Original subtitles

There are stars

in the southern sky

Southward as you go

There is moonlight

and moss in the trees

Down the Seven Bridges Road

- Pretty close. - Not too bad.

It's gonna be about 2 minutes, so come on.

- Do what you got to do. - We got to go.

I need a wrist band.

It's something that you can't do forever, you know?

This is not a lifetime career that we can do, you know? So...

It's not?!

All right, let's go.

Thank you and good evening. We're the Eagles from Los Angeles.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Well, I'm running down the road

trying to loosen my load

I got seven women on my mind...

People are always saying things to me like,

You're just like a normal person.

And I always say, Of course!.

All right!

We might be a little more world-wise

than some of those kids, that's all.

We just maybe have less innocence than they do, but

I eat, I sleep, I fall in love, I fall out of love, I work.

I do pretty much the same thing.

You got your demons and you got desires

But I got a few of my own

Oooh someone to be kind to

in between the dark and the light

Oooh coming right behind you

Swear I'm gonna find you one of these nights!

We saw a poster of us when On the Border was made.

Everybody looked like little kids, like, arly 20s and stuff.

And everybody didn't have their wrinkles and baggy eyes.

Sort of like a president when he first takes office.

And then, like 4 or 5 years later,

he just walks out, and his hair is grey,

and his eyes are drooping, and he's just really real burned.

Spent the last year Rocky Mountain way

Couldn't get much higher!

The first thing that happens is you get some kind of label,

then you've got to live up to it, and then you just get caught in that,

and I forget what the second thing is!

You know I've always been a dreamer

Spend my life running round

And it's so hard to change

It's hard. It's like living two lives.

I have a family, 3 kids.

And it's just hard to live in between that line

of being out on the road and being away for a month.

Keep on turning out and burning out

And turning out the same

So put me on a highway

And show me a sign

And take it to the limit

One more time.

Maybe we wouldn't want to do this any more,

or maybe we can't do this any more,

or maybe nobody will give a shit if we do this any more.

Take it to the limit

One more time.

Thank you.

No, I insist. You first.

Hi, there.

Lock it up.

A hearty bunch out there. He's not even here. Now lock it up.

Hey, driver, lock 'em up for us tonight, ok?

- Out of sight. / - You just don't know what those kids will do.

Doggone.

How about a beer? Is that what I heard?

- You got it, brother. - Don't hurt yourself, young America.

- Would you like one? - Yeah, I would like one.

I'm gonna drink tonight.

I think they feel like they're up there,

like they're on the stage.

Cos we look like them. We dress like them.

Part of it is that, and part of it's the records.

I think they just relate to the songs.

I think it's 50/50, I guess.

The thing is now is to try to see how long

we can stay up here at the top of the mountain.

It's very narrow and windy up here.

We can probably continue doing what we're doing as long as the songs keep coming.

That's the only thing that frightens us,

is to not be able to do that any more.

If we go to the well and nothing comes up, we would be in trouble. So far, so good.

I think we can maintain this for a few more years.

I don't see why not.

Other people have. The Rolling Stones and the Who and the Led...

and Led Zeppelin. I almost said THE Led Zeppelin! ...have done it.

Chicago's done it.

Groups last longer than they used to, you know?

Shit don't float.

90- of the time, being in the Eagles was a fucking blast.

I was living the dream.

He was a hard-headed man

He was brutally handsome...

We never in our wildest dreams figured on being this successful and lasting this long.

She held him up...

We were a bunch of guys out there touring the country.

We had a little private plane. We had parties after the shows.

We had a good time. We were starting to make some money.

They took all the right pills They threw outrageous parties...

We had 3 guitar players finally, so we could rock a bit.

So, it was a good time, a good time for me, a good time for Don.

Life in the fast lane

Surely make you lose your mind...

Everybody was really happy...

then.

Life in the fast lane

Everything, all the time

Life in the fast lane...

It was going really fast, and probably too fast.

There was turmoil within the band.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves.

As Glenn used to say, We made it, and it ate us.

It's hard to be in a group. It's a bit like being in a marriage,

if you quadruple it or quintuple it, in our case.

They asked Don when the Eagles broke up, What was that like for you?

And he said it was a horrible relief.

And I think that clocks it pretty well.

You're a real pro, Don, all the way.

Yeah, you are, too. The way you handle people.

Except the people you pay, nobody gives a shit about it.

Fuck you. I've been paying you for 7 years, you fuckhead.

So much stuff just happened.

There's a philosopher who says, As you live your life,

it appears to be

anarchy and chaos and random events,

non-related events smashing into each other

and causing this situation.

And then... then this happens, and it's overwhelming,

and it just looks like, What in the world is going on?

And later, when you look back at it,

it looks like a finely-crafted novel.

But at the time, it don't!

And a lot of the Eagles' story is like that.

I'm gonna fuckin' kill you. I can't wait. I can't wait.

We might as well start at the beginning.

I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. My dad worked in a factory.

My mother baked pies at General Motors.

I started taking piano lessons when I was 5 years old.

That alone could get you beat up after school in suburban Detroit.

And then she said...

Just because you've become a young man now

There's still some things that you don't understand...

Detroit was Motown, and so they played all the Motown hits.

Keep your freedom for as long as you can now

My momma told me, you'd better shop around....

And that was the kind of stuff that we would listen to.

I stopped playing piano when I was 12. It was too much.

I wanted to do other things,

and I think the girl thing was starting to happen, as well.

Then the Beatles came along,

and my aunt took me down to see the Beatles at the Olympia.

It was crazy.

I remember having a girl that was standing on her seat in front of me

fall backwards into my arms, delirious, going, Paul, Paul!.

And I thought, Oh, my God!.

I have a very vivid memory of seeing the Beatles

with my parents on our old Admiral TV set.

It was like a bolt of lightning.

It had a huge impact on me. It was revolutionary.

And it was an impact that would last a lifetime,

and I know that had a huge impact on Glenn, too,

even though we didn't know each other at the time.

Linden, Texas, is my hometown. It's a small town in North-eastern Texas.

When I was growing up, the population was about 2,500, 2,600.

I can settle down...

It's primarily an agricultural area.

Some people worked at the steel mill.

It's just a typical small Texas town.

There's an old courthouse dating back to before the Civil War

and one stoplight.

It's kind of like The Last Picture Show, you know?

It was a great place musically,

because it was kind of a cultural crossroads.

It's really located where the old South begins to meet the West.

Linden, Texas, was the birthplace of Scott Joplin and T-Bone Walker.

Yes, time is hard, baby...

Both my parents loved music, so we had a lot of records in the house.

I was exposed to music of all kinds from an early age.

Country and Western music, Western swing music, gospel music, Blues...

Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline.

More, more, more

Gonna live it up and tear it down

Get in the groove and paint the town

Got a lot of rhythm in my soul...

There was a 50,000-watt radio station in New Orleans,

and I heard things on that station that I didn't hear anywhere else.

So, I had a lot of radio coming in.

And when I would go to work with my dad,

he would listen to a station in Shreveport, Louisiana. KWKH.

Say, hey, good lookin!

What you got cookin?

How's about cooking something up for me?

And that station broadcast a radio show called the Louisiana Hayride,

where Elvis Presley made his first radio broadcast in 1954.

