Original subtitles

One of these nights One of these crazy old nights

We're going to find out, pretty mama...

A funny thing happened right when we broke up.

1980 is when the format classic rock hit American radio.

So, even though the band broke up,

they kept playing our songs all the time.

It was like we never went away.

We were still on the radio.

I'm a-running down the road Trying to loosen my load

I got seven women on my mind...

Somebody once told me people didn't just listen to the Eagles.

They did things to the Eagles.

They went on fandangos

and drove across the country with 3 of their high-school buddies.

Take it easy...

People broke up with their girlfriends.

Every time I try to walk away

Something makes me turn around and stay

Cos I'm already gone

And I'm feeling strong...

People quit their jobs or changed their lives.

They did things to the Eagles.

Hey there, how are you?

It's been a long time...

Songs from that album have even been played in outer space.

And they used to pipe the music up to the space shuttle to wake

the astronauts up in the morning.

Shortly after having a breakfast of steak and eggs and toast,

he then put on his space suit...

And heroes, they come and they go...

He was a hard-headed man, he was brutally handsome

She was terminally pretty...

On a dark desert highway

Cool wind in my hair...

That song has really gotten around.

...Rising up through the air

Up ahead in the distance

Saw a shimmering light

Head grew heavy and my sight grew dim

I had to stop for the night...

There's been a lot of conjecture about how

and why we got back together.

We began to realise that we'd been away for 14 years.

Maybe we could have that rarest of things in American life,

which is a second act.

A second chance.

Thank you.

When we stopped, I was really sad.

Like, What are we going to do?

I sleep all day out all night

I know where you're going

I don't rock you act that way

You don't think it's showing...

I was pretty devastated.

I had only been part of it for barely 3 years,

and I'd loved it.

When we're hungry Love will keep us alive...

We created this monster, and it took its toll on all of our lives.

Maybe some day we will find

That it wasn't really wasted time...

Somebody was quoted as saying the Eagles would get back together

when hell freezes over.

So, hell froze over.

We're all ready. The gentleman in blue over there.

After the acrimony and the bitterness that marked

the demise of the band, it must have been a long road to reunion.

Can you just take us through the steps that you went through

on the road to reunification?

No.

Anybody want that one?

No, really, it's a fair question.

From the time that we disbanded in 1980,

there were always offers on the table for us to get back together.

It started with the first US Festival,

and Steve Wozniak wanted to pay us a million dollars.

I said no.

I needed to do something else.

The heat is on

It's on the street

The heat is... on!

I called my first solo album No Fun Aloud because I was having

so much fun.

It was so liberating to know that whatever I did

was going to be more fun than what I just did for the last 3 years on

The Long Run album.

I knew I wanted to have a songwriting partner, so I

asked my friend Jack Tempchin if he wanted to write some songs together.

And Jack's a very bright guy lyrically,

and so I started working with him.

He had become a disciplined co-writer with Don Henley,

and when the Eagles broke up, he just wanted to let go

and have some fun with music.

So we were fiddling around with some grooves, and one of us said,

You belong to the city.

And then we're going, Oh, yeah, yeah. That's it.

Cos you belong to the city

You belong to the night...

You just show up and good things happen.

I make my living off the evening news...

Henley's solo career was really, really successful.

Going solo was the scariest part of my life.

All she wants to do is dance, dance...

The whole MTV thing was a difficult transition for me to make.

The Eagles, at one point,

had been accused by some critic of loitering onstage.

So it was difficult for us loiterers to make

the transition to the world of choreography and costume and acting.

She wants to party She wants to get down...

Did I benefit from MTV? Yes, I did.

I made a couple of videos that won some MTV awards.

Nevertheless, I would just as soon have skipped the whole thing,

because I considered myself, first and foremost, a songwriter

and a recording artist.

I didn't really want to be an actor, too.

Nice, huh?

The guy who sold it to me said it was a lemon.

But I'm telling you, it may look like a cow,

but she runs like a stallion.

I always like to take a good-bye look at America.

Just in case it's my last.

I acted in television, in movies.

I wasn't thinking about getting back together with the Eagles.

The guy's got an attitude problem.

He listens to me. I can help you with that.

Cameron would call me up and say,

'Glenn, I gotta find somebody that's not going to take

any shit off Tom Cruise, and I think you're the guy.

We have history, Dennis.

Oh, yeah. We got history all right, Jerry.

No, no, no. Dennis. Dennis, Dennis. Don't, don't!

Nobody on the road

Nobody on the beach

I feel it in the air

The summer's out of reach...

I signed Don Henley to Geffen Records.

You might say, since the Eagles sued me

at Asylum Records, why he did come with me at Geffen Records?

David uses the same pick up lines

every time he comes a-courtin'.

You know how much I care about you as an artist.

You know what a big fan I am of yours.

And so I bought it a second time and I signed with him.

And then things started to fall apart.

I produced several hits, but I could feel the support somehow waning.

Don got into arguments with them over things like budgets,

videos, artwork, things like that.

I recall Don starting to write letters to them

referring to them as Nickel and Dime Records.

When you feel like your label is not supporting you,

it's completely deflating.

I used to call him Golden Throat.

I thought he was an incredible singer.

But, by nature, he's a malcontent. He's always been a malcontent.

And, that's just life.

So I just said one day, I'm not going to record for you anymore.

I'm leaving. And so he sued me for 30 million.

Happily ever after fails

We've been poisoned by these fairy tails

The lawyers dwell on small details...

My wife has MS, and they deposed her,

dragged her all the way from Texas

to Los Angeles to sit her down in front of his attorneys and ask

her a bunch of pointless questions, because she didn't know anything.

I thought that was really low.

I said to Irving over the Henley contract,

I'd sooner die than let you fuck me.

You'd better win this case.

It was settled, you know, and that was the end of that relationship.

Offer up

your best defence

This is the end...

This is the end

of the innocence.

I've realised now that we have adult rock stars.

You don't have to give this up when you turn 30 or 35 or 40.

