Some friends of mine recruited me into the high school marching band. My original instrument was trombone, and I learned to play fairly badly. But I was always sitting in class doing cadences on my books, tapping them. and I drove my classmates and teachers crazy until one day, somebody--I don’t know who it was--asked, ‘‘don’t you put down the trombone, which you don’t play very well anyway, and try your hand at drumming?” The band was apparently in need of drummers at that time, and I guess I had a natural ability for playing the drums. I would practice at home-I still have the red sparkle drums my mom bought me-and listen to Beatles records, playing along with Ringo.

Cars were a big thing in my family. When my dad came home from World War II, he went into the auto parts business with two other gentlemen. I remember going shopping for cars with my dad to all the dealerships in all the little towns in East Texas. I remember the smells of the interiors--that "new’’ smell. I loved cars from the time I was a kid. I got my first one when I was fifteen or sixteen. It was a ‘48 Dodge and had belonged to my grandfather. I lived in that thing. 1 slept in it, drove it all over northeast Texas. I was under the hood constantly tinkering with it.

The Beach Boys were really important to me and merged with the car culture. When I was in high school ,as I was just beginning to drive, the Beach Boys were having hits like “I Get Around,” which was our anthem. Me and my buddies would go from one neighboring town to another, cruising for girls because we were tired of all the girls in our hometown and they were tired of us.

We all worked on our cars back then. We changed our own oil and spark plugs. We flushed the radiator. We tinkered with the carburetor. The Beach Boys songs had these lines in them about souped-up cars and fuel injection and stick shift. It was real guy stuff. It was the stuff of every young man’s dreams. They would talk about pistons and camshafts and other car terms that I suppose had subconscious sexual connotations. But we weren’t aware of it then, and the Beach Boys probably weren’t either.

I guess the first time I realized music could be associated with California was the Beach Boys and all the spinoffs—Jan and Dean, Dick Dale, the Ventures. I was in a rock band since high school, and we went through various incarnations. When we were an instrumental group, we played a lot of Ventures music because you didn’t have to sing. It was all instrumental. “Walk—Don’t Run” had a drum break, and I could sort of show off. The big [Surfaris] hit, “Wipe Out,” had a drum solo.

I was with my band, Shiloh, playing at some club in Dallas when we met Kenny Rogers in ‘69. He was passing through on tour with the First Edition, and he was looking for groups to produce. We chatted with him, and he came to see us play. I guess he thought we had some potential, because he said, “Come on out, we’re going to produce a single for you.”

I’m forgetting the music magazines, which also sparked my dreams of California. In the late sixties, I read about the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and Linda Ronstadt and the folk scene at the Troubadour, which became the seminal spot, really, for so much of what happened in the seventies. I saw Elton John’s first American performance there—his American debut.

So we packed up our things and came out here. We arrived in Los Angeles at night—and I’ve recounted this many times—and I remember the first recognizable thing I saw was the Capitol Records Building, because it’s right there by the Hollywood Freeway and it was all lit up. Then, stretching below that building was the Los Angeles basin and all the twinkling lights of Hollywood.

I remember being very very excited and hopeful and feeling like a whole world of opportunity lay before me. I literally felt that I had arrived in the promised land. It was both frightening and welcoming. I felt optimistic, but it was a cautious optimism. I was still deeply attached to Texas, and I had modest goals at that time. I felt that I would be satisfied if I could just make one album, and then I’d go home and buy a farm. I was so naive; as if I was going to make enough money to buy a farm with one album. It was also very intimidating at first. I had cultivated an attitude before I arrived here that this was someplace that I didn’t want to stay. The people were different, and I think we all felt a little out of place for being country boys from Texas. Even then we were smart enough to be wary of the record industry.

Kenny signed us to Amos Records for our first album and also signed to that label was a duo called Longbranch Pennywhistle, which consisted of a fellow Texan named John David Souther and Glenn Frey. I ran into them at the Amos offices, and also in the Troubadour bar, and we were all languishing in obscurity. It was spring 1971, and Glenn was going on the road with Linda Ronstadt. He asked me if I wanted to come and be the drummer. I had been in LA about a year at that time and nothing had happened. I was beginning to realize that perhaps my future lay elsewhere. So I went on the road with Linda Ronstadt with Glenn, and by September of 1971 we had formed the Eagles.

We all converged here as so many young people did in the sixties, looking for that dream—whether it be music or acting or just a lifestyle. California was being packaged and sold by the media as ground zero for the counterculture, and LA and San Francisco were where it was all happening. An entire generation was coming of age and going through a period of self-discovery. California during that time represented a place where one could reinvent oneself and leave behind all the negative aspects of home.