Well, that's alright, Mama

That's alright with you

That's alright, Mama

Just any way you do

That's alright

That's alright...

The very first rock 'n' roll record I bought was by Elvis Presley.

Anyway you do...

My playing the drums was sort of an organic process.

I began by beating on my school books with my fingers

and with pencils.

I would beat out little cadences,

and I used to drive my classmates crazy doing that, until, I think,

one day, somebody said to me -

I think it was my friend Richard Bowden - he said,

Why don't you just start playing the drums?

I managed to cobble together a drum kit from old drums

that I found stashed in the back of the band hall at high school.

And then one day, my mom said, Come on, get in the car.

And she drove me to a town about an hour and a half away

called Sulphur Springs, Texas, to McKay Music Company.

Much to my surprise,

she bought me a set of red-sparkle Slingerland drums

that I still have today.

So, I have to give my parents a lot of credit.

They bought me that drum kit

even though they couldn't really afford it.

The first band I was in was a band with my high-school buddy

Richard Bowden and another high-school friend, Jerry Surratt,

and we played Dixieland jazz music. Nobody sang. We just played music.

I went to a high-school party, and there were 4 kids

who were freshmen in high school who were playing.

I was a junior, and I had a couple beers that night and said,

Hey, do you know Satisfaction? Cos I can sing it.

So, I became the lead singer of the Subterraneans.

And I try and I try

And I try...

I played in the Subterraneans for a while,

and then I played in another band called the Mushrooms.

The most important thing that happened to me

when I was in Detroit was I met Bob Seger.

Yeah

I'm gonna tell my tale, come on!

He took me under his wing.

He invited me to recording sessions that he was having,

so I could see how records were made.

I was his mentor.

He was just so young, and I liked him right away

because he was so funny.

He had a great sense of humour, and, like me,

I could see he was really ambitious. He really wanted to be on the radio.

He cut a song called Ramblin' Gamblin' Man.

He let me play acoustic guitar on the basic track

and sing background vocals.

Ramblin' man

A gamblin' man...

You can really hear Glenn blurt out on the first chorus.

He comes out really loud. Tremendous gusto.

Of course, that was a national hit for us, so that was really cool.

Bob was the first guy that wrote his own songs and recorded them

that I had ever met.

He said, if you want to make it,

you're gonna have to write your own songs.

And I said, What if they're bad?.

And he said, They're gonna be bad.

He says, You just keep writing and keep writing,

and eventually, you'll write a good song.

We were gonna have a band together.

He was gonna get rid of his other guys,

and I was gonna be his bass player.

It didn't work out.

My mom found me smoking pot with a friend of mine

in somebody's basement, and she called up Seger's manager,

Punch Andrews, and said, Just a minute, not so fast.

In the years leading up to the Great Depression,

my dad had to quit school after the eighth grade.

He had to go home and work in the fields with his brother and sister

to help support the family.

His fondest wish, in fact, his life's goal,

was that I would go to college.

Every Saturday night, he would bring home 7 quarters,

and we'd put them in a piggy bank, and when those quarters

amounted to 100, he would take me to the bank

and we would buy a savings bond, a United States savings bond,

and put that away for my college education.

So, between what my dad had saved and between what I was making

doing gigs all over Texas and Arkansas and Louisiana

on weekends, I paid for 3 and a half years of college.

They have a world-famous music department in which I did not excel.

I took one music course.

I think it was beginning theory, and I flunked.

I made an F.

But I didn't really care because I was an English major.

After the Mushrooms, I got invited to join this band

called the Four of Us.

Started getting into some of the California bands -

the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys.

Always wanted to go to California.

And I got out there, my mind was blown.

The vegetation - I'd never seen palm trees.

It was just like a dream come true.

So you want to be a rock'n'roll star?

Then listen now to what I say

Just get an electric guitar...

The first celebrity I saw was David Crosby.

And when your hair's combed right and your pants fit tight

It's gonna be all right...

And he had on that flat-brimmed hat that he wore

on the second Byrds album, and he had a little leather cape on,

and I just looked and I thought, My God, there's David Crosby.

Zoom, and we went right by.

And in a week or two if you make the charts

The girls'll tear you apart...

And the first person I met was John David Souther.

We wanted to get high and play music.

There were two of us with guitars.

We were listening to a lot of that sort of interface between

rock 'n' roll and country and western music that was

happening in Southern California at the time with the Byrds

and Dillard & Clark and the Burrito Brothers and Poco.

When I last saw you

I couldn't find a reason why

I felt kind of blue...

There was a lot of great music of that sort going around then.

Longbranch Pennywhistle here.

I suppose you wonder what that name meant, and John David and I -

It was a well-kept spring back funky women.

The songs weren't very good.

I don't think Glenn and I were very far along as songwriters then.

Run, boy, run

You gotta move...

We were a funny little group, but we got gigs.

We managed to play in some of the folk clubs around LA:

the Golden Bear and the Ash Grove.

Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah

What condition my condition was in...

We had a chance meeting with Kenny Rogers in Dallas, Texas, one day.

He was coming through town with the First Edition.

They were very hot at the time.

I tripped on a cloud and fell-a 8 miles high...

I remember this like it was yesterday.

This little kid came up and said, Mr Rogers, he said,

I'm Don Henley, and I'm with a group called Felicity,

and we're doing a show tonight, and we'd love to have you come see us.

And I said, I'm really sorry, but I don't do that.

I don't just go to clubs and watch groups.

He said, I really think you'd like us.

And I thought, That's pretty cool, so I did.

From the minute that I met you, baby

You were hanging your chains on me

And I loved you so

I nearly lost my mind...

Kenny is a Texas boy, and he was looking for groups to produce.

So, I brought them to LA,

and they literally lived at my house for about 4 months.

We changed their name to Shiloh.

It was so much fun to take them into the studio.

Well, thank you Mr Big Time Music Business Man

for taking time to listen to my song...

With Shiloh, we made one album, and it had a single called

Simple Little Down Home Rock and Roll Love Song for Rosie.

Not exactly a short title!

Just a simple little down home

rock and roll love song for Rosie...

We didn't know much about the business at that point.

We were pretty naive.

Going down to the swamp river country some day...

We kicked around in the LA clubs for a while,

played the Whisky, played some of the clubs down in the South Bay area,

and nothing really happened for us.

JD and I were looking for any place to play.

We had heard about this guy Jackson Browne.

He'd been playing the same clubs we had,

but we never had seen him perform.

- This is California. Mr Jackson Browne. - Ah, thank you, thank you.

'Then there were a bunch of gigs that they had and some gigs that I had'

that they would show up at my gigs

and me at their gigs, and we became really good friends.

And we'd start talking about, Where do you live, and what's going on?.

And Jackson said, You should come down to Echo Park.

Rent's real cheap.

Glenn got the apartment next to my apartment,

and this apartment cost like 125 or something a month.

And I needed to economize, so I moved into the basement

underneath Glenn's place, which I could get into for 35 a month.

It only had one door. It was really just kind of an illegal place,

just a cubby-hole, and that's where Jackson lived,

with JD and I above. That was it.

There was a stereo, a piano, a bed, a guitar, you know, a teapot.