I'll always make records and write songs. I've got to do them.

Otherwise, I'd go nuts.

This is a tune that was written with my new friend Mike Campbell

and my old friend John David Souther.

'When the band broke up,

Glenn started writing songs with Jack Tempchin.

I guess the rift between Henley

and Frey probably spread to between Frey and me.

Glenn and I had had some outrageously fun times together.

And then Don and I did for a decade or so.

Been trying to get down to the heart of the matter

But my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter

But I think it's about forgiveness

Forgiveness, even if, even if, you don't love me anymore.

How have you changed as musicians over the years,

both as a group and individually?

Your whole mandate is just to improve.

Life is about improvement,

whether it's as a musician or as a singer or as a songwriter or

just all the other different hats we all wear.

So, hopefully, we're just getting better.

We've been doing this quite a long time now on and off,

and we feel like we've got it down pretty good.

And, in fact, we've had 5 days off, and we're ready to go now.

When the Eagles first broke up,

I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with myself.

So I just hustled.

I went just as a singer with Toto,

I played bass for Jimmy Buffett, I went out with Warren Zevon

and Dan Fogelberg, and stuff I wouldn't have necessarily done.

I sang on Poison records and Twisted Sister,

although you'll never see my name.

They never gave me credit.

That was more like yelling.

It's not all going to be the greatest thing in the world.

But if you can work and support yourself and your family, it's good.

OK, next question. Gentleman in the front here, Richard.

What position do you think rock'n'roll takes now about drugs?

We came from a generation that experimented with all kinds

of substances, of course.

I think our message is that you can be a damn good rock band

without all that stuff.

I'd like to propose a toast to dedicate this song to you, to us.

The drinking man's musician, Joe Walsh!

I ended up an alcoholic.

And very fond of cocaine.

If I was awake, I was...

I was doing that stuff.

Good morning, rock fans.

'In the very early years, it had briefly worked.'

And then you chase it when it doesn't work anymore.

And I chased it for years and years.

If you look at your reflection

In the bottom of the well

What you see is only on the surface...

Could Hemingway have written like that if he was sober,

or could Hendrix have played like that

if he didn't experiment with hallucinogenics?

Probably not.

I used that one for years and years, and it never occurred to me

that all those people are dead.

They got further and further away from reality.

- Should I look at you or the camera? - Look at me.

I ended up... in bad shape.

I wanna live with a cinnamon girl

I could be happy the rest of my life

With a cinnamon girl

A dreamer of pictures I run in the night...

'I had hit bottom.'

And I knew that I was done and that...

I would probably die if I kept going.

Mom, send me money right now I'm gonna make it somehow

I need another chance...

Joe was a mess.

He was around a bunch of people that were really just enablers.

Nobody wanted to intervene.

Nobody wanted to tell him he had a drug problem or a drinking problem.

Everybody was just going along with Joe.

I remember what we all did when it was an art form.

And I'd like to fight to get it back to that.

And I was very, very happy in the Eagles.

I was just going to say I'm sorry we broke up, but we didn't break up.

We just stopped, I think.

We just said, you know, The heck with the '80s.

Song 3, take 6.

In 1990, we tried to get together to refuel it.

Everybody was in on that, but Glenn wasn't involved yet.

Irving got us together - Timothy, Joe, myself, and Don Henley.

Glenn was supposed to join us in the studio,

and he was going to bring some songs in,

and we were going to start making another record.

So, we started rehearsing, the four of us, then we got a call,

I think about the third or fourth day in the studio, saying that

Glenn had refused to come be part of it, to join the party.

So we just stopped.

He was still, I'm not doing this.

To tell you the truth,

I was having a fine time doing what I was doing.

There's more to life than being in the Eagles.

The moment was always going to be kind of

when Glenn was ready to do it again.

I think Henley would have been more willing than Glenn.

For me, personally, I think that I had proved pretty much

everything that I needed to prove in my solo career.

I had won a couple of Grammys and had a few hits

and some successful tours.

And I had founded the Walden Woods Project.

When you're a solo artist, you have to take responsibility

for everything - every mistake, every bad record, every sour note.

But when you're in a band,

you get to share the praise and the blame with your bandmates.

So, I was OK with the notion of maybe going back

and being in a band again.

The thing that sort of turned my head

was the release of the Common Thread album.

Irving and Don went to Nashville

and they talked a bunch of people into recording some Eagles songs,

with the royalties going to the Walden Woods Project.

I'm a-running down the road trying to loosen my load...

I don't know who asked me, but they said,

Travis Tritt's going to do a video of Take It Easy

and he wants to know if you guys will be in the video.

I said, Well, OK.

Take it easy

Take it easy...

Never really talked to Travis about whose idea it was.

I think Irving probably had a hand in that whole thing.

Was I trying to put the band back together by doing Common Thread?

No.

Was I waiting for the moment? Yeah.

...Understand, just find a place to make your stand

Take it easy...

In the Travis Tritt video, there was a little bandstand scene

and we all picked up our instruments and started playing.

I was thinking, Guys, come on!. You know?

'It's interesting - after years pass,

you really sort of remember that you were friends first.

You have a lot of common history together

and a lot of shared experiences.'

I remembered mostly the good stuff.

I didn't really think about the bad stuff.

I just remembered how much we genuinely had liked each other

and how much fun we'd had.

We realised, after the success of the Common Thread album

that there were still a lot of people out there -

a whole lot of people - who wanted to see us play again.

Sometimes there's a little bit of serendipity

involved in this, and I think what happened is everybody's life

started to line up in a way that now it made sense for all of us.

And we discussed it.

Joe and Don came up and sat in at a benefit that I did in Aspen.

'We had a meeting in Aspen.'

I was one of the first guys that they wanted to try it out on.

Joe was buzzed. It was 1.00 in the afternoon.

And he would say, Hey, I'm there, man. I'm fine.

Don't worry about me.

But Don and I

could both tell that he wasn't fine, and we were worried.

