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Don Henley An Oral
History of Popular Music The serious Eagle, Don is the writer of some of the group’s more intense songs. He provided steady drumming along with a husky vocal style and has been brilliant in his solo career as well. The Troubadour was the first place I went to when I got to LA. I had heard about how legendary it was, and all the people who were performing there. The first night I walked in I saw Graham Nash and Neil Young, and Linda Ronstadt was standing there in a little Daisy Mae kind of dress. She was barefooted and scratching her ass. I thought, “I’ve made it. I’m here. I’m in heaven.” I really didn’t know anybody. I just hung around the Troubadour by myself. It was kind of pathetic, really. But one night Glenn Frey invited me over to his table and bought me a beer. He said, “What’s going on?” I said, “My group’s not doing anything. Things area drag. One of the guys left to go play with the Burrito Brothers.” And Glenn said, “Me and my partner are breaking up, too. And there’s this guy named David Geffen,” who I didn’t know from Adam, “and there may be a deal in the works if a band could be put together.” I said, “That’s nice.” And he said, “In the meantime, do you want to go on the road with Linda Ronstadt and make 200 bucks a week?” I said, “Sure, fine, I’d love it.” I’d never really been on the road before. So Glenn and I became good friends and we started plotting and planning. He told me about Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon, who had been with Poco and the Burritos, respectively. Glenn said we needed to get those guys because they could play the kind of country rock we were all so interested in. So when we got back form being on the road with Linda, we recruited those guys. We didn’t all agree on things from the beginning, but we were so enamoured of one another that It was OK for a while. Then Geffen talked Glyn Johns into listening to us. Glyn said that although we needed a lot of work, he’d produce us in London. So they packed us off to England and stuck us in this little apartment, picked us up, took us to the studio, and then we’d go back to this little apartment and drink ourselves to sleep. Then we’d get up the next day and do it all over again. As we got into making more albums, Glenn and I would go through a series of moving in together and then moving out. We’d have girlfriends and live with them for a while, and then we’d get ready to do an album and we’d move back in together. Dudes on a rampage. By ’76, ’77,l Glenn and I were living in a big house that belonged to Dorothy Lamour, up in the hills with a 360-degree view. Glenn and I were the odd couple. I was sort of the housekeeper, the tidy one. He was the lovable slob. All around the house he’d leave these little cigarette butts standing on end. They looked like miniature cities. Burns all over the furniture and carpet, coffee cups all over the place. We would get up every Sunday, watch football together, scream and yell, and spill things. It wasn’t my house. I didn’t care. During the “One of These Nights”/”Hotel California” period, I lived in Irving Azoff’s house on Benedict Canyon, and Glenn lived on Coldwater. I was in an upstairs corner bedroom in Irving’s house. This was before Irving was married, and we were bacheloring it pretty good. It was during this time that I had my brief affair with Stevie Nicks. I remember the Eagles were on tour, and so was Fleetwood Mac. These were the extravagant days. One time I chartered a Lear jet and ran her to where I was, and for weeks I got a lot of shit about that from the band. If she had a couple of days off, she’d come over and go on the road with us for a while, and then I’d fly her back in time for wherever Fleetwood Mac was supposed to be. The affair with Stevie lasted off and on for year or so, and we remain good friends today. But back then we coined the phrase, “Love’ em and Lear ‘em.” Hey, Lear jets were a lot cheaper then, and when I speak of sending one for Stevie, that kind of thing did not happen every week. Once in a while we would do something completely over the top like that, and it was simply our way of coping with the absurdity of making so much money and being so famous at such an early age. We had to do absurd things sometimes just to be able to put it all in perspective. We would feel silly about it later, but we would laugh it off because we knew one day it would end. That’s what the Desperado album was all about, how you get hung sooner or later, or hang yourself. As we became more and more successful—the Eagles, Jackson Browne, JD Souther, Linda—it seemed to take us all away from one another. In a way, success separated all of us. In our hearts we were still good friends and mates and all that, but the salad days were gone. |