We slept late in those days, except around 9 o'clock in the morning,

I'd hear Jackson Browne's teapot going off,

this whistle in the distance.

And then I'd hear him playing piano.

I didn't really know how to write songs.

I knew I wanted to write songs, but I didn't know exactly:

you just wait around for inspiration, what was the deal?

I learned through Jackson's ceiling

and my floor exactly how to write songs 'cos Jackson would get up,

and he'd play the first verse and first chorus,

and he'd play it 20 times until he had it just the way he wanted.

And then there'd be silence.

And then I'd hear the teapot go off again.

Then it'd be quiet for 10 or 20 minutes.

Then I'd hear him start to play again,

and there was the second verse.

So, then he'd work on the second verse, and he'd play it 20 times.

And then he'd go back to the top of the song,

and he'd play the first verse, the first chorus and the second verse

another 20 times until he was really comfortable with it and

change a word here or there, and I'm up there going,

So, that's how you do it.

Elbow grease, time, thought, persistence.

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years

And the slow parade of fears

Without crying...

I wanted to kill him sometimes.

Jackson would play the same phrase from Doctor, My Eyes for 6 weeks.

The same thing with The Pretender. I just wanted to murder him.

Doctor, my eyes...

And it was during that period of time that I met Glenn Frey

because we were on the same label, called Amos Records.

Some of the things that struck me

when I first met Glenn were things we had in common.

Both of our dads made a living in the automotive industry.

Glenn and I loved old cars, especially cars from the '50s.

He had a '55 Chevy that he named Gladys.

And we drove around Los Angeles in Gladys.

Check out the new talent.

There's no better place in town to catch those new singers

and songwriters than down at the Monday night Hoot Night,

Doug Weston's world-famous Troubadour, happening tonight.

The Troubadour club was the centre of the musical universe.

It was a very seminal place. It was the place to see and be seen.

Every Monday night they had an open stage.

It was called Hoot Night.

The Troubadour was the place to go if you were young

and happening and trying to get involved in the music scene.

It was happening there.

California

Oh, California

I'm coming home

Oh, make me feel good rock'n'roll band

I'm your biggest fan

California, I'm coming home.

I saw a lot of great acts at the Troubadour.

So far away

Doesn't anybody stay in one place any more?

It would be so fine to see your face...

I witnessed Elton John's American debut performance in 1970.

And it's good old country comfort in my bones

Just the sweetest sound my ears have ever known...

Everybody who was anybody at the time played at the Troubadour.

Of course, Linda,

she still has one of my favourite voices in the business, ever.

Feeling better now we're through

Feeling better cos I'm over you...

The Troubadour is really responsible for the entire music scene.

Everything I got, really, was virtually through either

performing there onstage or in the bar, you know?

I'm telling you now, baby

and I'm going my way...

I was just started managing Linda then,

and Linda was going to be a star. hat voice as big as a house.

There wasn't anybody in the room

that cared about anything but that voice.

I'm gonna say it again...

One night, we're down at the Troubadour,

and John Boylan comes to me - he's managing Linda Ronstadt -

and he says, I'm taking Linda on the road.

We need guys who can sing. You want to play rhythm guitar and sing?.

I offered him 250 a week, and he took it.

I went back to him, I said,

Can you give me some of that money right now?.

I think he gave me 50 bucks.

And then I found Don from this band called Shiloh.

I heard him playing at the Troubadour.

I'm coming down...

I was looking for a job. Glenn introduced me to John Boylan.

I auditioned at this little house in Laurel Canyon.

I had listened to her album hundreds of times,

so I knew the songs backwards and forwards,

and I guess I passed the audition, because I got the job.

I got a feeling called the blues Oh, Lord

Since my baby said good-bye

And I don't know what I'll do

All I do is sit and cry Oh, Lord

I've grown so used to him somehow

But I'm nobody's sugar momma now

And I'm lonesome

Got the lovesick blues.

I learned a lot from Linda.

It was a very formative experience for me.

And she could hang with the guys.

She could drink tequila with the rest of us and hold her own.

Saving nickels, saving dimes...

It was really very ad hoc.

We had a station wagon, put the gear in the back.

We'd all get in it and drive to the college and play there.

As a cost-cutting measure, band members had to share

rooms in those days, so Glenn and I were roommates.

- What did you guys eat? - I had a bowl of Rice Krispies.

Ladies and gentlemen, Linda Ronstadt.

It's funny. I seem to get people at a critical stage in their development

and they build their chops.

There's nothing that gets your chops up better than playing every single night.

If the same thing happened to everybody

That just happened to me...

Linda and John Boylan really like the way Henley and I play,

really like the way we sing with her, and they start to get

a vision of putting together a super group to back up Linda -

the best of the new country-rock musicians,

and we were going to be part of it.

I remember talking with Don, and Don said,

You know, I'd rather, like, just be in a band with you.

And I said,

Yes, me too. I'd rather just be in a band with you.

So, we went to Linda and said,

We really appreciate everything you've done for us, and it means

a lot, and we love playing with you, but we'd like to have our own band.

If you won't be with me someday...

I think a lot of people

could get miffed by that, say, Wait a second.

I brought you out here, you know.

I gave you a paying job when you couldn't afford

your own drinks at the Troubadour bar, and now you want to quit?.

Smile...

Linda was extremely gracious about the whole thing, as was John Boylan.

They weren't resentful or bitter at all. They were great.

They were supportive, as a matter of fact.

There you go and baby

Here am I

Well you left me here

So I could sit and cry...

They started talking about putting a band together,

and we told them they should get Bernie Leadon.

I was in several bands in LA early on, I met Linda.

Then I worked with Dillard & Clark -

Doug Dillard, banjo player, and Gene Clark from the Byrds.

And so, now I'm in an offshoot of the Byrds world,

and then that turned into an invitation from the Burrito Brothers

from Chris Hillman to come join them for their second album on A&M.

Since we got the older guys to show us how

I don't see why we can't stop right now...

And I was still in the Burritos, but they had lost Gram Parsons,

and it had changed, and I wasn't that interested any more.

Bernie was a very accomplished banjo player,

and he could also play guitar in what we called the Bindi lick style.

It was pioneered by a fellow named Clarence White.

And then Glenn told me about this guy named Randy Meisner who

had been in a band called Poco.

Randy could sing really high, and he also played bass.

It's a good morning and I'm feeling fine...

So, Glenn just kind of asked me one day

if I'd be interested in starting a group with him.

And he had Henley and Bernie. That was the first Eagles.

So, the plan was that Glenn and I would try to recruit Bernie

and Randy, and then we would all go to David Geffen and see

if he would give us a recording contract.

In the '70s, Asylum Records was considered the LA sound -

Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,

Jackson Browne.

David Geffen, who started Asylum, is our patron, you know.

A Medici, Medici of rock'n'roll.

It's a very artist-oriented company, and

whatever they want to do, we support them.

If we believe in them, we'll stick with them,

whether they make it or not.

Jackson was our conduit to David Geffen.

He was the first guy to get signed

by Geffen's new Asylum Records label.

So, we all walk in Geffen's office, and we basically said,

Here we are.

Bernie Leadon just boldly says to Geffen,

Well, do you want us or not?.

