Chapter l: The American Eagles
This is the story of an American rock band as successful and suspect as the country that spawned it. The Eagles are hard-headed Hollywood dreamers who took the spirit of rock & roll and made it their own; a spirit mingled with a single-mindedness that paid off and cursed them at the same time and made the Eagles one of the country's most popular and most hated bands. This dilemma fits their image as self-styled modern desperados, not so much criminals as gadflys. Altogether, the Eagles have been seven desperate men. ln 1971 Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon formed the group. Two years later Don Felder joined, then Joe Walsh replaced Leadon and Timothy Schmit replaced Meisner. The changes were made in an atmosphere of bitterness, paranoia and recrimination, but the group continues to be America's biggest selling rockers despite repeated near break-ups.

The band started with a single image born of the collective songwriting cartel that included Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther and Linda Ronstadt. The image was the desert; bone dry, crystal clear, a vast and complex landscape that provided the perfect backdrop for a band intent on codifying the American Dream. The endless flatlands of Arizona, Nevada and Utah hold the last mysteries of mythical America. You travel from small town to small town without a glimpse of civilization for hours at a time. The heat rises from the ground at midday in a shimmering dance. The air is so clear and dry you can almost taste it in the back of your throat. Buttes and mesas rise from the flat landscape in eerie science fiction grandeur. This is the setting of the celluloid west in the cowboy movies, the west of endless trails, breathtaking open skies, ricocheting gunfights amid scrabbling mountain rock.

Today, L.A. cowboys drive to the desert to "mellow out." That dry, intense climate and clean air give the desert a reputation as a healthy place, and, to be sure, this apparent desolation provides one of the last strongholds of the native American Indian. But the desert is also a site of plunder, of deadly asbestos mines and nuclear testing grounds. The combination of beauty, peace and astonishingly cynical waste adds additional awe to an already magical spot. It's an ingenious setting for a band intent on embodying the American myth. "It's like wearing your personality on your sleeve," says Glenn Frey about the Eagles' identification with America. "The magic bands are the ones who live their trip onstage. If you're in a band like the Eagles you've got to focus on yourself and amplify that image. You have to exaggerate what you do without prostituting how you feel about yourself."

Two symbols crystallize the image those Eagles try to represent. The first is remarkable because it was applied to a different band who paved the way for the Eagles; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. lt's a surreal paint and airbrush montage from Guy Peellaert's extraordinary book of rock & roll images; Rock Dreams. It shows the four group members in a dark American car, stopped in the desert with the awesome Rocky mountains in the background. The four musicians are staring at a female apparition, a girl in the left foreground facing them with her back to the viewer, cropped below the shoulders so that her tattered, skin tight cut-offs provide the picture's focus. While Peellaert captured an essence of the appeal Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young invoked, the picture is startling. The group members don't seem to belong. But it is a tailor made scene for the image the original quartet of Eagles tried to convey: macho cowboys aimlessly wrangling through the desert in search of wholesome thrills.

The second image is more starkly symbolic, yet simple and complete. It's the label on your standard bottle of tequila, the drink most associated with this desert scene and subject for one of the Eagles biggest hits, "Tequila Sunrise." Anyone who has spent time with this splendid drink will recall the beautiful desert scene depicted on its label. The flat expanse of desert pans out to the distant mountains and a lone eagle spreads its wings in flight against the sky.

The image is presented in the Eagles' first hit, the blockbuster "Take It Easy," which was playing on every car radio in America almost before anyone had even heard of the group. The hero of the song is standing on a street corner in Winslow, Arizona, admiring the giddy desert afternoon. Carefree and happy, he's taking life as it comes, just waiting for something to happen. What does happen is so exhilarating it might have been a dream. A truck driving cowgirl comes careening down the road and takes a fancy to this street corner cowboy. The song, in turn, accounts for the hero's women problems but resolves to the soothing, lighthearted chorus, "Take It Easy." A great song, it's the perfect vehicle for a group trying to establish its identity

