Rolling Stone

November 29, 1979

        

"I was blown away that a band like the Eagles would ask me to join," recalls Don "Fingers" Felder, who bears the destinction of being the least-known Eagle, during a break at Bayshore. "'This is terrific,' I was thinking, and then I got to the studio for On the Border. Bernie was bouncing off the wall, and Randy was threating to quit every week. I thought, 'What have I done? I just joined a band that's breaking up!' It was like walking with a keg of dynamite on your back with the fuse lit, you don't know how long the fuse is."

         Like the Allman Brothers, Tom Petty, Stephen Stills and Bernie Leadon, Felder is a product of the Northern Florida music scene. Graduated from high school in Gainesville in 1965, gigged around town a bit and finally joined A jazz band, Flow, which recorded one album for CTI. After learning record production in New York and Boston, he moved to L.A. and took a job backing up David Blue (yet another client of David Geffen's) and later Crosby & Nash. He played one guest session for the Eagles on "Good Day in Hell," and they asked him to join the next day.  Over the years he's contributed some of the Eagles best licks: the haunting bass line on "One of These Nights," and the guitar progression and some of the solos on "Hotel California" and "Victim of Love," among others.

         "I enjoy being anonymous," he says. "I spend my spare time with my wife and three kids. Don and Glenn have no anchors like that, and they handle being rock stars well. Everybody in the band is a different piece of the puzzle. I'm the musical catalyst. I can't worry or be political, so back when Randy quit and everything was real insecure, I just recorded a lot of tracks in my home studio and gave Glenn and Don each a ninety-minute cassette to work with. No vocals, just music, because they sometimes need a scene to paint their lyrics on. That was the start of this album. I see myself as a offensive lineman who has to take out the middle linebacker so Don and Glenn can make the big play."

         "Making an album can be really boring and sterile, but it's wonderful when you can find a new sound. Remember how you felt when you first heard Ringo's tom-toms on Revolver? Or Keith Richard's fuzz tone on 'Satisfaction'? When there's nothing to do in the control room, Joe and I burn out amps and destroy equipment to discover new sounds. That's our pastime."