Wired For Sound

1999

"Felder is a 'Guitar God,'" writes fan Daniel E. Smith on an Internet web page he has devoted to Don Felder. "He is one of the accurate guitarists in the world; if he wants to play it, it will come out right. While he only sand one song (Visions), his talents have been exploited elsewhere. He has incredible speed while playing and he writes awesome guitar parts for songs  check out Too Many Hands, Get Over It or Hotel California. He was a great addition [to the Eagles] in '74. Don, I bow my head and pray to you every night."

Glowing praise indeed for the musician who, by his early teens in his hometown of Gainesville, Florida was already making a name for himself playing in the local group, The Continentals, with Stephen Stills (Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young). Tom Petty, who was from the same area and had been taught music briefly by Felder, says that he was always the best guitar player in town.

After graduating high school, besides working and teaching at Lipham Music store in Gainesville and working in a number of local groups, Felder joined future Eagle Bernie Leadon, in a local group called The Flow, which actually released an album in 1970 on the CTI Label. (This is wrong. Don and Bernie were members of the Maundy Quintet and Flow was a band out of New York and not Gainesville. - Cathy) Over the next few years, Felder toured with David Blue in his band and spent some time as Stephen Still's fill-in with Crosby, Stills & Nash before being asked to join the Eagles in 1974 after contributing slide guitar on the track Good Day in Hell during the sessions in L.A. for the Eagles' third album, On the Border.

Speaking to Rolling Stone as part of a cover story on the group in 1979 , Felder talked about how he saw his position within the band, which was enjoying international acclaim at this point. "I enjoy being anonymous," Felder contended. "I spend my spare time with my wife and 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 [Meisner] quit and everything was real insecure, I just recorded a lot of tracks in my home studio and gave Glenn and Don each a 90-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."

By the end of the 70's, The Eagles for all intents and purposes had ceased to exist. Felder, who had his pilot's license, recorded a solo album, Airborne, in 1983. A decade later, shortly after the release of Common Threads: The Songs of the Eagles, a charity album to benefit Walden Woods, which featured a number of top country artists performing the group's hits, The Eagles reunited with a new album, Hell Freezes Over, an accompanying tour, and a couple of chart-topping hits, including Get Over It and Love Will Keep Us Alive.

The Eagles were inducted into the Rock &and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. During the induction ceremony the past members of the group re-united to perform a couple of their biggest hits, Take It Easy and Hotel California.

We spoke to Don Felder in the living room of his Malibu, California home on an afternoon when he was preparing to go flying with his son.

I grew up in Gainesville in North Central Florida, home of the Fighting Gators, and, when I was about 14 or 15, I snuck into a bar to hear B.B. King. He impressed me so much in the way that he was able to effect the audience with the way he was playing.  There were people crying and women hollering out and just really getting it on. I went backstage after it was over  it wasn't much of a backstage  and when I talked to him he was just the nicest guy. I was working in a music store at the time trying to build up enough credit there teaching guitar and selling guitars so I could order a guitar for myself. After seeing B.B. King, I ordered a new cherry red Gibson 355, and I guess I about a year or a year and a half saving up the money and waiting for that guitar to come. It finally came and I was probably the happiest kid on the block.

I was in a band at the time with a guy by the name of Bernie Leadon, and we were down auditioning for small clubs and hotels down in South Florida in Fort Lauderdale and Miami area. We had done an audition, and when we were carrying our gear back and forth to the van afterwards, I set that guitar down beside the guy who was loading the van, I went back in to get something else and came back out and my guitar was gone. Somebody had stolen it, and it just broke my heart after working that long and waiting that hard to get it. To have my guitar stolen like that just destroyed me.

When I finally went through the Gibson factory a couple of years ago with Henry Juszkiewicz, I told him that story and he said, 'Well, you gotta come over and meet the guy these guitars and puts the bindings on. He probably built the one you originally ordered.' I went over and, sure enough, the same guy that's been working there in the factory doing that same job for however long was still making 355's. I gave him a handshake, congratulated him, and told him how much that guitar meant to me, so they built me another one to replace the one that was stolen. It's kind of a youth memento for me here and I play it on stage now on I Can't Tell You Why, which is kind like a romantic song. It kind of brings back a lot of those feelings for me when I switch it on.