The Eagles are part of a long tradition of American rock bands, a tradition that needs to be under- stood before you can figure out the Eagles themselves. Some of this band's influences predate rock & roll, a fact that explains a lot about the internal disputes that first plagued the Eagles. Rock & roll started as a purely American art form, fashioned out of black blues and rhythm & blues forms from the post World War II era as well as white country and western, mountain music and bluegrass elements. In the mid '60s American rock music arrived at the most complex mix of all those elements yet assembled when the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield formed a school of west coast country rock. Both bands split up and their respective members formed other country rock groups, creating a pyramid of influence. Musicians regularly formed and dissolved these groups until most of the west coast country rockers had played with most everyone else in the field.

Though they come from a long line of California bands and write extensively about Los Angeles, the only original Eagle who grew up in California was Bernie Leadon, whose family moved to the coast from Minnesota when he was still a child. In 1957 the ten-year-old Leadon got his first exposure to bluegrass music, an influence that would color his life. As the years went by Leadon could be found at an instrument shop in Los Angeles called the Blue Guitar owned by folk gurus Larry Murray and Gary Carr. The store was a hangout for folk musicians and bluegrass fans, and the owners held meetings, gave lessons, repaired stringed instruments, even custom-made certain instruments. Leadon learned a lot from hanging out at the Blue Guitar. "It started out really funky," he recalls, "a focal point for anybody who was at all interested in folk or bluegrass. You had the two camps, folkies on one side and bluegrass players, the best of whom played in the Scotsville Squirrel Barkers, on the other. Then you had flamenco freaks and classical nuts too. So the Blue Guitar, for the whole of that folkie period, was a really interesting place."

During the folk boom of the late '5Os and early '6Os Leadon gradually decided to become a blue- grass player. "I was still very young, and I'd been into commercial folk, playing in a few little school groups, but when I met all these guys and started hanging around with them, I realized how much stronger the roots of the traditional folk music were than the commercial stuff, which at this time, around 1961, was in its heyday on the west coast. As a result, I got into bluegrass banjo, listening to and learning from Kenny."

Kenny Wertz was one of the Scotsville Squirrel Barkers. "At the weekends, the shop used to hold concerts where the Squirrel Barkers would play, besides which they would do evening gigs all around the city and play bluegrass festivals up in L.A., and so there was a really good little scene happening."

Wertz left the Barkers and Leadon replaced him on banjo until the group broke up, whereupon he joined ex-Barkers Larry Murray and Chris Hillman in Los Angeles. "At the time," says Leadon, "I decided to go to Florida with my father, who got a position at a University there. So we went off to Florida and stayed there until 1967, when I felt the urge to get back out to California. I packed all my stuff and returned the 3000 miles all by myself."

Leadon didn't know it at the time, but his short stay in Florida was to prove fateful, for he met and played with Don Felder, a young guitarist who would later become important in his relationship with the Eagles. When Leadon returned to Los Angeles in 1967 the city was blazing with country rock activity. He joined a local group called Hearts and Flowers, became a minor sensation at L.A.'s biggest folk club, the Troubadour, and finally split when that group hit the rocks. Next was a stint with Dillard and Clark, another minor Los Angeles sensation.

Leadon was developing a reputation around town as a gifted multi-instrumentalist, as well known for his electric guitar playing as his banjo work, so he was invited to play guitar in Linda Ronstadt's band. He alternated between that and a few other bread and butter gigs before joining the legendary Flying Burrito Brothers, perhaps the greatest of all the country rock bands. The group also featured the great Gram Parsons as well as Chris Hillman, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Al Perkins and Michael Clark. Leadon left the Burritos in 1971. "I was just fed up, I suppose," he remembers. "I felt that by staying, I was restricting my abilities. I wanted to try and broaden my techniques to a greater degree than my role in the Burritos allowed."

So there was Leadon in July of 1971, wandering around in search of a new medium. As it turned out he found it in a bizarre, almost fairytale fashion, at Disneyland, where Ronstadt was working. Ronstadt was playing a week of gigs there with a band that included guitarist Glenn Frey and drummer Don Henley. When bassist Randy Meisner dropped by later in the week and was asked to join in, the original Eagles were all assembled on the same stage at once. It didn't take long for the quartet to see what they had going for them.

