The changes in the Eagles’ organization that occurred during the making of On the Border—new producer, new guitarist, new manager—were to bring the group to a new peak of popularity and at the same time nearly destroy them. Guitarist Bernie Leadon, who may have seen the seeds for his departure in Felder’s arrival, was the first to voice misgivings after the making of On the Border. "It seems to take more time and effort every year, he complained, "to forget the whole trip of touring and recording and get loose enough so that the creative juices flow naturally." Felder, on the other hand, was basking in the glory of having walked right into a gold mine of a band. "As soon as the opportunity of joining the Eagles came up," said Felder, "I flashed on all the possibilities. I looked at all the pieces and how they had been put together and the versatility of the whole thing was a mind blower." The chemistry of the band changed with this hard rocker in the lineup, for not only did Felder provide a gutsy second guitar to match Frey’s Detroit street punk leanings, but he could add another instrument to the bluegrass numbers. "My first reaction," said Frey, "was this could be a great five piece bluegrass band because Felder plays banjo 1 and I knew it would also kick our rock ‘n’ roll in the a--. Now we can play ‘Oh Carol’ better than the Rolling Stones." The dividend provided by Felder’s addition was immediately apparent in the band’s live sound, which was fuller, more dynamic and harder edged. They had finally become a hot live act—hot enough to match the serene perfection of their recorded sound. "We can do it all now," beamed Henley. The band’s appearance before a live audience of 300,000 at the ABC-televised California Jam brought them a whole new following and the ensuing tour elicited the best audience reaction they had yet been received. Even as these advances were being made the cracks were beginning to show. Despite Felder’s enthusiasm he wasn’t sure whether he had signed on to a band on the verge of breaking up. Leadon and Felder had more than a few arguments and tension became almost unbearable. Frey usually managed to turn that energy into a rationalization. "We fight with our manager. We fight with each other. Don and Bernie nearly had a fistfight they other day. We fight about everything: playing too loud, facial expressions, drinkin’ too much, stayin’ up too late, talking in a restaurant. Not saying anything when you shoulda spoke up. The issue is not the important thing. The important thing is that it gets vented. When you’re working with a band, when you’re working with a producer, with managers, with a whole lot of other people, it’s all a romantic relationship. When the band don’t get off, the band fights. It’s gonna be released some way. It’s creative tension." Henley summed up Leadon’s growing problem with the band when he said "Glenn and Bernie are the opposites. Bernie is trying to keep it from going too fast while Glenn is trying to keep it from going too slow." An unfortunate illustration of Leadon’s unhappiness came at the end of a triumphant but grueling three month U.S. tour in 1974. The morning after the tour’s last concert the members of the band had all found their way down to the hotel coffee shop for breakfast. There was a general feeling of accomplishment mixed with exhaustion. Glenn Frey’s parents had driven out from Detroit to meet their son. Then, without warning or any kind of buildup, Leadon slumped over on the table and began screaming uncontrollably. He went on for a while doing this while the rest of the band looked on, powerless to help him. Bernie was nearing the end of his road as an Eagle. Leadon got over his road-induced depression long enough to resume touring with the band and assist with their fourth album, One of These Nights, but his heart was no longer with the rest of the group. Ironically one of Leadon’s contributions to the album helped to establish the identity that the band would develop after his departure. Until this point the Eagles had been feeling their way carefully and only with the addition of Felder did they become strong enough as a live group to make the final step toward super-stardom. The band really hadn’t locked into an image at this point, but with One of These Nights they put forward the first of what had become a series of increasingly nihilistic macho poses tied into the band’s self-defined role as spokesmen for a new kind of southern California lifestyle whose images of degradation and decay contrasted with the sun, surf and fun of previous California pop myths. As the band prepared to make One of These Nights the pressure was intense, added to the strain of Leadon’s dissatisfaction and the knowledge that they were expected to come up with something spectacular. The band was being pigeonholed in three different ways and each group of followers was poised to dislike the new offering. Months after the sessions began under Szymczyk at Miami’s Criterion studios reports started to filter out that the group