strings he plays the melody much like the right hand of a piano. So he's able to accompany himself and play a melody at the same time, which I found technically fascinating. And at fourteen I was trying to figure out how he did

all this stuff. So my dad took me over to Daytona Beach and he played in the small like little Daytona Beach Civic Auditorium, and he had taken a guitar and he had wired it so that the low three strings went out of one pickup and went into a amplifier on one side of the stage. The top three strings went out of another output into another amplifier. On the other side of the stage, and when he played these things, First of all, it was the first time

I had really heard stereo live. But secondly, he played this thing that he said, you know, the bloodiest war we had in America that caused the most American lives was the Civil War, Americans killing Americans, and I want to be able to heal those wounds. And I'm going to play the two themes. So he started playing don't don't, don't, don't do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do, Yankee Doodle Dandy on the low, three strangers coming out

of one amplifier. Then he stopped and said, I'm going to play the theme of the South, and he started playing Dixie came out of the other amplifier, and he says, in order to unite these two spirits, I'm going to play them both at the same time. And he played both songs simultaneously, coming out of two different amplifiers, and the top of my head just exploded. How can he technically do that? And instrumentally how does he have So we stayed right where Chet went back and got a case,

opened it up, packed up his own guitar. There was no road crew or roadie or anything, and he walked off the front of the stage and there were steps that came down. He was just gonna walk out of the front of the hall. My dad and I stayed there and I said, how did you do that? And he described how he had wired and split his pick

up so he could do that. So when I got on the sound stage after recording all these guitar tracks in the studio to figure out how I was going to play that song live, I sent a ROADI out to buy the guitar and I rewired it. So it's literally two different guitars. One is a twelve string guitar that when the switches up, it goes out of one outputting into a Leslie amplifier, sounds just like the record.

You flip it down to the other neck, it goes out of another output and threw a pedal board into an amp, and you got all that rock and roll electric guitar. So he not only influenced me in the playing and technical ability, but the concept of being able to do something as electronically technical as splitting the guitar into stereo, which really is the reason I had to wear that white double neck every night, quite quite fascinating. Let's talk about books. What what are some of your

favorite books. You're on the road a lot. What do you like to read? What? What sort of stuff do you enjoy? Do you read books or listen to books or podcasts? What? What do you do to keep busy when you're traveling. I like to read. A matter of fact that I've got a great story. When my wife was working at Harvard Square. She was a search assistant research secretary for guys who were writing thesism books at Harvard.

So I used to take a train over there when I got out of the studio, and I'd sit in this coffee shop and I was reading this book called written by Pdo Spinsky, call in Search of the Miraculous. And I was always I think I have always been and searched the miraculous in my life. So I'm sitting there reading this this guy comes down and sits down at older gentleman sits down and next to me. He

looks at me, he goes, what are you reading? And I go, well, this book about this guy in Search of the Miraculous, and he was doing experiments with music where he would play different types of music and tonalities, Egyptian music, half town music, hold town music, Eastern, Western, Southern, to see what influence and how we responded musically and personally to certain frequency oscillations. And it was just fascinating to me. And I started explaining to this guy. He said,

are you a student here at Harvard? No, I'm just a musician. He said, would you be interested in going to school here? And I went, no, I'm studying music. I'm a musician. I don't want to go study at Harvard. So I had the opportunity not only to be a teacher at Berkeley, but because I was reading that book he was he was a professor at Harvard, and he was going to get me out as a student, just because I was so obsessed with trying to, you know, read and learn stuff. So what do you do today

for fun? What do you do when you're not in the recording studio? Well, I used to play golf a lot. I was a seven handicap and I loved playing golf when I have the time. But over the last five years, my life has just gotten so full of writing, recording, producing, touring, promotion, everything that my golf game has really suffered dramatically I'm

up to a twelve handy happen. There's moments where you see the old seven show up, and then there's moments of twelve and fourteen, which are you know, not quite quite as welcomed into my golf game. So what sort of advice would you give a millennial or recent college grad who was interested in a career in music. You know, if it's something you're not absolutely obsessed with for the love of doing that, don't do it for the money.

Don't do it because you think you're going to become rich and famous, and you know, uh, overtake the world, because at the end of the road, when you look back at your life, if you have not lived a fulfilling, loving, challenging, passionate life doing what you want to do, then you've

lived your life wrong. You'll you'll have regrets that you It's not the number of zeros that you have on the end of your bank account number it to me, it's how much thrill and passion and excitement you had in your life while you were here doing what you chose institute, and our final question, what do you know about the music industry today that you wish you knew back in the early seventies when you were first starting out, well, you know, I became kind of self educated about the

music business. I my brother was a lawyer, like I said earlier, and I really wanted to know how it worked, everything from accounting. I took accounting classes so I could read a general ledger. I got involved with overseeing a lot of the investments my business managers were doing, because so many artists wind up, you know, starting out rich and for bad business investments, wind up not being so rich, you know, just being ripped off. Its legend I was.

I refused to let anybody put out a check out of my account more than five thousand dollars and list I sign it today it's a matter of fact. So you know, I just stay really keeping a close eye on the business side of it as well as I'm sort of self managed today. I mean I have management, but I literally look at every contract that goes in and out for show performances. We run spreadsheets to see what the gross is going to be, what the costs are going to be, what the net's going to be.

Is this worth doing and going and doing and just really involved in the business side of the music business. Every document I signed, whether it's a publishing deal for for um my book or a new recording contract with BMG. Who's a great record label right now? Who my new record is on American rock and roll Great. I look at every contract, discussed it with my lawyers, go over it. And if you go through life with your eyes closed, you are just a turkey waiting to be shot. True

true words were never spoken. We have been speaking with legendary guitarists and musician Don Felder. If you enjoy this conversation, well look up and entered down an inch on Apple iTunes and you can see any of the other nearly two d and fifty such chats we've had over the past five years. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions. Write to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Give us a review on Apple iTunes. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that

helps put this conversation together each week. Um Medina Parwana is my engineer slash producer. Michael Boyle is our booker. Michael Batnick is my head of research. Anatica Val Brunn is our project director. I'm Barry Retolts. You've been listening to Master's business on Bloomberg Radio