—Don Henley

Built into the Eagles from the start was a self-destruct mechanism. Politics and ambition dove-tailed in the desire to make it at all costs for Glenn Frey and Don Henley. For Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner, the intrigues of superstar power plays were passé—they had already been burned in those kinds of ego games and were interested in putting together a more relaxed band where everyone got their chance to play and write songs. The problem with such arrangements is that groups invariably produce leaders. Basic ideals and egalitarian plans may be fine at first but eventually disappear when the pressure becomes too great.

The start of the problem is that the two most ambitious Eagles were the least well known when the band started. Frey’s friendship with Jackson Browne hadn’t hurt. Browne was already one of Geffen’s crown jewels and he helped convince him to sign the Eagles. But Geffen was surely hooked into the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young image of the band based on the illustrious backgrounds Lead-on and Meisner brought from the Flying Burrito Brothers and Poco.

Though Leadon was the group’s immediate spokesman, his role receded as Frey and Henley asserted control. Whatever resentment Leadon and Meisner felt was tempered by the band’s giddying instant stardom. The doubts started to surface during Desperado despite the fact that it was probably the most cooperative record the band ever made. "All the songs, with the exception of ‘DoolinDalton,’ were written since the Eagles were together," Frey explains, "whereas on the first album some of those songs had existed for quite a while. There was much more inter-band communication. The songs were written tailor-made for the talents that we observed in each other."

But that cooperation invariably meant more input from the Frey-Henley axis. Leadon and Meisner contributed heavily to the first album, while Henley stayed in the background, but Henley was already a major force by Desperado. Leadon was the first to suggest that the consequences of dividing the group would be an eventual breakup. "When Lennon and McCartney were writing together," he reasoned, "they did the best albums of all. But when they couldn’t work together anymore and started to write separately, Lennon became too sour and McCartney too saccharine."

Whether you agree with him or not, Leadon’s point is well taken, especially when applied to the Eagles. Henley had an answer for him, too. "There’s a lot of tension in this group," he admits, "but it’s a healthy tension which keeps the music from sounding the same. Everyone sings and writes. In a group where one person dominates things get old pretty fast. It’s harder this way but more lasting in the long run.

Almost as if he realized the trap this line of reasoning could set for him, Henley adds "We do have troubles sometimes. I suppose you could call then ego hangups, hangups about how many songs each member is going to sing, how many they’ve written. From the beginning we’ve tried to keep this band on an equality basis. Everybody writes, everybody sings.’!

Frey was even more adamant about the Eagles avoiding dissension. "What basically has gone down is that the group has become very much like a marriage, It is heavy commitment for each of us to the other three people. When a group first starts, there is sort of an initial energy you wanna keep going and after that you have to put even more energy into the group to make it go on. You know what I mean. When you first get that band together everyone is really excited. Everybody thinks it’s going to be the band. After a while, it becomes more than just a band. You have to be more than just a leg on the table; you have to be the glue. That is probably the heaviest change of all; how you felt initially and not being sidetracked no matter what else happened. Good God there have been many changes. We have done television shows and played with orchestras, we have had some hit singles, and now we are at a point where we have to plan our careers four or five months in advance to make it comfortable for us. The group is now two years old.

"A lot of bands don’t last even two years," he proudly stated. "Especially when you have a lot of famous people in them. The Eagles are never going to have any personnel changes or have any kind of that nonsense going down. It is just unfair to our fans. I know when Clark left the Byrds I bought their third album and was disappointed because there were only four Byrds on the cover. When people initially become fans of yours, they don’t want to see the personnel change."

These would become sad and ironic words before too long. But the Eagles had more immediate problems than their own breakup. They had to make a third album, and traveled to London to make it with Glyn Johns once again. This time, however, they were doomed to failure. For three miserable weeks they clashed and fought ten hours a day at Olympic Sound Studios, bitterly at odds with Glyn Johns in this attempt to record. Then, one cold October morning, the four musicians showed up at the studio and fired Johns from the project. An impending eight week tour of Britain and the States would serve as a hiatus, after which the band would resume the record at home with a new producer.

The usually quiet Randy Meisner offered one of his few statements on the departure of Johns. "You can’t think things out when you’re staying together," he simply said. "You need to be alone in your own home."

Leadon, characteristically, offered a technical explanation for the split. "The main objection we had to Glyn," he points out, "Was that he considers that he has a certain sound. In other words, the producer is the filter for the band to get on tape. He shapes it and so forth. Glyn has what he considers his stamp that he puts on something that you do. And echo, a certain amount of echo, is part of this. We figured some tunes deserved that much echo and some tunes don’t, some deserve less. We tried to work it out but it wasn’t really happening, so we just decided it would be a good time to try another guy and see where it was at."