That, of course, turned out to be both a good thing and a bad thing. While this culture gave rise to the Beach Boys and the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas, it also gave rise to Charles Manson. A lot of the kids that came west didn’t have enough stability in their backgrounds to be discerning about who they spent time with and what they did. So a lot of them got lost in the shuffle, and their dreams got lost with them.

I would say that we’re lucky to be here right now. But Glenn and I never lost sight of the goal, and we both possessed the drive and the work ethic and even, in a strange way, the discipline to carry it through. This is not to say that we didn’t get sidetracked or that we didn’t waste a great deal of time that could have been used more productively. But in the end we somehow remained focused and did what we had to do. We had a great support group that consisted of Jackson Browne and John David Souther and John Boylan and Linda Ronstadt. So we formed kind of a loose-knit family. We were all going in the same direction, and it was important, so far from home, to have a sense of family.

The first song that Glenn and I collaborated on was “Desperado.” I had begun writing it back in 1968 when I was still in Shiloh. Musically that song is very southern in its influences, which range from Stephen Foster to Ray Charles. So it’s really a Southern song that sort of evolved into a Western song on its way. It traveled with me from East Texas, which is really part of the South, all the way across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona into California, and got completed almost five years after it had begun. So the song itself is a journey that parallels mine in a way.

The afternoon I showed “Desperado” to Glenn for the first time—and I think we finished it maybe that day or the next day—I was living in a house up at the top of Laurel Canyon. It was one of those houses on stilts, and I had moved into it not knowing who the previous occupants had been; later I found out that Roger McGuinn of the Byrds had lived in that house.

Glenn and I both lived in other houses in Laurel Canyon, and I still have a great deal of feeling about that area. When my original band, Shiloh, moved out here, the first place we lived was on Skyline Drive. We could afford a couple of months’ rent but we couldn’t afford any furniture, so we slept on the floor. Laurel Canyon was the heart of the music scene and every well-known musician had lived there at one time or another; I make an effort to drive through there every so often just to remind myself of that time. It’s sort of a marker for me. There are certain places in this town that hold creative and spiritual meaning for me, and Laurel Canyon is one of them. My first audition for Linda Ronstadt’s band was in Laurel Canyon. A great many significant, life-changing things happened up there, not just to me but to a lot of other people.

Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Monica and Malibu is another spot for me that’s very powerful. I would say I’ve written the majority of the lyrics and melodies for all of my solo work driving on Pacific Coast Highway or sitting on Zuma Beach. Zuma Beach is a place of contemplation for me, where I can make the world—or at least half of it—go away. It’s a good place to think about the pilgrimage that many of us make at some point in our lives. When I’m out there I think about the fact that it’s about as far west as you can go in the continental United States. Even though I wasn’t raised near the ocean, I find that it has become a very important part of my life and that I miss it when I’m not near it.

Mulholland Drive is another area where I’ve written a great many lyrics. It’s a wonderful vantage point because you can see in several different directions. You can see the Santa Monica Bay to the south. If it’s clear enough, perhaps in the wintertime, you can look in the other direction and see snowcapped mountains.

All that brings up a lot of questions about what this place must have looked like before all these people got here, and, back in 1976, it led me to think about not only Los Angeles but all desirable places. Places like Aspen, Colorado, and the Hawaiian Islands and how, by our mere presence, we ultimately spoil wonderful places because too many of us want to live there.

I wrote a song called “The Last Resort,” the last line of which is: “You call some place paradise. Kiss it goodbye.” That has been one of the major themes running through our music and my music as a solo artist. Civilization has migrated all the way around the globe and ended up here. We’re all sort of huddled together, too many of us. This is a place where nature’s work is unfinished. You have all this geological upheaval, as if to say, “Go away! There are too many of you.”

I got engaged in 1994, and my wife and I decided to move back to Texas to raise the children that we have subsequently brought into the world. That move was also precipitated by the earthquake of January 1994. The earthquake destroyed my home on Mulholland Drive. It had to be demolished, and I took that as a sign that it was time to move on, to go back to Texas and reconnect with my roots there.

But after I was back there for a little over three years, I realized that I had put down roots here that were in some ways just as deep, if not deeper, than the ones I had in Texas. I’m fifty-two years old now, and I have lived just about half of my life in each place. I am deeply attached to both of them, and in some ways it’s troublesome because it doesn’t allow me to fully exist in or to fully partake of either place. On the other hand, it fills my life with an interesting kind of duality.