They said what they wanted to do.

They wanted to try it, get back together again.

They didn't know what I would say, but I said,

I understand, and, yeah, I can get sober.

Somewhere along the way I found the meaning

Woke up dreaming

Along the way

Never quite seems the same when you awaken

And making up for the time is such a price to pay

Then they take the dream away and it just ain't fair...

We had to get Joe into some sort of rehab,

and we couldn't be sure it was going to work.

So we better have Felder.

The Eagles reunion had better have at least one of the two of them,

and hopefully both.

Irving called me up and said that Don and Glenn

and Joe had gotten together, and they were talking about doing

something, and would I be interested in doing it?

I said, "Absolutely".

One thing led to another, and finally Irving

and Don Felder picked him up and drove him to rehab.

I made a commitment to them that I would clean up

and that I would be in the band

if that's what they wanted to do.

So help me through the night

Help me to ease the pain...

I'm really, really grateful to those three guys.

Tell me it's all right...

Because I had a really good reason to get sober.

And as soon as I got sober, we started rehearsals.

He was a hard-headed man He was brutally handsome

She was terminally pretty

She held him up, and he held her for ransom

In the heart of the cold, cold city

He had a nasty reputation as a cruel dude...

From that first phone call from Irving

to showing up on a rehearsal stage to start putting together

a show for MTV was only a matter of weeks, if not a month.

Life in the fast lane. Surely make you lose your mind...

'It was a little scary rehearsing for the MTV thing.

'Normally, I think people would have their act down a few weeks,

at least, before entering into something like that,

but we just dove in headfirst.'

'Even though we had rehearsed really well,

for the first time to walk out on stage and actually

play as a band in public and kind of put the key back into the ignition

and turn it over for the first time, it was really a lot of nerves.'

- Are we going the right way? - Glenn!

'Not having played as a group in 14 years, the first night,

there was a lot of terror.'

Gentlemen, good to be with ya. Hope I'm with ya all night!

- Have a good one, OK? OK. - Showtime! Showtime! Showtime!

'The audience was very kind, and they were with us.

And that was good, but it was rough.'

Just another day in paradise

You stumble to your bed

You'd give anything to silence

Those voices ringing in your head

You thought you could find happiness

Just over that green hill

You thought you would be satisfied

But you never will.

Even when we went onstage, we were definitely a little tight.

Until, I think, Henley forgot the words

to one of the new songs...

You want to start again?

I'll tell you what.

This is television, so we get to do this till we're happy.

I thought you didn't remember the third verse.

That was only the second verse!

I know the third verse.

'That was sort of the icebreaker, though.

That was a good thing, ultimately.'

I feel like Tommy Smothers.

We didn't think getting back together was quite as legitimate

unless we had some new material,

so we're going to put forth several new songs for you this evening.

This first one Timothy B Schmit is going to sing for you.

This is called Love Will Keep Us Alive.

I was standing

All alone against the world outside

You were searching

For a place to hide

Lost and lonely

Now you've given me the will to survive

When we're hungry, love will keep us alive...

After selling 100 million records worldwide, was it real pressure

on you to write the new material for the Hell Freezes Over album?

We didn't really look at it as a body of new work.

It was more of a retrospective piece of material.

And we look forward to writing some new material, perhaps in the future.

We can't keep recycling this material,

although it seems to be working just fine.

Don and I were trying to figure out how to write another song,

and if we could.

We hadn't written anything together since, like, '78.

So it was a little awkward at first, just getting back into the groove.

Here we are starting out at 1, 2...

During The Long Run album,

there were a lot of sessions with Don and I where nothing got done.

We were both a little bit reticent to introduce

our ideas for fear that they weren't good enough.

So when we sat down to do it again in '94, my first worry was,

Is it going to be as hard as it was in 1978?".

We were sitting around, "What are we going to write about?, and stuff.

And he said, I've got this one title, Get Over It.

And he sort of proceeded to tell me what it was that was

pissing him off - all these people going on television

and everything that's wrong with them is somebody else's fault.

I'm just sick of all this whining,

and so I'm going to write a song called Get Over It.

The intro, straight Chuck Berry. Never play a seventh, right?

So, then I said, I think

maybe a Chuck Berry riff would be a good way to tell that story.

Time out. Do you want to play the...?

You want to do it on slide?

And then Felder and I will just play power chords low and high.

And those guys will play Chuck Berry low and high.

And we can do Get over it.

A couple little of them slide answer licks is cool.

My favourite thing is when Don and Glenn co-write stuff.

I like to play guitar to that.

- You want me to sing it, or do you want to wait? / - It's 10 to 6.

You can sing it at 10 to 6 or 5 to 6.

- Do it again? - Yeah, we'll do it twice.

Yeah, you could write it in to the mic.

Captioned for hard of hearing.

It was really liberating.

We both walked out of the session and went, God, we can still do it.

I can't believe it. We just wrote a song together.

Maybe we can write some more.

Turn on the tube and what do I see?

A whole lotta people crying, Don't blame me...

That was a really good feeling.

It was a great sort of artistic reconciliation for us

to have been able to sit down and write that song together.

Get over it!

Get over it!

All this bitching and moaning and pitching a fit

Get over it! Get over it!

Get over it!

We did Hell Freezes Over, and then we went out on the road.

That was the question on everyone's mind -

what if we got back together, and no one showed up?

What kind of love have you got?

You should be home but you're not

A room full of noise and dangerous boys

Still make you thirsty and hot...

We set it up to be a 3-month reunion.

I went back to my wife, and I had two young kids at the time.

I said, I don't know if you're going to recognise me.

I don't know what this is going to do to me.

But I hope I don't change too much. Hang in there with me.

Tell all your girlfriends

Your "been around the world" friends

Talk is for losers and fools

Victim of love, I see a broken heart

I could be wrong but I'm not

Victim of love, we're not so far apart

What kind of love have you got?

I was on the side of the stage once at one of their shows

when they first got back together, and Jack Nicholson was

euphoric listening to this band play again, you know?

