THE EAGLES IN HARMONY

St. Petersburg Times; St. Petersburg; Feb 24, 1995;

By: Tony Green

Miracles, it turns out, reveal themselves in the oddest places, at the most unexpected times. Nearly nine months into one of the most ballyhooed tours in recent memory, in a van somewhere between Chicago and Iowa, Eagles guitarist Don Felder witnessed something amazing.

Don Henley, Timothy B. Schmit, Joe Walsh and Glenn Frey were sitting around, cracking jokes, laughing; basically acting like a band, instead of like the Eagles. The old Eagles, Felder emphasized.

"When I was asked to join the band (he first appeared on 1974's On the Border), it was in a massive state of flux," he said by phone recently. "They had fired their producer, they were shifting away from a light country rock direction into a more pop-based AM direction. there was a lot of difference as to what songs should be on the album, how songs should be done . . . I thought I had joined a band that had just broken up."

All that has changed.

"It's wonderful," said the Gainesville native, who once gave guitar lessons to Tom Petty and wears his Gator heart on his sleeve. "We're having a great time working and writing together now."

That may come as a surprise. The Eagles' reputation for - shall we say - individual creative differences inspired the title of both the tour and comeback album (Hell Freezes Over). But wounds heal better when salved not just with time, but with money. The high-priced Eagles tour (which resumed on Jan. 9 after being interrupted last fall by Glenn Frey's stomach problems) is generating revenues hand over fist, along with a top-selling album.

The Eagles, said Felder, is a bunch of happy guys right now. That's not surprising. What is slightly surprising is Felder's contention that it has no effect on the band's ability to create great music. Happiness, according to conventional wisdom, is the death knell for a rock band. But contentment doesn't equal complacency, Felder said.

"What creates great rock music is great writing," he said. "And the key to our consistent success is the breadth of the writing talents of Henley and Frey; their ability to write in idioms that range from country & western to heavy metal to disco-influenced stuff. Their ability to write remains the same whether they are old and happy, or young and angry. A content, talented band is just as viable as a feuding, talented band."

Some things just happen as you grow older; your life, like Felder's, changes. After the outfit's 1980 breakup, he settled into family life, raising his four kids.

"I was absent the first 10 years of my family's development," Felder said. "The breakup really enabled me to have some important developmental years with them, the years when you are best spent involved. Two of my kids are in college and one is in boarding school, and I think the investment I made has rewarded everyone in our family. It's a rarity in the rock industry that a person has a family of four and is married to the same woman."

It's all about maturity, he said. The problem with the '70s Eagles was that the band got swept up in one of the decade's overwhelming pop-rock success stories. That success proved too much for the members' admittedly young egos, Felder said.

Right now, Felder's life and career, as well as that of his cohorts, has settled into a manageable mode.

"There has been some talk of continuing on," he said. "Glenn has said he would like for us to continue on for another few years; there's talk of expanding the tour to include Europe and Australia. But right now, we're taking this whole thing in small bites. As long as we're really having fun being together, writing and playing, we'll continue to take small bites, pacing ourselves and not getting caught up in the kind of stress that was the downfall of the original Eagles."

Says Felder: "It's like that saying you hear from parents all the time: `Once you have kids you'll understand.' Well,once you've been through what we've been through, you know all the traps and errors, and you know your way through the minefield. It's amazing how much a few years of maturity give you in way of perspective." AT A GLANCE The Eagles at 8 p.m. Thursday at the ThunderDome in St. Petersburg. Tickets are $42.50, $77.50.

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