They were dying to sign with me.

I think they were very ambitious, particularly Glenn.

Glenn wanted to have a hit band.

I loved the way Don sang.

We all had hopes for it.

All of a sudden, we were signed to Geffen's new label.

They sent us back to the drawing board.

They said, You guys need to go and rehearse some more.

They said, You need to write some songs.

You're not really ready to record yet.

So, they packed us off to Aspen, Colorado.

It could have been worse.

There were people who were way higher than any of us had ever been.

It was a Wild West wide-open town at that point.

We played at a club up there called The Gallery,

which was located right at the foot of Aspen Mountain.

Tryin'

Got to keep on tryin'

Tryin'...

We didn't have a big catalogue of our own tunes at that point.

We were just getting started.

We needed to learn how to play together as a band, and we did.

The moon is a weeper

The sun is your clown

And his way of lovin'

Is holdin' you down...

And then it was like, OK, we need to make a record.

Who are we going to get to produce it?.

We wanted to shoot as high as we could.

Glenn Frey came up with Glyn Johns as an idea.

Glyn Johns was a name that kept popping up on records we loved.

The first time I heard them was in Aspen.

I was not at all impressed, really.

I thought they were confused.

Glenn Frey wanted to be in a rock'n'roll band,

and Bernie Leadon, on the other side, was one of the greatest

acoustic players, country players, if you like.

And there was a bit of a confusion.

I didn't see what all the fuss was about at all.

So I passed.

We're like, God dang, what?. It's not what we expected.

He had worked with Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Stones,

so he was coming from that, and he said flat-out,

You're not that, man.

It isn't always easy to spot what's hot about an artist

if you go and see them play. You can see them on a bad night.

It's not necessarily the fairest way of doing it.

So, I thought, The best thing to do would be for me to see them

in a rehearsal situation where we could converse

and they could play new stuff and I could stop and start.

And they played the stuff that they played in Aspen,

and it all sounded pretty much the same.

I was thinking, I don't get it. I still don't get it.

So, we decided to take a break for lunch

and as we were leaving,

somebody said, Why don't we play Glyn that ballad?

My daddy was a handsome devil

He had a chain 5 miles long...

And it just completely blew me off my feet.

There it was. That was the sound.

From every link a heart did dangle

For every maid...

Extraordinary blend of voices, wonderful harmony sound.

Just stunning.

And that was it. I was in with both feet.

Now I have loved you like a baby...

Except that Glyn Johns

didn't want to come to the United States and work.

He wanted to work in London in the recording studios

that he was familiar with, and so they shipped us off to England.

I don't think that any of us except Bernie had ever been out

of the country, so it was a little bit like going to the moon for us.

I'm hanging on to my peace of mind

I just don't know

I'm hanging on to those good times...

And I'm stoked. I'm thinking,

I'm going to go to Beatle country with Glyn Johns.

I'm going to record in the same studio

where Led Zeppelin did Rock And Roll.

Oh, my God, I can't wait.

We were recorded at the famous Olympic studios,

where a lot of legendary records had been made.

Glyn Johns, he had a certain style of recording,

which was very organic.

He would simply place a few mikes around the room, and off you go.

Rather than, for example, placing a microphone on each

and every drum, he would just put three microphones on the drum kit.

He was accustomed to recording people

like John Bonham with Led Zeppelin.

And I said to Glyn, I want the bass drum to be louder.

And he said, If you want it louder, hit it harder.

And I hit it as hard as I could,

but I couldn't hit it as hard as John Bonham.

He had a bunch of rules that really didn't suit me

and some of the other guys, too.

No getting high in the studio, no drinking in the studio.

I agreed wholeheartedly with Glyn Johns

regarding drugs and alcohol in the studio -

that we'd get more work done and that it would be better work.

When I got the opportunity to produce and therefore

be in the chair, I decided that I would no longer put up with that.

Somebody said to me the other night that

I was the designated driver in the '60s and early '70s.

Glyn had worked with the Rolling Stones at a time when they went

to the studio and did nothing except wait for Keith to go down

in the basement and play his guitar until he came up with some riff.

So, Glyn was impatient.

The Stones had burned him out on the

get high in the studio and wait for something to happen kind of thing.

Let's go. We're rolling.

1, 2, 3.

I like the way your sparkling earrings lay

against your skin so brown

And I wanna sleep with you

in the desert tonight...

There were three hit singles on the first album.

Peaceful Easy Feeling was written by Jack Tempchin,

who is our friend and frequent collaborator.

Cos I got a peaceful easy feeling...

Peaceful Easy Feeling captures the time, captures this attitude.

You can feel the wind blowing across the desert.

What a feeling

The second hit was Witchy Woman, which I wrote with Bernie.

Witchy Woman started as a guitar figure.

Then we were jamming it one day, and everybody was digging it.

And then Henley came back the next day with the lyrics.

Raven hair and ruby lips

sparks fly from her finger tips

Echoed voices in the night

She's a restless spirit on an endless flight

Woo hoo, witchy woman

See how high she flies

Woo hoo, witchy woman

She got the moon in her eye...

During the time that the Eagles were on the road for the first album,

we had just come through the '60s - civil rights movement,

'68 - all the assassinations, all the rioting.

The Vietnam War still winding up. Nixon, Watergate.

I really think that part of the reason that the Eagles

succeeded the way they did was because the country

and people and young people needed to feel like things were OK.

So, here comes this song Take It Easy.

Well I'm a runnin' down the road

Trying to loosen my load

I've got seven women on my mind

Four that want to own me

Two that want to stone me

One says she's a friend of mine

Take it easy

Take it easy

Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy

Lighten up while you still can

Don't even try to understand

Just find a place to play your hand

Take it easy...

Jackson had this song called Take It Easy.

He couldn't finish the song. He was stuck in the second verse.

He had, I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.

And so, I filled in, Such a fine sight to see

It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford

slowing down to take a look at me.

Well, I'm a standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona

Such a fine sight to see

It's a girl my Lord in a flat-bed Ford

Slowin' down to take a look at me...

Girl, Lord, Ford, all the redemption.

Girls and cars and redemption all in this one line.

He's very mercurical. You know mercurial? Mercurial.

And he's mercurical, too.

We may lose and we may win

But we will never be here again

So open up I'm climbin' in

So take it easy...

All right!

Someone once asked Stephen Stills about the Eagles,

and his response was, They just wanted to be us.

But when it came time to do our album covers,

they suggested that we use Gary Burden and Henry Diltz.

They had done the first Crosby, Stills, Nash cover

and some stuff for Joni.

The one I really remember was

The Mamas & The Papas all sitting in the bathtub.

That was one of their album covers.

So, these were the cool guys to have work on your album.

Gary Burden is about 40 years old, full beard, long, greyish,

wavy hair, crystal-blue eyes.

Henry was a sort of magical, non-invasive photographer guy.

For the Eagles,

it was the peyote spirits which the American Indians, of course,

ate peyote and had a very, very spiritual experience,

and they would maybe meet their animal totem

or they would get their quest for life.

My deal was always to take the bands out of their comfort zone.

Take them away from their girlfriends, from telephones,

from anything, and have them under my control so that

I could get things to happen without any interference.