And he said: Repertoire.

What do you want to hear?

One of these nights

One of these crazy old nights!

One of these nights...

We didn't know how many people were going to show up for us

to reunite, but people came out in droves.

Somebody's gonna hurt someone

Before the night is through...

We were sold out everywhere.

Audiences were having a fabulous time.

We were having a good time, too.

There's gonna be a heartache tonight

A heartache tonight, I know

Gonna be a heartache tonight

A heartache tonight, I know

Oh, I know.

Heartache, baby!

I listened to the guys, and Joe Walsh, for example,

is playing better and singing better than I've ever heard him

play in his life since I've known him.

Hi there, how are ya?

It's been a long time

I didn't have time to really sit around

and miss alcohol or cold turkey from more cocaine or anything.

And I had to go in front of people

and play and sing sober,

which I hated, at first.

Ooh, that was scary.

Why do we give up our hearts to the past?

Yeah

And why must we grow up so fast?

And all you wishing well fools with your fortunes

Someone should send you

a rose

With love from a friend

Nice to hear from you again

And the storybook comes to a close

Gone are the ribbons and bows

Things to remember, places to go

Pretty maids all in a row

All in a row.

When Joe first got out of rehab and we started rehearsing,

he was still pretty dark.

But over the course of that first year getting sober, I think

he found happiness again.

He found a way to be happy.

You look very pretty.

It's OK. Once more. Oh, now, are you ready?

Father, daughter, take 1.

We got that family thing to ground us all now.

It's really sort of our common thread. We've all got kids.

It changes your life and your perspective on your work, as well.

So, the tour was so enormously successful that we sort of

didn't want to give that up, you know?

OK, this is good. I could do this for a while.

Harry got up

Dressed all in black

Went down to the station

And he never came back

They found his clothing

Scattered somewhere down the track

And he won't be down on Wall Street in the morning

In a New York minute

Everything can change In a New York minute

Things can get pretty strange...

Doing a concert is a strange combination of conscious

and subconscious acts.

You're not really thinking about what you're doing

because you know it so well, you're just doing it.

On the other hand, you have to put some emotion into it.

When you've got a crowd that's cheering you on,

doesn't matter how many times you've sung the song. You just do it.

Lying in the darkness

Hear the sirens wail

Somebody's going to emergency

Somebody's going to jail

If you find somebody to love in this world

You better hang on tooth and nail

The wolf is always at the door

In a New York minute

Everything can change In a New York minute

Things can get a little strange In a New York minute

We've played all over the world, and, probably,

if we could write the script, it was probably a genius move.

Cos when we come back, it's bigger than ever.

How much money do you expect to gross with this European tour?

Irving?

- I actually haven't added it up, but I will tell you that... / - Good answer.

One thing, the costs of being a touring rock'n'roll band

in Europe are beyond our wildest imaginations, but this

band is here in Europe because there was demand for us to be here.

And it's not nearly as lucrative as anything we've done before.

It isn't?

Offers started coming in for us to do more shows,

and I just sort of said, Book some more.

It doesn't have to end now. Book some more.

Where else can we play? You haven't been in Europe.

Let's go there.

I heard some people talking just the other day

And they said you were gonna put me on a shelf

Let me tell you I got some news for you

And you'll soon find out it's true

Then you'll have to eat your lunch all by yourself

Cos I'm al...

...ready gone

And I'm feeling strong

I will sing this victory song...

How's it go?

Hoo-hoo-hoo! My, my, hoo-hoo-hoo

Well I know it wasn't you who held me down...

We had drawn a line in the sand and said,

No drugs or alcohol during any band activities.

And, as a result, we're playing and singing pretty damn good.

I think the thing that brings them together is the harmony.

When they start hearing that and how seamless and how perfect,

they get as thrilled as the audiences do, that, We can still do this.

We can't really understand it. It's just the chemistry that works.

And we gave up trying to understand it. It just works.

We're just going to do one verse the New Kid.

One verse the New Kid. OK. Joe's singing Smuggler's Blues.

I'll just do the beginning of Funk 49.

- And then I'm going to go pee. - Yeah. / - Then I'll go pee.

1, 2, 3.

Well I'm a-running the road trying to loosen my load

I 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 make your stand

And take it easy

Well I'm a-standing 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

Well, come on, baby

Don't say maybe

I've gotta know if your sweet love is gonna save me

We may lose and we may win

Though we will never be here again

So open up, I'm climbing in

So take it easy...

All right, boys!

We ended up going all around the world in about 2 years

and 9 months.

Well, you know we got it easy

We oughta take it easy.

Thank you, Dublin!

We've learned not to make career decisions at the end of long tours.

If we break up again, though, you won't hear about it.

- We'll just go quietly. - And we'll say we're still together.

They've laughed, cried, fought, but, most of all,

they have beaten the odds and are as popular today

as they were in that incredible summer back in 1972.

It is an honour and a pleasure to introduce the Eagles.

A lot has been talked about and speculated about over

the last 27 years about whether or not we got along.

We got along fine. We just disagreed a lot.

I was not in the trenches with this particular band,

so I'd like to thank my predecessor, Randy Meisner, for being there.

I'm glad that

Randy and Bernie got recognised.

I think that's appropriate.

Hey, how you doin'?

It's a good feeling. Looks good on my resume.

I'd really like to thank Don and Glenn for writing those songs.

Thank you, guys. It makes my job real easy. Thank you!

Charming outfit, Joe.

I'd like to, again,

thank Don Henley and Glenn Frey for writing an incredible body of work

that's propelled this band through 20-some-odd years' worth of life.

Thank you, guys.

When a kid first picks up a guitar or a drumstick,

it's not really to be famous.

It's because that kid wants to fit in somewhere,

he wants to be accepted, and he wants to be understood, even.

And so, I like to think of this award as something that is

acknowledging us not for being famous, but for doing the work.

And I appreciate all the work that all these guys behind me have done.