Poverty was the reason I picked up the guitar in the first place. [Laughs] Like I said, I grew up in Florida on a dirt road and in a white clapboard house. I think a lot of the attraction was just the fun and thrill of playing music to begin with. My father loved music. He bought a Voice of Music tape recorder, since we couldn't afford to buy records at that time. He'd take it over to people's houses and copy their records and he'd have all this music in the house. I think his influence on me, just how much he about music, led me to pursue music, and when I started playing he encouraged me and helped me along. To begin with, I ended up with a couple pieces of junk with some nice tall half-inch action on them that really gave me some good calluses and some strength in my hand. I struggled through that, and, about that time, Elvis Presley hit the black and white screen on the Ed Sullivan Show and I was gone. I was hopeless from there on out. That was the end of it for me. I was sold.

I started playing when I was 10. I don't know how my parents put up with me. I was always thrashing away on something. There was nobody there [in Gainesville] that taught. I just had to seek out people in my neighborhood who knew a few chords. One guy would know Red River Valley and I'd learn that. Someone else would know something in the key of G and they'd teach me that. I was starting to learn songs, and with my dad's tape recorder, I was able to sit down and do studies of music, stuff I'd hear real late at night on WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee  John R's Record Company. I'd get copies of those and I'd record the radio, and then I'd sit down and study them as much as I could and try to mimic them.  As I said, there was no real music school in my area, so I was sort of self-taught at the time and I wound up playing all my school functions, my own senior prom, my junior prom, every little woman's group and all the dances. And fortunately in Gainesville, the University of Florida was there and with all these fraternity parties every Friday and Saturday night.  Thank God! They kind of kept me in business and I would always have some band I would be playing in.

Stephen Stills and I had a band. I guess we were about 13 or 14. He and I and a couple other guys put together a band to play frat parties. We went over to play the strip in Daytona Beach during the summer when the frat parties were over because college was out for the summer. We'd lie about our age and say we were 18, though we were barely shaving at the time.  There was a little blonde-headed guy named Tom Petty who was around then. He had a band called the Rucker Brothers and I use to teach him guitar. I just wound up being attracted to the whole music industry.

I had made a couple records in bands before The Eagles, but before I ever recorded, we would go out to the local radio station in Gainesville and we would set up and play live at night. A disc jockey there turned out to be our manager, which is how we ended up getting on the radio so much. He would make tapes for us while we were there in the radio station and he would continue to play those tapes during the course of the week until it got to the point where their was enough of a following where people wanted to buy records. So we went down to a local studio and recorded a couple of songs, made some demos, and we were selling them off the front the stage and from out of the trunk of a car, anywhere we could sell those records.

I really had very little experience making records when I moved to New York. I moved there with a different band, a kind of a jazz-fusion band. I was signed to a jazz label there called CTI, which had people like Quincy Jones, Freddie Hubbard and Hubert Laws as artists. I think we made our album in about a day and a half. Everything was already rehearsed and we in and set up and played it and it did okay. We played a lot around New York. I then moved to Boston, mainly because my now wife, then fiancée, lived in Boston, where I got a job working in a recording studio eight hours a day as staff guitarist, staff engineer, staff producer, staff broom guy. Anything that had to be done, I was elected. I made records eight hours a day for about two years. I really learned a lot how to make everything from basic tracks through final overdubs to mixing and editing before I moved to Los Angeles, California.

When I got out here, I started making contacts with people through Bernie Leadon, who at the time was in the Eagles. I was like every other guitar player on the street, but I met some people and played for them and wound up being invited to play on some of their records, artists like Joni Mitchell, David Blue, Bob Segera lot of people who were out here recording at that time. I was invited down to play slide guitar on an Eagles record called Good Day in Hell. Although I played slide guitar, it wasn't my absolute ultimate forte, but I worked it up after I had run into a guy by the name of Duane Allman, who was working the strip over in Daytona Beach with his brother Greg in a band called The Allman Joys. They were doing club covers just like our band, and when everybody got off work at about two or three in the morning, we'd go and get breakfast together and hang out. We'd wind up over at his mom's house and he'd play slide guitar. I was absolutely fascinated by it, so I decided, well, hey, that's something I should learn to do, though I never learned to play it as well as Duane. I don't know if there are many people who can or will ever play like him, but I'd learn to play it well enough so that when The Eagles asked me to come down and play slide guitar on this track, I said, 'Okay, I can do that.'