And so, we would take trips.

Now, how this plan came about exactly,

today you have to scratch your head, but this was the plan.

OK, we'll all go to the Troubadour,

and we'll stay there till closing time.

And then we'll drive to Joshua Tree.

This morning I don't know...

We had a bag of peyote buttons, a bunch of trail mix,

some tequila, and some water, and some blankets.

And the 7 of us set out for Joshua Tree.

We got there probably about 4.30 in the morning, parked in this

special place that I don't know how we found it in the dark.

We all took one peyote button, put it in our mouths,

and started hiking up to the place that we were supposed to go.

So, right around the time that we're getting to the campsite

and we're starting to build the fire

and starting to cook some peyote tea, and the first buttons -

everybody's chewing the first button

and the drug starts coming on just as the sun is rising.

Earlybird by the Eagles

I think everybody got higher than they ever imagined

anybody could be, and it was a good thing.

We were after getting into life deeper

and better and more and surrendering.

I had to go to the bathroom, so I left the campsite,

and I hear the guys yelling from the campfire, Eagle! Eagle!.

I look up, and it's soaring right above me. Huge wingspan.

I'm scuffling to get my pants back up, and I'm slipping.

I fall down, and the bird just kind of goes,

Eagles, huh? Yeah, I don't think so.

The images of the first album cover

really set the tone for visually what Eagles are.

Gary designed the album cover so that it would open up into a

whole poster, and at the bottom were the Eagles around the campfire.

And then, up at the top, it would go on up into the sky

and the eagle up in the sky.

But David Geffen thought that would be confusing,

and without consulting us or consulting Gary or the Eagles

or anybody, he told them, Just glue it shut.

And so when they glued it shut, you would get this:

this album, front and back, and you'd open it up,

and it would be upside-down, which didn't make any sense to anybody.

The fact was that the success of the first album scared the hell out of us.

Why me instead of some guy down the street?

Why me and some friends of mine who are just as good of musicians

as I am, but it happened to me and it didn't happen to them?

I don't know.

Success can sometimes be just as disconcerting

and frightening as failure, especially

when you have questions about your own worthiness and your abilities.

It came time to do another album.

Don and I decided we'd try to write some songs together.

I had been sitting over on Aqua Vista.

I was living on the couch,

and I'm just laying there playing the guitar, and I started going...

Ding-digga-ding digga...

I'm thinking,

Yeah, that's pretty cool, kind of Roy Orbison, kind of Mexican.

Yeah, I like that.

So, I showed him that guitar riff.

I said, Maybe we should write something to this.

It's another tequila sunrise

Staring slowly across the sky

I said goodbye

He was just a hired hand

Workin' on a dreamy plan to try...

Songs like "Desperado" and Tequila Sunrise,

that's when Glenn and I began collaborating, and

that's when we really became a songwriting team.

Every night when the sun goes down

Just another lonely boy in town

And she's out runnin' round.

Earlier that year,

someone had given Jackson Browne the book of gunfighters.

It had all the big outlaw groups, Frank and Jesse, the Doolin-Dalton gang.

We were all just fascinated with those guys,

and we thought it would make a great analogy.

For example, we live outside the laws of normality.

Also, you usually, because of records or bank robberies,

you usually heard about these guys before you ever saw them.

They had posters that were wanted posters up for people.

There just seemed to be some parallels.

It wasn't really like we were outlaws,

but I think they did have their nobler characteristics.

A life on the road is the life of an outlaw, man.

We started talking about it.

Then we said, Maybe we should do an album all about the rebels.

We got to doing this outlaw album,

and we had 8 songs finished, and we needed 2 more.

An idea Randy came up with was how the guy became an outlaw

and how he became a guitar player.

He was a poor boy raised in a small family

He kinda had a craving For something no one else could see

They said that he was crazy The kind that no lady should meet

He ran off to the city Then wandered around in the street.

I kind of started it, and that's what usually happened.

I'd get a verse or two, and then I'm done,

and they would help fill in the blanks.

Oh, yeah. He wants to see the lights a-flashing

And listen to the thunder ring.

Nobody expected there to be a concept album with western cowboys music.

Don Henley was from Texas. He was a cowboy.

Glenn was from Detroit. He wanted to be a cowboy.

Because I knew all these guys had a little cowboy inside of them,

I took them to Western Costume and just said, Pick out your persona.

Their premise was that, if they had lived 100 years ago,

in like 1872, they probably would have been gunslingers.

Everybody's going to be firing in the direction of this building right here.

Jackson, J.D., Boyd, you all got to be in the picture more.

- We're going to be in there. - You ready? 1, 2, 3!

And we fired so many blanks that it was a cloud of smoke hanging

over this western town,

and the fire department came cos' they thought it was a fire.

Keep firing!

We were just a bunch of kids. We were just playing around.

The picture that's on the back of the album,

there's a lot of reality in it.

All of the agents and managers and road managers, all the guys

who didn't play are standing up, alive with badges and guns,

and the four Eagles at the time and Jackson and I are all dead, bound

up the way they used to do when they'd catch outlaws in those days.

They'd stand them up for display.

People never tired of looking at the corpse of a bad boy.

We all felt, when we were doing it and as it was delivered, that it

was another really remarkable record on the part of the band.

It was pretty extraordinary.

The band and I were enormously thrilled with it.

They literally carried me out of the control room.

They chaired me out of the control room.

Desperado

Is there gonna be anything left...

Desperado comes out, and it bombs.

Jerry Greenberg was the Vice President of Atlantic Records.

They were excited to get the second Eagles album.

We played him Desperado, and he said,

Hmm, that's nice, that's good, that's nice.

And turned around and said, "God, they made a fuckin' cowboy record".

Desperado

Oh, you ain't gettin' no younger.

I was extremely flattered that Linda recorded "Desperado".

It was really her that popularized the song.

Her version was very poignant and beautiful.

And freedom, oh, freedom

That's just some people talkin'

Your prisoner is walking through this world all alone.

There have been a lot of articles and things

that identify me with the L.A. sound.

It's sort of me and Jackson Browne and the Eagles.

All of us are reaching out for

other musical influences all the time.

The so-called southern California sound was developing.

It was fresh, it was different, it was unique.

It was a melting pot, people moving

here from all over the United States to pursue their dream.

Actors, musicians, wannabe managers, agents, wannabe, you know, like me.

I picked up the phone cold and called David Geffen,

who was just starting Asylum Records.

Long story short, I took a job as a manager with Asylum.

I was intrigued.

I wanted to know about the Eagles and meet the Eagles

cos' I was a fan.

Emergency?

I get a phone call. Glenn Frey's on the phone.

We need money for Christmas. Can you book dates?.

I book some dates.

So, I get on a plane and go out to meet them.

First of all, the show was fantastic.

Crowd was nothing like I'd seen a year, year and a half earlier.

- Good evening. Welcome to the Portland version of... / - Spread Eagle.

Spread Eagle. Tonight, the promoter gave us chopsticks.

I don't think we ever checked in a hotel.

We went from there to a party at a sorority house.

One thing led to another, and I'd never seen anything like this.

They wouldn't give us any booze in the bar.

We tried to get some booze, but they fucked up,

so we may burn the fucking place down. We're not sure.