I want to thank Irving Azoff,

without whom we wouldn't be here today.

As I've said before, he may be Satan, but he's our Satan.

We're in a dog-eat-dog business.

Show me anybody that's going to be responsible for guiding or

managing an artist's career that's made too many friends,

and I'm going to show you somebody

that's sold out their artist and done a crappy job.

So, I was quite proud of Henley's reference of what he said.

It was more or less, for me, a validation of a job well done.

A lot of my job was trying to keep the band from breaking up.

In the '70s, we formed a corporation called Eagles, Limited.

And that was all-for-one and one-for-all.

Well, it wasn't the 3 musketeers.

As our friend JD Souther used to say, "Time passes, things change".

In talking with Irving about putting the Eagles back

together in 1994, I said, Irving, I'm not going to do it

unless Don and I make more money than the other guys.

We're the only guys who have done anything

career-wise in the last 14 years.

We're the guys that have kept the Eagles' name alive on radio,

television and in concert halls.

So we came up with a deal that I was happy with,

and Don was happy with, Timothy was happy with,

Joe was happy with, and Don Felder was not happy with.

And I called Felder's representative.

And I said, Hello, Barry. This is Glenn Frey.

I'm sorry you happen to represent the only asshole in the band,

but let me tell you something.

You either sign this agreement before the sun goes down today,

or we're replacing Don Felder.

That's the final deal.

He signs by sunset, or he's out of the fucking band.

Hung up.

So, he signed the deal, and we started out on the tour.

I didn't sense a great deal of camaraderie.

You hardly saw anybody

if it wasn't walking on the plane or walking onto the stage.

Everyone thought, If we don't get together,

we won't have problems.

And I think instead of being able to sit down and have a beer and talk

about stuff and renew a relationship with everyone, that independent

isolation really didn't add the comfort necessary to make it work.

Don Felder was never, ever satisfied, never, ever happy.

A rock band is not a perfect democracy.

It's more like a sports team.

No one can do anything without the other guys,

but everybody doesn't get to touch the ball all the time.

Time went on, and time went on, and Felder became more and more unhappy.

Couldn't appreciate the amount of money he was making,

more concerned about how much money I was making.

If Don Felder really thought about it,

it really was he wanted it to be a -band- band in the purest

sense of the words, we're all going to get equal songwriting,

singing, expression stuff, and this was not a hippie commune.

And everything for them

really goes back to those 2 words: song power.

We finally made the decision that we won't be working with him anymore.

It just broke my heart. It's not just playing with Joe.

I miss these guys.

But I really missed the friendship and the music.

OK.

Glenn and I, when it comes time to make band decisions,

usually stick together.

It's difficult for 4 or 5 people to have an equal say.

Here we are 40 years later, and we're doing OK.

We're one of the few bands that can say that.

The novelty of the Eagles being back together

and those fews new songs that we had

on the Hell Freezes Over album is one thing.

But we needed to make a record.

Considering that we haven't made a record in so long,

we spent a good 2-and-a-half years making Long Road Out of Eden.

We finally figured out that we just needed to do what we do.

This really goes back to the essence of what we do best,

which is singing and songwriting.

A lot of harmony singing on this album.

There's a hole in the world tonight

Don't let there be a hole in the world tomorrow...

Big tragedies like that make you think, as a parent,

what kind of world is coming up?

What's going to happen next?

What's the world going to be like when my kids are grown?

After September 11th, our immediate visceral reaction,

our gut reaction, resulted in Hole In The World.

Don't let there be a hole in the world tomorrow...

The Eagles have written and sung plenty of love songs

over the years, but we've also written and sung songs

that have to do with what's going on in the wider world.

We've never shied away from social commentary.

We think it's part of a rich tradition that dates all

the way back to medieval times.

And so we still engage in it.

No more walks in the wood

The trees have all been cut down

And where once they stood

Not even a wagon rut appears along the path...

The writings and the ideas of Henry David Thoreau

and Ralph Waldo Emerson had a huge impact on me.

They got me through some very difficult times in my life,

one being when my father was stricken with heart disease,

and provided a lot of spiritual support for me.

When I found out in 1980 that part of Walden was going to be

destroyed by commercial development,

I decided that was something I needed to help fight.

So I ended up founding the Walden Woods Project.

And we are in our 27th year now, and we've accomplished a great deal.

It's been one of the most rewarding things that I've ever done.

We and the trees and the way

Back from the fields of play...

The lyrics to that song were originally a poem

written by a great American poet named John Hollander.

No more walks in the wood.

Don had this title, Long Road Out of Eden.

Timothy goes over, and he picks up an acoustic guitar.

And I go over to the keyboards and Joe grabs a guitar

and Don goes on the drums.

And we start making up this sort of musical story called

Long Road Out of Eden, a story of, really, the war in Iraq.

Moon shining down through the palms

Shadows moving on the sand...

And it was, like, the last resort.

It was another opus, another David Lean movie.

And it's a long road out of Eden.

We finally got through,

and we finally made Long Road Out of Eden.

And we didn't give it to a record company.

We made a deal with Walmart.

This was the first major artist to do a direct-to-retail release

and bypass the major record companies.

It was phenomenally successful.

The album entered at number 1.

It gave, I think, the whole industry hope that it could find a new

and different way to reach its fans.

They're becoming a much greener company,

and that was important to me.

And the other good thing was that our fans got 20 songs for 12 bucks.

It was basically a double album, and they weren't charged double for it.

Don said, I got a title for a song: Busy Being Fabulous".

And I thought, What a great title.

I came home to an empty house

And I found your little note...

And then Don wrote, Don't wait up for me tonight,

that was all she wrote.

Don't wait up for me tonight

And that was all she wrote...

And then we were off on the story.

You were just too busy being fabulous

Too busy to think about us...

Busy Being Fabulous, Don and Glenn had gotten it

to a certain state, and I came up with some stuff for the bridge and

tweaked what already exist.

I was very involved in the Long Road record.