I got a call the next day from Glenn Frey, who asked me to join the band. At the time I was subbing for Stephen Stills in the Crosby, Nash show. I was playing and singing all of Stephen'' parts with David Crosby & Graham Nash. It was a really good paying job for me, while The Eagles were still playing really small auditoriums2,000-seaters--- on college campuses. I had to think about this for a minute, but I finally said, 'Well, alright, I'll quit a good paying job and join this band.' Shortly after, I joined the band, I realized that I just joined a band that was constantly in the process of breaking up. From day to day, someone was breaking up or quitting or mad about something. It was constant turmoil, but that really part of the creative process of that band, everybody fighting for what they believed was the best music, the best track, the best lyrics and singers. I think that's what made the Eagles who they are.

Everyone in that band has a certain expertise. Don Henley is just a brilliant lyricist as well as a great singer. At the time Bernie and I were appointed to the job of musical arrangement, and Glenn was kind of the supervising arranger. We use to call him the Lone Arranger. He'd go off on these tangents, but he's really brilliant at it. The philosophy of that band is the less you do on a record, the better it is. The less is more theory, so everything you play and every little piece that's on that record really gets the ultimate scrutiny, not only as far as the composition, but also the lyrics and the sound of each instrument, the choice of each instrument that's on the record, how it's played, the sparsity of the notes, where they're placed. That's the key, less is more, to be really selective about what you play and not to overplay. So many records that you listen to have someone who has to show off how much he can play or how fast he can play and drummers who want play all the fancy stuff. That's just not part of this band.

It's a very simple, very selected, almost calculated part-by-part, piece-by-piece, arranging of these tracks. So far it has worked, but it makes it really difficult as far as performing those records, which span quite a few years and a lot of different styles, everything from country to R&B to rock and to Hotel California, whatever style that is. It's difficult to be able to perform all that live on stage.

I wrote the track to Hotel California on a four-track TEAC tape recorder in a bedroom in a beach house I rented, and it was completed with everything but lyrics and vocals. Almost all the solos were done. The little double harmony parts were all kind of done. I just spit this thing out and then we finally went in and recorded it. When it came time to play it live  it had about 11 or 12 guitar tracks on it  Joe Walsh and I ended up layering the harmonies and all that stuff and playing the solos. We asked ourselves, 'How the heck are we going to do this on stage? Have we created a monster for ourselves?' It wound up that I was forced to play two parts, one which is a 12-string part that I played on the record and then the electric guitar part, which we doubled on the solos. There was only one way to do it, which was use a double neck guitar.

I wound up getting a Gibson double-neck guitar and we wired it as if it were two different guitars put together with two different output jacks and two different amps. The 12-string goes through a Leslie and an echo, and the 6-string goes through a Marshall so I can do all that solo stuff. I have to switch between two guitars through the course of that performance. It was a difficult task to figure out how to go about presenting that song to make it sound like the record. The choice of all the instruments that go into that show,  except for maybe one to three songs I think everything I play on that show is a Gibson guitar.

With the solos for Hotel California, writing them followed the same methodology as when I write other material for the group. When I write, it's like writing a script for five different characters. You kind of know hoe Glenn's going to play and I kind of know Joe's style and I know how I want to play, so in all the things I write, I try to write for that band. I can't write something's that too complex and ask Glenn to play it or I can't write something that doesn't fit with the characters that are there. For Hotel California, I had pretty much written that track, those instrument parts and those and those solos and everything else pretty much as they are, with the exception of some of the stuff that Joe changed on the solos, which was fine with me. It was kind of a sketch. It was like a screenplay. 'Here is the idea! You say this and I'll say this and you say something like this.' And kind of get the feel of how the pieces would go together. Sometimes that works and sometimes people say, 'I want to change the script! I don't like what I saying here!' That's pretty much how it came out.

My prior musical experience and my subsequent versatility with various musical styles served me well. When I was growing up I was forced to play a variety of styles, everything from country and western music to jazz. I had a bluegrass band with Bernie Leadon; we played Wednesday and Thursday nights. I think the guy that played mandolin and sang in the band actually worked for Florida Fish & Game. On the weekends, we had a cover band and I played nylon-stringed guitar in a bar before playing movie themes, which was a great deal of help later when we did this acoustic version of Hotel California for the unplugged MTV video. Don Henley said, 'Well we've got to do an acoustic version of Hotel. How in the world do you do that?' So I was handed the task and challenge of coming up with the parts and arrangements and putting together an unplugged version of that song. I used my past experience playing jazz and a classical music or gut string approach to playing jazz and country. That's really what this band does. The Eagles have a very wide variety of instrumentation and expertise and approach to writing songs. I think that's been part of our longevity.