It seems fitting somehow that the Eagles effectively got their start at Disneyland, the absolute symbol of California fantasy. All four had worked with Ronstadt previously, and each brought a markedly different background into the band.

Bassist Randy Meisner's credentials were almost as impressive as Leadon's. Nebraska-born Meisner joined his first group, the Dynamics, in 1962, when he was just fifteen years old. Soon he decided to split from his home state for Colorado, where he joined a band called the Poor. "We did as many local gigs as we could for a few years," Meisner recalls, "but then decided to move to Los Angeles and become a super original folk rock group." While in L.A. the Poor came to the attention of ex-Buffalo Springfield managers Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, who recorded some demo tapes for the band. "I think maybe we tried to be too original," shrugs Randy, "and we ended up the same way we arrived-with nothing. With prospects looking pretty bleak for the Poor, I left to join Poco after Miles Thomas, our roadie, who knew Richie Furay, had suggested me as a possible bass player for his new band. I stayed with Poco for about a year before I decided to leave them, too.

"There were various reasons for my leaving, but I finally quit over the final mix of the album. I wanted to be present to make my suggestions, but Richie and Jim Messina said they were going to do it and that we'd have to wait and listen to it later. So, rather too hastily, I suppose, I quit because I thought that if we were a group we should all have a hand in it. Looking back, I'm more pleased with the way the album came out, but at the time I wanted a stronger bass and drum sound. I wasn't very experienced, so maybe Jim was doing the right thing in keeping me out and going for an overall sound."

Meisner had quickly developed a reputation as one of the most outstanding country rock bassists and it was generally considered that Poco missed him, although Tim Schmit, who would later re- place Meisner again in the Eagles, fit in immediately. "Having left Poco," Meisner picks up the story, "I was ready to give up, but then Rick Nelson called and asked me to join his band, so I went with him. He'd seen Poco playing at the Troubadour and that had given him the idea of getting a new group together. He'd gotten real buzzed from hearing us play that kind of music. I played on Rick Nelson In Concert, came over to Europe to do a military tour, and then when we got back I quit because I didn't feel I was getting a chance to ex- press myself. It wasn't anyone's fault because it obviously had to be Rick Nelson and his group rather than just being a group with all the members having equal status. Rick always consulted us and we all made suggestions but even so I wasn't really happy with the music."

So Meisner quit the music business altogether and returned to Nebraska where he got a job work- ing in a tractor factory. After proving his point, though, Meisner found he missed his music. He re- turned to Nelson's band for a while until he got a call from John Boylan, Nelson's producer, who asked Meisner to fill in for another of his clients, Linda Ronstadt. "I did that for a couple of nights," he explains, "and that's where Glenn and I met and discovered that we got on pretty well playing together."

Boylan, a good producer and a shrewd judge of talented sidemen, is often said to be responsible for first putting together the Eagles as a potential backup band for Ronstadt. "We all knew him from the times we played on her records," says Leadon. "Boylan is Linda's manager and he helps put together her bands. He always liked all of us as individuals and apparently he sat down one day, figured out our capabilities, and came to the conclusion that, on paper, it would be hard to put together a better band. Of course, that was on paper, which doesn't really mean a thing because it doesn't matter how good the components of a band may be as individual musicians, it's no use them playing together and expecting good results unless there are no personality hang-ups. At his insistence we got together not long after that Disneyland gig and it just seemed to come together from there. We wrote and played and sang and everything was great."

Don Henley amplifies the point a bit when he says "We all thought, 'great, but why don't we put together a supergroup to back each other up?'" They were so powerful as Ronstadt's backup that they all realized this was the band they'd been waiting for themselves. "John and Linda gave us our blessing," Henley continues. "I really respect Linda Ronstadt. She's got a good heart. She's never been selfish enough to hold anyone back."


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