I've always been a lot happier getting into the entire project,

arranging stuff, producing the stuff, co-writing the stuff.

Like, Waiting In The Weeds and Business As Usual

were co-writes with Don.

Getting Steuart Smith in the band was a real shot in the arm.

He's such a terrific musician.

It's a great solo.

It's like stepping into a space suit.

It is strange to be playing that song.

The reaction is terrific, and you bask in that excitement.

But I didn't write it.

I'm one part hired gun, but also one part collaborator.

I'm one of the guitar players. But I'm not an Eagle.

I don't know what it's like to be one of those guys.

3, 4!

My kids were looking on the Internet,

and they found this show that the Eagles had done in 1974.

I was in my office watching TV, and my kids come in and say,

Hey, Dad, come here.

You got to take a look at your hair.

And one of the songs was How Long.

But if I never see the good old days

Shining in the sun

I'll be doing fine and then some

Tell me how long...

How Long was from my first solo album.

They found that cos Cindy saw it on YouTube and said,

Glenn, what's this?.

And he said, It's a song of JD's.

She said, You didn't cut it, did you?.

How long, how long rock yourself to sleep

JD wanted it on his solo album, so we never recorded it.

My wife said, "Hey, that sounds like a hit Eagles song".

Everybody feels all right you know I heard some poor fool say

Somebody

Everyone is out there on the loose

Well, I wish I lived in the land of fools, and no one knew my name

But what you get is not quite what you choose

Tell me, how long, how long

Woman will you weep?

They are the American band.

Yeah, they pretty much encompassed the '70s, didn't they?

And took it all in.

That's a long time to still have a musical impact,

and it's due to this incredibly crisp, tight,

extraordinarily good record-making band and the presence of good songs.

But it's also now taken on this other thing, too,

where it's everybody through the band wants to remember a

'70s that they may or may not have had.

Good night, baby rock yourself to sleep

Sleep tight, baby rock yourself to sleep

Bye-bye, baby rock yourself to sleep.

This band could go play stadiums all over the country,

and people know these songs so intimately.

They last. The songs last.

I have one small plaque on my wall.

It says, "Presented to the Eagles to commemorate the best-selling

album of the 20th century,

with sales in excess of 26 million units".

That century's gone, so nobody's going to top that.

What's it like to be an Eagle now?

It's just part of my life. I do normal things.

I go to the market, and once in a while, somebody comes up to me.

I don't walk around being an Eagle.

I'm an Eagle when it's time for me to be.

I made sure the dishes were done before you guys came today.

You know?

He was a hard-headed man

And he was brutally handsome

She was terminally pretty

She held him up and he held her for ransom

In the heart of the cold, cold city

He had a nasty reputation as a cruel dude

They said he was ruthless, they said he was crude

They had one thing in common they were good in bed

She'd say, Faster, faster, the lights are turnin' red

Life in the fast lane

Surely make you lose your mind

Life in the fast lane...

I love everybody in the band like a brother.

To be part of a real band -

a REAL band -

is something that not all musicians get to do in their life.

And I'm real lucky to have that chapter in my book.

Rock'n'roll saved my life. It changed my life tremendously.

And as Mick Jagger so famously and eloquently said,

It's only rock'n'roll, but I like it.

I think that one of the reasons that Glenn and I

wanted to write songs is because rock'n'roll music got us

through junior high and through high school and those difficult

times when you're searching for your identity

and wondering who the heck you are,

trying to get girls to notice you, and wondering why

the football players are doing so much better than you are.

At the end of the day, it was and still is about the music.

You know, I've always been a dreamer...

I regret that I didn't handle some of the adversity

that the Eagles faced in the late '70s better.

Fortunately, for me,

I've had another chance to be the leader of the Eagles, another

chance to be Don's partner and do this work again and play this music.

And in this second run, I think I've done a pretty good job

of keeping the peace and keep the band together, keep everybody happy.

So here we are.

Still doing it.

You gotta take it to the limit

One more time.

Thank you.

That's it! That's it!

Bye-bye.

We wanted longevity.

It wasn't a hobby for us. It wasn't a game.

It wasn't a pleasant diversion. It was a life.

It was a calling. It was a career.

It was worth it.

We went to China last year.

We're still breaking new ground 40 years later.

Back in the late '70s,

Neil Young sang a song about the emerging punk ethic.

And the pivotal line in that song was,

It's better to burn out than it is to rust.

And I'm not sure that even Neil himself

subscribed to that sentiment, but I don't see rust as a bad thing.

I have an old 1962 John Deere tractor that's covered with rust,

but it runs like a top.

The inner workings are just fine.

You better let somebody love you

Let somebody love you

You better let somebody love...

To me, that rust symbolises all the miles driven

and all the good work done and all the experiences gained.

Before it's too

late.

From where I sit, the rust looks pretty good.

When somebody is around 40 years, it means they've got something,

something that people want. And the Eagles have that.

To me, the Eagles really expressed a mood.

California was the place of dreams.

It was a time of limitless possibilities.

I think they were a defining moment in the rock'n'roll world

that I love.

You couldn't really love the Eagles music and be an Eagles fan

and actually know them and not aspire to greatness yourself.

I'm not really into legacies. People talk to me, What's your legacy?.

I'm here now.

I'm doing what I want to do, and I'm trying to make stuff happen.

I see the Eagles in the same way.

They're not in the '70s.

They're in 2012 and 2013.

And whatever they're doing now artistically,

that's what's important.

In the long run In the long run

We can handle some resistance If our love is a strong one

Is a strong one

People talkin' about us they got nothin' else to do

When it all comes down we will still come through

In the long run Ooh, I want to tell you

It's a long run

You know I don't understand why you don't treat yourself better

Do the crazy things that you do

Cos all the debutantes...

and they started to customise their writing to fit in with it.

...Day by day It's only fair to wait...

I think that the Eagles started breaking up

during the recording of Hotel California.

There were creative tensions, but there was always tension tensions.