was stalled on the record and breakup rumors abounded. When it finally was released, One of These Nights was exactly what was expected—an album trying self-consciously to be great while satisfying a pop single audience, rockers, r&b fans and those who were looking for the group to make a more "arty" statement. Szymczyk’s production was slick, unusual for him, and the album was commercial without being particularly substantial. Nevertheless it was meticulously crafted, featured superb vocal and instrumental performances and even provided a sense of unity despite the obvious aesthetic fragmentation that was occurring. Though critics have in retrospect pointed to this album as proof of the band’s slick soulessness it was well received on its release, impressing many critics with its precision and thematic interest. Leadon’s role was obviously decreasing—he played lead guitar on only one song on the record that he didn’t write himself, while Felder assumed the role of big gun. "From the day Don Felder joined the band," Frey later said "Bernie felt like he was being threatened or edged out. Felder wanted to have somebody he could play toe to toe with, and he and Bernie never got that off. Hell, I’m not the greatest guitar player in the world, but if I was Bernie Leadon and we got a guy like Felder so we could do some double shit, I’d be ecstatic. But Bernie wasn’t." Of the three songs Leadon contributed to the record, "Hollywood Waltz," written with Tom Leadon, Henley and Frey, probably best sums up his dissatisfaction with the band and its goals while at the same time providing a thematic focus for the album that would soon become the band’s trademark. "Hollywood Waltz" likens the city of L.A. to an aging woman who’s been used up to the point where she’s no longer attractive. This L.A. metaphor-spinning soon became identified with the Eagles. Leadon’s other two contributions to the record were its low points. "Journey of the Sorcerer," which immediately followed "Hollywood Waltz," begins as a banjo instrumental played extremely slowly and soon becomes a full-fledged symphonic dirge with eerie string sections pitched against the banjo. It’s an attempt to make a grand mood statement like the Neil Young/Jack Nietsche orchestrated epics on Buffalo Springfield albums but ends up sounding like a melodramatic "Dueling Banjos." Likewise, the album’s tag line, "I Wish You Peace," fails as Leadon’s below average voice doesn’t convince the listener that he really means what he sings. By contrast, Felder’s position in the group was solidified to great effect. His precision playing on "One of These Nights" and "Too Many Hands" gets the album off on the right track, and "Visions," co-written with Henley, is the album’s only really up tempo tune. If the cool remove of this record was meant to imply a certain macho arrogance, the stance is well represented in the group portraits for the back cover and inner sleeve. The band hadn’t cracked a smile for a promo picture yet, but where before they tried to evoke the image of trail weary cowboys and defeated desperados. now the Eagles projected looks of brooding evil. "This album has a lot to do with our career,’ says Frey, who glares out from the center of the pack in the picture. "Lyin’ Eyes" and "Take It To the Limit" form a kind of epic to contempt, warning off an unfaithful lover (again with a nod to L.A. as a loose woman) and spitting in the face of the aging process, all performed in the most understated hype~-cool style the group could muster. The desired effect was achieved—these glossy soap operas became, along with the title track, a psychodrama trilogy of hit singles that pushed the group’s burgeoning popularity even further. "My feeling," says Frey of One of These Nights being an L.A. album, "is that Los Angeles is the Rome of North America, during the chaos. And if there’s gonna be any kind of fall of the dynasty, I’d like to see it from L.A. because I think L.A. will feel it first. The most critical songwriting is going on in the living rooms of Southern California. Rod Stewart’s moving to L.A. Elton John’s moved to L.A. The Band moved to L.A." Such an apocalyptic vision was not inappropriate, especially since the band was so touchy about its sudden success and how it would affect the future. "L.A. gives and takes," Henley reasons. The days of drowning his sorrow at the Whiskey were apparently forgotten as he said "If you’re strong enough that’s where you go and you can make it. If you don’t make it you can blame anything you want to. All the excuses are there: dope, women, or the business. L.A.’s got every kind of reason and crutch. It’s very romantic. It gets a hold on you. You love it and you hate it. It’s a whore, but it’s a fertile mother. L.A., to me, is what America’s about." Frey is particularly aware of the traps set for him by the L.A. lifestyle. "There are days when I drive to the office, drink a cup of coffee for an hour, check the mail, watch Irving Azoff kill on the phone, get existential anxiety, go to the Cock ‘n Bull to eat, drive to the dry cleaners, drive back up to the house, look out at the view and wonder what’s gonna get me up to do what 1 wanna do. That’s the whole premise of ‘After the Thrill Is Gone.’ Where is the next stimulation?" Frey and Henley spent a lot of time rationalizing the band’s philosophy but Felder was also feeling his aesthetic oats. To him, Eagles music is "a real good statement of the head of earthpeople, the people who have had some drug experiences, the people who have done a lot of thinking about what’s going on. Without getting into the whole cosmic rap like the Grateful Dead. I think it’s a real valid statement about a certain group of people and their evolution at a certain point in time. And that’s what music is, it’s a reflection of what’s happening. Because you can only produce through art what you have seen and what you know and what you have experienced in life. "I think it’s just a real straightforward ‘Hey, this is what I’ve seen and I think you guys have seen the same thing. I’m pretty sure you have.’ Real human experiences are that universal. It won’t be bound in leather books and handed down from generation to generation. All you can ever hope to do in music or in any art is relate something to someone else." Frey took this same idea on the warpath against his favorite subject, the critics. "Some guy reviewed us for the New York Times and labeled our. songs escapist rock. Now to me our songs are more realist rock, confrontist rock, than anybody’s. To me all that glitter stuff is escapist rock, that is fantasyland. What we’re doing is all stuff that happened to us. We don’t make any of it up. It happens to us in real life—a relationship with a girl, a spiritual thing, whatever. I hate those stupid labels. I hate when people call us a country-rock band because they are so full of it. We can do anything! We can do rock and roll, we can do country music— anything!" But as Henley was saying before, the effect of several hit singles was also making them acutely aware of their commercial potential. "The music thing," Henley continues, "when all is said and done, is a business. It’s a weird combination of art and dollars. The opportunities are there, but if you’re not smart you’re gonna get ripped off. It’s as simple as that. Rock and roll is a business. Rock and roll music is marketed like deodorant or detergent." Henley’s honesty may have been brutal but his opinion simply wasn’t shared by either Meisner or Leadon, and Leadon in particular was impatient to get on with it. "Everybody realizes that this is a good opportunity to make some bucks," he granted, but added "To me, sun and salt water is where it’s at. That, a little wine and my old lady that’s it. That’s all that matters." As if to prove that point, Leadon went ahead and kissed the Eagles goodbye in late 1975. The band had a massive tour in progress at the time and were forced to replace Leadon in about a week. They turned to a logical choice, a good friend and tremendous guitarist who, conveniently enough, was also managed by Irving Azoff: Joe Walsh. "We didn’t want any rumors to get around that Bernie had left and that was it for the Eagles," comments Frey. "We wanted it out quickly that Bernie had been replaced by Joe and the group was on its way to New Zealand. Even so there were rumors that Joe wasn’t staying with us and that the group was going to split up. We had an indication about a year and a half before Bernie left that he was planning to leave—or at least he wasn’t going to stay with us for the duration. The duration as he saw it was a much longer period of time than he wanted it to be. We talked to Joe at the beginning of 1975. We knew which way things were going to go and it was more or less a matter of time. There was never any question of trying anybody else. We never made any other calls because there really wasn’t anybody else who could join our band, and we wanted to keep it a five piece band instead of going back down to four again." The Eagles, or at least Frey, Henley and Felder, had been hanging out with Walsh for awhile and played on two of his solo albums, Time Out and You Can’t Argue With A Sick Mind. But in the end it was Leadon’s disgust with the band that precipitated the change. Even if they had actually fired him. "The rest of us were willing to make more sacrifices to this trip we’re on than he was," Frey said of Leadon’s departure. Then Frey indicated that it may not have been just Leadon’s decision to make the parting. "He cared more about his personal life. It was more or less a mutual agreement. "We thought we had two and a half year’s more work to go," Frey explained. "We think we’ll tour through 1977 or ‘78 and maybe at that point we can spend a year off the road. It’s not good to stop too soon and break the momentum you get going in a business as fickle as the music business." Walsh would prove his worth quickly. In fact, Walsh was soon to turn the Eagles into what amounted to a whole new band.
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