Johns himself has a different explanation of the disagreement.

"They weren’t comfortable in the studio, physically or mentally," Johns grants. "There were a lot of hang-ups. But what it boils down to is they weren’t ready to make another record. The six weeks in the studio were a disaster area, but it had nothing to do with me. I certainly got frustrated on some occasions because they wouldn’t grab the situation and get on with it. I don’t believe in kid- gloving artists."

Frey regretted the departure and had good things to say about Johns. "We learned tons and tons from Glyn," he says. "How to cut through a lot of bullshit in arranging songs and how to shape them up real fast in the studio. He helped us take professional attitudes and mold them into professional recording artistry."

But Henley would pull no punches about dumping Johns. "Glyn thought we were a nice, country- rock, semi-acoustic band, and every time we wanted to rock and roll, he could name a thousand British bands that could do it better. We couldn’t think over there, we couldn’t create. We were too busy trying to find a good restaurant."

The Eagles returned from England with only two tracks for their efforts, two acoustic ballads in keeping with Johns’ prejudice about the group. The first, "You Never Cry Like a Lover;" was written by Henley and John David Souther. The song demonstrates the brilliant arrangement strength that the band always had under Johns, opening with Frey’s blocked out piano intro followed by the full band for the theme, then breaking to understated instrumental accompaniment for Henley’s softly spoken first verse before going full out on the next verse, then soft for a few lines until finally the backing harmonies join in and break the song loose. Leadon’s solo has a tremendously deep and resonant sound unlike anything else the Eagles ever recorded, a sound which later characterized some of guitarist Barry Bailey’s best moments with the Atlanta Rhythm Section.

The other ballad recorded in England was "The Best of My Love," written by Henley, Frey and Souther. The beautiful acoustic/steel guitar intro and one of Henley’s best vocals made this an instant Eagles classic. It was one of those songs which seems tailor made for the group’s close fitting vocal harmonies, and sure enough it became a huge hit single, helping to make On the Border the band’s most successful album up until that point. The last fights with Johns may have taken their toll but at least in this case the results were worth it.

Despite the band’s internal problems, the need for a new producer forced them to set aside their differences just to make the rest of the album. Finding a producer is a lot harder than it might seem at first and ironically, the band was indirectly pushed to use Bill Szymczyk because of Joe Walsh, the guitarist and solo artist who put Szymczyk on the map as part of the James Gang, one of that producer’s first projects as staff producer at ABC records.

"Walsh told me I should produce the Eagles and learn about harmony," Szymczyk said. "Up until then I’d only worked with single singers. Working with the Eagles was an experience, an education." It would soon become that for Walsh as well.

The Eagles cornered Szymczyk during a break in a session and explained that they were looking for a new producer. Szymczyk played the tapes to Walsh’s second solo album, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, which he’d.just finished, and the Eagles flipped at the hard rock guitar sound of the album’s hottest track, "Rocky Mountain Way." A new alliance was born.

"It’s hard working with the Eagles," the producer later said, "in the sense that everybody is such a perfectionist. A month before we started On the Border I had dinner with the band and they asked me questions about guitar sounds. It was like being interviewed for a job. I almost didn’t go to the dinner or take the job cause of my own paranoia:about following Glyn Johns. For years he was my idol."

The band immediately fell into working with Szymczyk, and in a sense On the Border became a different album under his direction. The theme, if you take away Meisner’s "Is It True" and the two tunes recorded in England, runs true to form: it’s an album about taking risks, the exhilaration and consequences of letting it all go. "We had more freedom in the studio with Bill," Frey says. "Working with Bill was like we were the Miami Dolphins and he was Don Shula. His job as far as producer went was not so much to arrange the music or analyze the songs as much as just to keep us up, keep us loose, make sure things didn’t get too intense, but that they got intense enough."

One of the techniques Szymczyk used was to drink with the band. According to Frey, this is how the title track was recorded. The band was in the Record Plant and had tried several takes of the tune, it was after midnight, and Szymczyk suggested the group take a break lest they burn out. "We decided to get completely liberated on gin and tonics," Frey laughs, "in order to do that little Temptations bit in the break. We had to be totally uninhibited where we didn’t feel like we were going to sing the blues or anything. We were just gonna go out there and have a good time."