By the time we got to recording Hotel California,

if the song wasn't good enough to survive the amount of time

we were working on the record, it didn't make it on the record.

Perfection is not an accident.

'Our goal was just to be the best we could be.

'We wanted to get better as songwriters'

and as performers, and we worked on it.

Don and I felt like there was no space now for filler, and

Don Felder, for all of his talents as a guitar player, is not a singer.

Felder wanted to write more, sing more, and Felder had kind of

demanded that, I'm going to sing two songs on Hotel California.

We were all alphas,

and we were all very assertive and powerful in our own way.

You could bring in a great track to Don and Glenn

and be really excited about it.

This happened to Felder.

I wrote the track for Victim Of Love.

It was going to be a follow-up song on the Hotel California

record for me to sing.

...Victim of love...

I have no recollection of anybody being promised anything.

Victim Of Love was not brought to the band as a complete song.

It was simply another chord progression that Don Felder brought in.

It had no title, no lyrics, and no melody.

Glenn and I and JD Souther

all sat down and hammered out the rest of it.

We did let Mr Felder sing it.

He sang it dozens of times over the span of a week, over and over

and over again.

It simply didn't come up to band standards.

Victim Of Love had been recorded with Felder as the lead vocalist,

and my job was to take Don Felder out to lunch or dinner

while they went in the studio and put Henley's vocal on it.

...What kind of love have you got?

Irving took me out and said that everybody in the band

thought that it was better if Don sang that.

And it was a little bit of a bitter pill to swallow.

I felt like Don was taking that song from me.

I'd been promised a song on the next record.

But there was no real way to argue with my vocal versus

Don Henley's vocal.

There was no way to argue with anybody's vocal in the band

compared to Don Henley.

Felder demanding to sing that song would be the equivalent of me

demanding to play lead guitar on Hotel California.

It just didn't make sense.

If you look at my vocal participation in the Eagles

over the course of the 1970s, I sang

less and less.

It was intentional. We had Don Henley.

Don and Glenn's position was, This is the best thing for the Eagles.

And Don Felder never forgot that.

...What kind of love have you got?

Get it! Get it! Run! Run! Run!

Shit!

This is a real healthy thing.

It promotes good feelings, among... the guys,

and it keeps us from killing each other.

Where's my glove? Who's got my glove?

If we can yell at each other on a baseball field,

then we don't have to yell at each other when we're working.

- Get all my frustrations out. - What frustrations?

I haven't been getting laid.

We try to get out and play softball with the crew if we have a day off.

- Swing, batter! - Oh, it's gone, it's gone. It's gone.

Something to help release the tension.

That's really what I do to keep from going crazy.

How do you keep from going crazy, Joe?

Well...

I tell you, I just...

In the press and the media, it was presented that we were

constantly at war, and I can't say that's exactly the case.

We were interacting and we were all intense.

Glenn said to me one time,

I get nuts sometimes and I'm sorry.

Hey, Joe.

But that tension had a lot to do with

fanning the artistic fire.

Having that dynamic was important in making the music.

We're rehearsing now, and before we're even playing

and guys are just noodling around and getting their amps going

and stuff, we hear Joe go...

Do-do-do-do-do.

And everyone would kind of go, What did you play?

Play that again.

That was an exercise I was doing because it's a coordination thing.

It's like one of these deals.

So, I was doing that to warm up, and they said, "What is that?".

And I said, That's just something I have, you know?.

There you go.

That's the lick.

That's what we should build the song around.

I was riding shotgun in a Corvette with a drug dealer on the way

to a poker game, and the next thing I knew,

we were going about 90 miles an hour, holding big time.

I was like, Hey, man. What are you doing?.

And he looked at me, and he grinned.

He goes, Life in the fast lane.

And I thought, immediately, Now, there's a song title.

Life in the fast lane Surely make you lose your mind

Life in the fast lane...

Then they put out the greatest hits.

There was a period where we sold a million records

a month for 18 months.

It's a little-known fact that the Eagles had the biggest-selling

album of the 20th century.

But the music business never ever got honest of its own volition.

No record company ever went to an artist and said,

You've done a great job.

We're going to increase your royalties.

So we created our own promotion company.

We created our own management company.

We had our own booking agency.

Stop any time.

Take it to the limit...

We achieved an amount of success beyond our wildest imagination,

and Randy really had trouble with it.

Randy used to have trouble singing the high note at the end of Take It To The Limit.

...Come on and take it to the limit

One more time

Take it to the limit...

Oh, yeah, I was always kind of scared, basically.

What if I don't hit it right?. It was a pretty high note.

And in the middle of the fade, you crank the volume knob and go, What?!

Randy could do it,

but if you made him do it, Oh, no, man, I...

...One more time.

- Thank you. - Randy Meisner.

He'd call the road manager and say,

Tell Glenn I don't want to do Take It To The Limit any more.

Take it out of the set. I confronted him about this.

I called him up, and I said,

Randy, there's thousands of people waiting to hear you sing that song.

You just can't say, 'Fuck them. I don't feel like it.'.

Do you think I like singing Take It Easy

and Peaceful Easy Feeling every night?

I'm tired of those songs,

but there's people in the audience who've been waiting

years to see us do those songs.

We just got fed up with that and just said, OK, don't sing it.

Why don't you just quit? You say you are unhappy, quit.

Randy never knew how great he was. He wasn't alpha.

Confrontations were really hard for him.

All I want to see is 5 guys happy playing together,

and that's what makes the music.

We were backstage and the crowd was going wild.

And our encore number was Take It To The Limit.

People loved that song, they went crazy when Randy hit those high notes.

But Randy didn't want to do the song that night.

He'd been up partying all night with a couple of girls

and a bottle of vodka, and Glenn kept trying to talk him into it.

He said, Man, the people want to hear that song. You've got to do it.

And Randy kept saying no.

So after about the third or fourth time that Randy refused, Glenn

just backed up a couple of steps and said, Fuck you then!.