I don't think we went to sleep.

It was Eagle mania.

And then they went off to England to record On the Border with Glyn Johns.

They were quite open to being produced.

Understandably, that changed.

They began to be more opinionated and less insecure, perhaps.

We wanted to play rock 'n' roll or at least a more rock 'n -roll

version of country music, and Glyn Johns

was of the opinion that we weren't really capable of that.

I think he had been bombarded by loud,

aggressive rock 'n' roll for many, many years.

At that point in his life, he wanted mellow people and mellow music,

and we weren't exactly at the same stage in life.

Frey sort of took over more.

He had this desire to be something that

I didn't really feel that they were capable of doing.

He and Glenn Frey were like oil and water. They clashed frequently.

In the studio, Glyn Johns was pretty much a schoolmarm.

He'd push, push, push, you know? And then he'd say, That's it.

That's good enough. We're moving on. You're not a rock 'n-roll band.

The Who is a rock 'n-roll band, and you're not that.

After each of those records, the band freaked out and said,

We've made a huge mistake.

Glyn Johns missed it.

We actually had conversations.

Desperado hadn't done as well as the first album.

None of them were thrilled with the way the record sounded.

We wanted more input into how our albums were being made.

We wanted more input into the recording process itself.

Don and I thought that the vocals were too wet.

There was too much echo on them.

And he definitely told us, Excuse me, that's my echo.

It's my signature. It's my bloody echo. It stays there.

You don't tell me what to do.

We needed to make a change.

I joined the Navy at the height of the Cold War.

One of the main things they were doing was looking for Russian

submarines, and you do that by using sonar.

When I got out, I had a lot of electronics education, obviously.

And I got a job in a recording studio here in New York.

The first session I ever saw, like day 1, day 2,

was a Carole King demo.

She sat down and played piano, and it was like, Boy, this is fun.

These people are having fun here.

I worked my way up through the ranks, and then, of course,

after engineering for 4 or 5 years, I was like,

I can produce better than some of these guys I'm working for.

At the time, I was managing Joe Walsh, so I played them

Walsh music that I thought was an example of how it could be edgier.

Joe and I had just finished an album called

The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get.

And they heard that and said, That's what we want to sound like.

So, Irving arranged for us to have a meeting with Bill Szymczyk.

We really only had 2 questions that we wanted to ask him.

Do you mind if we have some input about how much echo is on the vocals?

And we wanted somebody who would put a microphone on each

and every drum so we could have more control over the mix.

He said yes to every question, and so we knew he was the guy for us.

I said, OK, under one condition.

I have to call Glyn and make sure it's OK with him.

So, I called him, and I said,

Glyn, the Eagles want me to produce them.

Better you than me, mate.

That's pretty much how I felt.

It had come to

a fairly unpleasant end.

So much for Beatle country with Glyn Johns.

Let's have a warm round of applause on a hot afternoon for the Eagles!

James Dean, James Dean

So hungry and so lean

James Dean, James Dean

You said it all so clean.

Along about the third album,

I was having some difficulty in communicating, I felt, in the

band, and I was starting to think maybe I should go at some point.

They still had this unfulfilled desire to be a mainstream

rock band and not just a vocal band,

but I think they wanted to go in a tougher direction.

Bernie Leadon was a country-based guitar player, but every time

I wanted to do a rock 'n-roll song, he was the lead guitar player.

Cos I'm already gone.

Every time we wanted to do something country that Bernie sang,

I was supposed to be the lead guitar player,

and I wasn't a country musician by any stretch.

It always felt like we needed a third guitar player.

We had met this friend of Bernie's, this guy named Don Felder.

We were playing in Boston, and he came back to visit Bernie,

and we were jamming upstairs in the dressing room,

and this guy was all over the neck.

What he brought was great chops.

We called him Fingers, Fingers Felder,

because he was an incredible player.

We did that session. I think it was like 3 hours.

And then I packed up and went home,

not thinking anything more about it than it was just another session.

And the next day, Glenn called me and asked me

if I would like to join the band.

I said, Absolutely.

I'm in heaven.

- Let's go another one. - All right, do it right!

The banter that would go on in between takes was hysterical,

and so I took to running a two-track to pick up these silly things.

We were young men with raging hormones and something to prove.

In the context of the times and the profession,

the way we behaved wasn't really all that remarkable.

The creative impulse comes from the dark side of the personality,

so we worked it good, you know.

We did a lot of stupid things, said a lot of stupid things.

It was the '70s. There were drugs everywhere.

Cactus sunrise was in my face Everyone was dying

Everyone was lying and trying

Well, rub your belly in the linseed oil...

There you go.

The heartbreak of psoriasis has once again descended upon

the adolescent experience, and we'll see you later.

See you at the show later on tonight.

The question was who could handle it? Who could function?

Who could show up?

One of these nights

One of these crazy long nights

We're gonna find out, pretty mama

What turns on your lights

The full moon is calling

The fever is high

And the wicked wind whispers and more

You got your demons

And you got desires But I got a few of my own

Ooooh, someone to be kind to

In between the dark and the light

Ooooh, comin' right behind you

Swear I'm gonna find you One of these nights

One of these days

There were always girls.

There were a lot of opportunities out on the road to entertain

ourselves with one thing or another.

So, we started to perfect after-show partying,

and we invented a place called the Third Encore.

We did 2 encores in our show, so the third encore was the party.

Everybody in the band and everybody in the crew was given a bunch

of buttons, and all we said was, No weirdos, no strange people, OK?

If you're going to give a button to somebody, make it count.

Totally sick. There's some real warped shit coming on now, ladies and gentlemen.

A member of Andy Warthog's pop-bowel movement has just tried to crash our party.

Welcome to

Pittsburgh Spread Eagle.

We want to just ask these girls why they think they have to leave now that it's 2:00.

One thing, he smells like beer.

We'd fill the bathtubs up with Budweiser,

and we'd have a party after every show.

- Your name, please. - Tammy Farley.

- Here we have Karen. Karen is 20 years old. / - Is that correct?

- Yeah. / - What's your name, dear? - Fuck it, man. / - Pardon? Fuck it.

Her name's Fuck it, man.

I want to talk about sex and drugs.

Who wants to go first?

I'm not lost for words on either subject.

Sex and drugs kind of came as a big package in the '60s.

It seemed like everybody, the sexual revolution

and the drug thing probably started out together.

Didn't they?

Don and I both tried to have relationships while we were members

of the Eagles, but it was always like the Eagles trumped everything.

When the Eagles became successful, we challenged all the rules.

Like when David Geffen left Asylum Records

and sold everything to Warner Bros and started his new empire.

Let's be frank. When we signed that contract, we were idiots.

We knew nothing about the business.

We had poor legal representation, nobody looking out for us.

Remember, bands don't really get record royalties usually ever.

So, they get money from touring, but they get publishing money.

So, in the very beginning, one thing that Geffen did

that I thought was great. He had us form a band publishing company.

All the band's publishing went in that.

The problem was Geffen had the other half.

Half the Eagles' publishing, half of my publishing,

half of all the artists that he signed went to Warner Bros, but

he got them to return mine.

Jackson turned me on to the Eagles.