I actually played bass on the session for One of These Nights. We were recording in Miami and Randy Meisner was the bass player in the band at that time. He was living in Nebraska and he got caught in a snowstorm there and couldn't get out. We were all set up to track that song and so I started playing bass, because I'd played bass on sessions and in studios forever. I made up that bass line in the song, and by the time Randy got there, we had almost cut the whole track, except for his bass part, which I had sort of forced to play by default.

Actually there's a funny story from that period. During the time I was playing the parts for One of These Nights, I was sitting in the studio [The Record Plant] with Bill Szymczyk one night when Don and Glenn were over doing a live FM radio broadcast as guest disc jockeys who were invited to sit in and kind of take over the station there for a while. One of the things they wanted to do on air was to phone into the studio and see how the session was going. Knowing they were going to call in as a gag, Bill and I made this solo up that had loads of mistakes in it. It started out sort of like the one on the record [One of These Nights] and, about three or four bars into it, you hear one clam [mistake] and then a few more bars into it you hear another clam and then pretty soon, by halfway through the solo, it's just gonzo. So they dialed up live from this FM station and we started running this screwy bass solo and we got a good laugh out of it. We played the real solo when we got on air.

Everything I do is based on the guitar. I'm a cripple on keyboards, to be honest with you. There are too many things over there that I don't know. I feel more comfortable writing on guitar, although I do use some synthesizers to sketch with in my studio. I leave the keyboard arrangements to Glenn and Joe, who both play keyboards a lot better than I do.

The Les Paul has probably been the key to my success in the record business, only because I have developed a relationship with this instrument like no other instrument. It has such a wide ability to translate into a lot of different types of music, and there are couple of sounds that I just really love that comes out of this instrument that you can't get out of any other guitar around, period.  As well, when you pick up an instrument, after all the instruments I've had in my hands and played, it should feel like something that is a piece of quality work. It shouldn't feel like Fisher Price or it shouldn't feel like sort of a Chevy - nothing against GMC. It should really feel like the best quality instrument you can get, and after having struggled for so many years in my youth playing all sorts of nasty instruments, I really prefer to have a Les Paul and a Gibson instrument in my hands at every opportunity.

I have different pickups put in four different songs, like the 12-string [double guitar] that I use for Hotel California, I took out those pickups and put in some hotter pickups for the 6-string part of it, because I had used a real 1959 Les Paul when I recorded that through a little Fender Tweed Deluxe at the time in the studio and it just screamed. To get that same sound out of the instrument on stage, we had to change that around. I don't do a lot of custom wiring on the instrument and I never refret. A lot of people like to take them out, change the curvature out of the neck and refret. I think that what Gibson makes almost right off the assembly line is such a quality instrument that you can just take it off the store shelf, plug it in, turn it on, and go, I don't do a lot of customizing.

I play slide on the Les Paul. Lowell George and Bonnie Raitt were the first to break through with the slide Stratocaster, because it's such a silky kind of sound, but having been impressed so much by Duane Allman in the past and seeing and hearing what a Les Paul does with a slide, that was really the timbre that I preferred over a Strat.

I use the Gibson ES 335 on one or two things. I use it on a blues-orientated  track where I would try to the best of my ability to mimic a sort of B.B. King approach, which kind of what wee did on I Can't Tell You Why. I tried to do a little tribute to B.B. on some of those solos, not quite as bluesy as B.B., but sort of in that era. Or I would use it on something that was a little more jazz-oriented. Actually there's two thin line Gibsons on that particular track. One of them is kind of a jazz chord, major 7th type approach to a rhythm guitar, if you listen to it, and then the solo is just straight ahead B.B. King. So it suits those idioms quite well, a jazz mode or a blues mode. That's really what it's designed to do.

I go through periods where I play anywhere from three to seven hours a day. I'm in on the road, we do three hour shows and then I'll try to play in the hotel at that date before we go on. Then there are times when, honestly, I just get sick of it. I want to something else in my life besides play the guitar. I know that sounds strange, but it's the honest truth. I think it's almost like a love or a relationship. If you're strapped with something everyday, day in and day out, you not so much take it for granted, but when you get inspired to go back to it and get inspired to pick it up and play, it's fresh, it's new, it's exciting, as opposed to something that is just routine. I try to get myself periods away from playing. Going back to it is like seeing an old friend or seeing an old lover or something that you're back in touch with again. It keeps me inspired that way. That seems to work for me.