The song certainly has that feel to it, and it does seem like the kind of thing they could never pull off with Glyn Johns. It’s a weird combination of spring tight funk r&b riffs and Crosby, Stills & Nash melodic elements; built around a fat, chicken scratching rhythm guitar figure and handclap punctuations. Henley’s croaking, diabolical lead vocal foreshadows his later triumph on Hotel California’s "Life In the Fast Lane." Lyrically the tune is another of the paranoia epics that had by this time formed one of the lynchpins of the band’s image. Chased by Big Brother, the hero has his phone tapped and this time the authorities want more than just his stash. Warned to take one side or the other, he ignores the order and finds some one listening in on a phone call with his girlfriend.

The rest of the album sustains this somber note, the only moment of true escape offered by the rollicking, bluegrass tinged "Midnight Flyer," which Meisner sings in energetic train song style. "James Dean" and a cover of Tom Waits’ "01’ 55" celebrate the freewheeling lifestyle. The tribute to the film star who was the epitome of cool in his brief career was penned by Frey and Henley with 3D. Souther and Jackson Browne and seems like an appropriate update of the Desperado project. The song kicks along on a doubletime backing track and stinging guitar leads then explodes at the end with a chorus repeated over and over in Chuck Berry inspired abandon. The last notes on the guitars are held for feedback resonance. "01’ 55" goes to the other end of the sentimentality spectrum, with Al Perkins on pedal steel guitar. Waits’ ode to his venerable Chevy has a classic chorus that fits the vocal strengths of the Eagles and is emotionally charged enough to bring a tear to most eyes.

The centerpiece of the record is made up of two songs written for Gram Parsons, probably the greatest of the country rockers in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Parsons pivoted the legendary Flying Burrito Brothers where Leadon got to know him, and made a couple of beautiful solo records before being killed in a mysterious hit and run auto accident. Leadon’s tribute to Parsons, "My Man," is one of the most poignant ballads the band ever recorded, partly because Leadon’s solo voice is rough and thus underscores his remorse at losing such a good friend and inspiration

The other Parsons tribute is "Good Day In Hell," an appropriately cynical sentiment written by Frey and Henley. A herky-jerky rocker, the song seemed to lack something when they finished recording it and the call went out for a slide guitarist to fill in some dirty soloing.

The first name that came to mind was Joe Walsh, whose slide guitar playing on "Rocky Mountain Way," the first track on his Smoker You Drink . . . album, impressed the band when Bill Szymczyk had played it for them. Walsh wasn’t available, though, and Don Felder’s name was mentioned. Felder had played with Leadon in Florida and knew the band from some after hours jam sessions and was brought in to play the slide part on "Good Day In Hell." The results impressed the band so much that they urged him to lay down a guitar line on "Already Gone." On that spirited tune he traded joyous lead lines with Frey in what was definitely one of the band’s hottest moments up until that time. The song worked so well that it was used to start off the record and immediately became one of the band’s in-concert favorites.

Felder was asked to join the group as a full-time member. "There were only four Eagles," Frey recalls, "and I could never foresee that framework actually changing. But I saw no one who could fit in as completely as Don does. He’s definitely the fifth Eagle. No doubt about it."

Frey’s enthusiasm for Felder had to be large for him to conscience violating what he had considered an absolutely set lineup. "I’ve been a Don Felder fan for about a year and a halt" he said at the time. "Ever since I heard him playing in a dressing room in Boston one night. I saw him at a concert in L.A. and asked if he’d come down and put some slide on ‘Good Day In Hell,’ but with every take he just blew us all away."

Adding Felder wasn’t the only crucial change the Eagles made at that point. Perhaps even more important was their underplayed switch of management. After being a cozy cog in the original Asylum family as David Geffen’s empire grew the band began to think that they needed someone to handle their concerns who wasn’t as bogged down with projects as Geffen. They found the man they wanted in the diminutive Irving Azoff, a Midwest manager/promoter with the ambition and aggressiveness that the Eagles were looking for.

Azoff had been an employee of Geffen/Roberts management and had seen the band’s need for a single management mastermind. When the time was right the cagey businessman stepped in. Henley explained the band’s thinking behind the switch: "Jackson, J.D., Ned and Glenn were at David Geffen’s house just down the street one day and he said ‘I want to keep Asylum records really small. I’ll never have more artists than I can fit in this sauna.’ Then, all of a sudden, he was signing people left and right. Then Geffen just split the management scene entirely and became a record company president, turning the whole thing over to Elliot Roberts and John Hartman. It wasn’t the same after that."

Soon the Eagles wouldn’t be the same, either.

Chapter 3      Chapter 5

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