He had turned me on to a lot of artists,

and I felt I owed him something.

And that, not surprisingly, was not acceptable rationale to the Eagles!

There's a certain amount of ire, like, real, you know, like,

What the fuck?

We didn't get our publishing back!.

So, it was the publishing issue and the fact that the business managers

and the lawyers were all shared common guys,

and did they have a conflict when an issue came up and which side to take?

It just makes you feel like meat.

It started out as such a personal, nurturing endeavour

with Mr Geffen saying, I'm going to protect you guys.

That's why I'm calling my new label 'Asylum'.

It's going to be a sanctuary for real artists.

He once said to Irving Azoff,

You know, Irving, this would be a great business

if there weren't artists.

Irving was the one guy who really believed in us,

that I thought could do something to help us.

I basically hired a lawyer and went in

after I said, "The Eagles would like their publishing back,

to which the obvious response was, No.

He sort of drew a line in the sand and declared war,

so I felt, for my survival, as their manager,

I needed to prove to them that I wasn't afraid of Geffen

and would stand up and.

The lawsuit was filed as a last resort.

I don't think David liked reading his name in the lawsuit.

I thought it was incredibly ungrateful

and they misrepresented the facts, but so be it.

Ultimately, we settled out of court,

and I don't believe it took very long.

He just wanted to get rid of us.

This is our new record contract.

Just paper!

So, then we headed off, for parts unknown

with Irving Azoff at the helm.

This card game is called Eagle Poker.

It's a bastardization of Red Dog.

I invented it in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947,

one year before I was born.

We were big gamblers. We played poker all the time.

They should have never given me money.

So, we decided we'd go to the Bahamas to gamble.

Everybody but Don was holding.

I had like 4 joints in a baggie,

stuffed down my sock in my cowboy boot.

Durkin, the pilot, has a joint.

Irving had about 30 Valiums in a sugar pack.

There was a couple of customs officials there

that asked us to collect all our luggage and come over,

and they wanted to search us 'cause we looked terrible.

We had really long hair and patches on our jeans

and a beard and not slept.

Now, I'm freaking out.

Bernie's freaking out. Irving's freaking out.

Henley's pissed off.

Don't touch me.

The guy proceeds to put us all in a room together,

and they start searching us one by one.

My greatest fear is that I'm going to be locked in a jail cell

with Bernie Leadon.

So, at this point, Irving steps in and takes

one of the Bahamian customs guys over to the side

and has a chat with him.

I'm not sure, to this day, what Irving said to him.

The next thing I knew, they let us pass with no problem.

It was sort of miraculous, really, it was,

because I thought for sure we were going to be in the slammer.

It was dumb luck that this guy bought my line

and didn't search them.

That was the day I decided, Irving Azoff

was the greatest manager in rock 'n' roll

and I would never do anything without him by my side.

I had the only seat in a major championship fight

to be sitting there when a lyric was thrown out

and then hear a track.

My on my, you sure know how to arrange things...

I've watched the creative process with lots of people,

but I've never seen it the way it fell in place with them.

I remember watching Lyin' Eyes written.

Glenn just had a way of coming up with a phrase.

He had written some kind of a tune, and they were sitting in Tana's

one night and looking at some young girl with an older guy at the bar,

and Glenn said, Look at those lyin' eyes.

And just like that, wow, there's the song.

You can't hide your lyin' eyes

And your smile is a thin disguise

I thought by now you'd realise,

There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes...

It was just about all these girls who would come down to Dan Tana's

looking beautiful, and they'd be there from 8:00pm to midnight

and have dinner and drinks with all of us rockers,

and then they'd go home because they were kept women.

On the other side of town, a boy is waiting

With fiery eyes and dreams no one could steal

She drives on through the night anticipating,

Cause he makes her feel the way she used to feel...

When we were doing the One of These Nights album,

we'd gone through 3 albums,

and the only people who'd sung on any hit records were Don and myself.

And Randy always felt like he was a lead singer, too.

And I actually felt that way, too. I liked his voice.

So, he brought in the beginnings of 'Take It To the Limit',

and it became the Eagles' first number-1 single.

Take it to the limit, come on,

and take it to the limit,

One more time,

Take it to the limit...

The line 'Take It To the Limit' was to keep trying

before you reach a point in your life where you feel

you've done everything and seen everything sort of feeling.

A part of getting old, and just to take it to the limit

one more time, like every day, just keep punching away at it.

And that's all that I really... That was the line,

and from there, the song took a different, you know, course.

Take it to the limit,

I think everybody in the Eagles did the level best we could.

You have to remember how young we were,

the fact that nobody had anything when we started,

and you got all this stuff coming at you.

Meanwhile, you're touring all the time. It's a lot.

To Bernie, success on any scale was synonymous with selling out.

He wanted us to remain sort of an underground band.

We had our problems with Bernie, and Bernie had his problems with us.

Some of it was based on him being able to have a voice in the Eagles

and record the songs he wanted to, the way he wanted to.

We were getting more and more rocked out,

and I think Bernie was less and less happy about that,

to the point that, one time, we had worked on a track all night.

It was a rocked-out track,

and we're all sitting behind the board the next day,

listening to the various takes of it, trying to decide

which take we liked the best. Bernie hadn't said a word.

So, I asked him over the board, I said, Bernie, what do you think?.

There's a long pause, and he gets up, and he stretches,

and he says, I think I'm going surfing.

And he left.

I was caught in the middle a lot of times.

And sometimes I would agree with Bernie, but

most of the time, I would agree with Glenn.

Glenn and I always wanted the band to be a hybrid,

to encompass bluegrass and country and rock 'n' roll.

There was a part of Bernie that really resisted that.

After a while, it became a real problem,

particularly between Bernie and Glenn.

Finally, we were at the Orange Bowl in Miami.

We were backstage, and we were talking about what our next move

was going to be, what our plans were supposed to be,

and I was animated and adamant about what we needed to do next

here, there, and everywhere, and Bernie comes over

and pours a beer on my head and says, You need to chill out, man.

I have no idea. It was a spontaneous thing.

I take that incident now quite seriously.

That was a very disrespectful thing to do.

Obviously, it was intended to be humiliating to him,

I would say, and is something I'm really not proud of.

It did illustrate a breaking point.

During that time, we got a couple shows

opening for the Rolling Stones, and Irving was managing Joe Walsh.

Joe Walsh was a bona fide rock 'n' roll guitar player.

So, for a couple of those shows, just for our encores,

we'd put Joe Walsh in a road box,

and we'd come back to do an encore, and we'd roll the road box out,

and just like the model jumping out of a cake,

we'd open the guitar case, and there would be Joe Walsh

with his Les Paul, and he'd climb out of the box and plug in,

and the Eagles... We would play 'Rocky Mountain Way'.

I loved the way he played.

I'd loved the James Gang when I was growing up in Detroit.

Now I started thinking, Joe Walsh for Bernie Leadon.

Spent the last year Rocky Mountain Way

Couldn't get much higher...

OK, maybe the vocals won't be quite as good,

but, boy, are we going to kick some ass!

Time to open fire

And we don't need the ladies cryin'

'Cause the story's sad...

I think one of the things that I brought into the band

that was good for the band was

to bring it up a notch when we played live.

Just keep kicking it in the butt a little bit, you know?

All right, D.C., come on, give it up!

I went to a show, maybe 8 months later,

and the band are interacting with each other

exactly like we did with me on stage, except instead of me,

Walsh was up there, and it just was really, really odd

to be watching it and not be part of it.

So, I actually left that show. I was just like,

This is too weird.

So, we got Joe Walsh in the band. That's another adventure,

because Joe was an interesting bunch of guys.

Hey, I tell you what. If you got firecrackers,

just wait until you get home, lock yourself in the closet,

and light everything you got, OK?

Thank you, Joe.

He brought a lot of levity to just about everything that happened,

which was needed at that time.

- Heads or tails? - Heads.

I could use a little head myself.

In those days, you didn't know what he was going to do next.

It was fun most of the time, although not all the time.

It was fun, depending on how much you'd had to drink,

to see a television go sailing off the 14th-floor balcony

and into the pool, as long as nobody got hurt.

Joe Walsh was the American King of room trash.

He had studied under some of the best.

One of the most terrifying things that ever happened to me

was that Keith Moon decided he liked me.

All those Keith Moon stories are true.

This guy was full-blown nuts, and you never knew

what was coming next.

Keith was my mentor at chaos, getting arrested,

practical jokes, pranks, room damage.

I live in hotels, tear out the walls,

I have accountants pay for it all,

They say I'm crazy, but I have a good time...

One year, we gave him a chainsaw for his birthday as a joke.

Life's been good to me so far,

Yeah, yeah, yeah...

By this time, we were eating in nice restaurants

and buying expensive wine and staying in great hotel rooms.

There were a lot of hotels that we weren't allowed to go back to.

We were in Chicago, and we were staying at the Astor Towers.

In Chicago, here's what happened.

There was a knock on the door, and in walked John Belushi.

John wanted to show me the finer restaurants of Chicago.

So, we went to the restaurant,

and they wouldn't let us in because we had jeans, and he got

the maitre d' up to like a 300 bribe

and still they would not let us in.

And John said, I know what to do. I know what to do.

And the next thing I knew, we were standing in the alley,

and he spray-painted my jeans black and made me do his,

and we went back, and we got in.

We were sitting in these Queen Anne-period chairs that had

needlepoint, and when we stood up, that was all black,

and the butts of our pants were jeans again,

so, we had to kind of back out of there and leave fast.

But that was the beginning of it.

And so that night, with much glee,

Joe set about to set the world record for room trash.

John and I did 28,000 of room damage.

Glenn and Don didn't really ever approve of the room trashing,

but they understood it.

They wanted respect as rock 'n' rollers,

and Joe brought that respect.

I was insecure always and afraid,

so I hid behind all of my hang-ups with humour.

I was totally in awe of Don and Glenn.

I was intimidated by Don and Glennv because they sang so good,

and they were writing stuff I could never come close to writing.

After we've just had a bunch of hit records on One Of These Nights,

we were under the microscope. Everybody was going to look at

the next record we made and pass judgment.

Don and I were going, Man, this better be good.

- Look at that. / - It's going to be quite a nice guitar.

- Felder, you see this? - Who tuned this?

Well, it has no nut.

With Joe in the band with me, I wanted to write something,

musically, that would fit two guitar players, that we

could play off of each other.

So, I was sitting on a sofa in Malibu at this rental house

that I had on the beach. I was playing this acoustic guitar

and this introduction came out, that progression.

I kept playing it 3 or 4 times.

I had an old reel-to-reel tape recorder,

so I went back and recorded that introduction to that song and

laid down that progression, made a mix of it, and put it on a cassette

with the other 14 or 15 pieces of music that I had

assembled, and I gave a copy of the cassette to Don, one to Glenn.

Don Felder used to send Henley and I instrumental tapes, song ideas.

95% of them were cluttered with guitar licks,

and we would listen to these things and go, "Where do you sing?".

As Don and I were listening through one of the Felder cassettes and this

song came up, we both sort of said, Hmm. Now, this is interesting.

The music sounded to me like some sort of a cross between

Spanish music and reggae music, and that one really jumped out at me.

So, we set out to write a song to that progression.

I'm pretty sure it was Henley's idea to have a song called

Hotel California.

I think Henley's and Glenn's lyric writing really came to a head.

They became real honest-to-God songwriters then.

During the recording of it, I thought that we

were on to something. I knew we were on to something.

We were in a really creative phase,

and it just so happened that Bill Szymczyk pushed record.

Thank God!

On a dark desert highway

Cool wind in my hair

Warm smell of colitas

Rising up through the air

Up ahead in the distance

I saw a shimmering light

My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim

I had to stop for the night

There she stood in the doorway

I heard the mission bell

And I was thinkin' to myself

This could be heaven or this could be hell

Then she lit up a candle

And she showed me the way

There were voices down the corridor

I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel California

Such a lovely place

Such a lovely face

Plenty of room at the Hotel...

We've been asked a million times, What does that song mean?.

Don and I were big fans of hidden, deeper meaning.

You write songs and you send them out to the world.

...So I called up the Captain

Please bring me my wine

He said,

We haven't had that spirit here since 1969...

And maybe somewhere in that song is some stuff that's just yours,

that they're never going to figure out.

...Far away

Wake you up in the middle of the night

Just to hear them say...

There has been a great deal of ridiculous

speculation about that song over the years.

It's really taken on a life or a mythology of its own.

It's sort of like the "Paul is dead" thing, or Who was the walrus?.

...Bring your alibis...

It's been denounced by Evangelicals.

We've been accused of all kinds of wacky things,

like being members of the Church of Satan.

People see images on the album cover that aren't there.

Just lunatic stuff.

...And in the master's chambers They gathered for the feast

They stabbed it with their steely knives

But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back to the place I was before...

My simple explanation is it's a song about a journey from innocence

to experience. That's all.

...You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave...

Whereas Felder was technically very, very good, Walsh brought spontaneity

to it, and the two of them playing off each other was just brilliant.

Out of great respect for each other, there was always a little

competition between Felder and I.

We always tried to kind of one-up each other, you know?

And that's really healthy.

It always made the song better when we were kind of,

Oh, yeah? Listen to this.

We got to the end, where now is the harmony guitars that are

playing together, and Joe said, We should do something that's like...

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

The ending of

Hotel California, that's one of my

high points of my entire recording career.

To have a 7-minute single be number 1, that was unheard of.

The record company said, You got to do an edit. You got to do an edit.

And we all said, "No. Take it or leave it. And they took it.

We had no idea that that song would affect as many

people on the planet as it did.

Thank you.

The rest of the album kind of developed around that song.

The album, you could loosely say, is a thematic album, a concept album.

Not unlike Desperado, Hotel California

was our reaction to what was happening to us.

On just about every album we made, there was some kind of a

commentary on the music business and on American culture in general.

The hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor not

only for the myth-making of Southern California,

but for the myth-making that is the American dream because it's a

fine line between the American dream and the American nightmare.

When you're out there on your own Where your memories...

All the songs we write for this album can fit inside this concept.

...You were lost until you found out what it all comes down to...

Once the rest of the guys in the band understood what the song

Hotel California was about, it became kind of a theme,