There were police officers standing backstage and when they saw us

about to go at it, they started to move in

and Henley turned right to the cops and said, Stay out of this!

This is personal and it is private, real fucking private!.

The writing was on the wall and Randy was going to leave.

There was only one person to ever replace Randy Meisner in the Eagles

and in my mind it was Timothy B Schmit.

He replaced him in Poco, and plugged in and sang the same parts.

And I remember sitting with Irving and saying, Irving, I think

we should get Timothy Schmit. He said, I just saw Timothy.

I was out on the road when the guys in Poco were in the hotel bar

and Timothy was smashed out of his mind, he was jacked up.

You sure about this?.

I said, Irving, if you had been in a band for 11 years

and you were still making 250 a week working 40 weeks a year,

maybe you would be a little smashed up yourself.

They asked me to join their band before I had even played

a note of music with them.

I just said, Where do you want me? When?

I am definitely in.

We want to introduce you to the newest member of our band.

He is our new bass player and we got him from a really fine band, Poco.

Please give a nice Houston, Texas welcome to Timothy Schmidt.

I went on the road with them in 1978 as the new guy.

...Your smile is a thin disguise...

And I heard a few, Where is Randy? from the audience.

But I knew it was a good move for them and me.

There were a lot of decisions business-wise that needed to be made

in a secret session, Glenn and Don and Irving in the back of the plane.

I didn't like that I wasn't part of that,

but I knew that it was good for the Eagles.

Don Felder REALLY did not like it.

Glenn and I saw ourselves as the leaders of the band

but other people saw us dictators.

You just cannot have 5e leaders in a band. It does not work.

People have to do what they do best.

There is all this undercurrent and resentment and plotting

and complaining and I'm sure Timothy thought, "What have I got myself into?".

I was just really happy to be there and all these tensions, it is

not that I did not feel it, but I had no idea how deep it was.

In my experience, all rock 'n' roll bands are on the verge of

breaking up at all times.

The band at that point had begun to split up into factions.

Don Felder, in an effort to gain more control, had co-opted Joe Walsh,

so much of the time it was Felder and Walsh against me and Glenn.

And at that point, even Glenn and I were beginning to have our differences.

It was tearing the band apart.

The magic ingredient that made the band successful was

the relationship between Don and Glenn.

Through years of touring, years in the studio, all of that

friction really started driving a wedge in between that relationship.

It reached a point where we were just tired of each other.

Tired of the hoopla, tired of touring, tired of pretty much everything.

At that point, song-writing was becoming very difficult.

How much sleep did you guys get? When did you get finished loading up?

- 2 o'clock? / - 5.30. - 5.30 this morning? / - Yeah.

After the success of Hotel California - Grammy winner, mega sales -

top that, and we show up at the studio and nobody has one song done.

I don't know what we will do first but...

I had enough of a piece where they both went "That's great.

Let's develop that", and I was really pleased that they wanted to

develop that one because it came out more as an R&B song.

And it is very simple.

Very simple instrumentation, very simple arrangement.

There's a lot of air in it.

That's why it works.

Look at us baby Up all night

Tearing our love apart

Aren't we the same two people who live...

About halfway through, Don comes up to me and says, There's your hit.

...Every time I try to walk away

Something makes me turn around and stay

And I can't tell you why...

We are on top of the world. We are young. We were overdoing everything.

There was a lot of chemical dependency going on within

the band and that was rough.

During all of that time of writing and recording The Long Run,

and all the time on the road that we were on the road doing

The Long Run, we were all using cocaine.

When we first started snorting coke it was like a writing tool.

Do a couple of bumps and kind of get started talking about stuff,

get yourself going and launch into some sort of idea for a song.

But in the end, cocaine brought out the worst in everybody.

Yes, this half hour of the show is brought to you by cocaine,

the makers of hits.

...In the long run

Ooh I want to tell you it's a long run...

Making that album was excruciating. We were just completely burned out.

We had driven ourselves really hard for almost a decade

and we were just fried.

It was long too. The days and hours would drag on, it would

feel like we were not getting anything done.

It was more painful than Hotel California.

It was more of a painful birth,

because all the stuff was going on and we were getting pretty frazzled.

And the record company didn't care if we farted and burped.

They would put that out. They didn't care.

When can we have it?. Because that was their whole corporate quarter.

Who can go the distance?

We will find out in the long run

In the long run...

At that point, we inked in The Long Run as the title.

I think Henley said, I know what to call this one. Look at us.

...We can handle some resistance...

Hold it. Stop.

That is it.

Eagles, The Long Run, song 2, take 1.

It was a struggle, an endless start, stop, start, stop.

We called it The Long One.

It was the beginning of the end.

Even though I don't think I saw it right then.

There were a lot of things building up

and a lot of things I tried to overlook for the good of the band,

and ultimately I just couldn't look past some of this any more.

And it festered because we didn't talk about these things.

It finally came to a head in Long Beach.

We were doing a benefit for Senator Alan Cranston.

He was concerned about a lot of some of the same issues

we were concerned about, including environmental destruction

and the war, so we wanted to support him.

Felder didn't like us doing benefits,

he just thought that was money that should be going into his pocket.

Why are we doing it for Jerry Brown or anti-nukes?.

Are you willing to sacrifice?

Alan Cranston and his wife are coming around to personally thank

every member of the Eagles for doing this.

I was very uninformed about politics, I couldn't care

less about politics, I didn't even know or care who Alan Cranston was.

Senator Cranston went up to Felder and said,

I want to thank you, and Felder looked at the Senator and said,

You're welcome, and then as he was turning away he said, I guess.

I guess.

I guess. And Glenn heard it.

And I just... got really mad.

I was drinking a long-necked Bud and walked into the tuning room

while Walsh and Felder was and took the beer bottle

and threw it against the wall and smashed it.

I stormed out.

I got more mad and more mad. By the time we went on stage, I was seething.

I wanted to kill Felder.

Thank you again very much from all the Eagles,

and for Senator Cranston for coming out here and checking it out.

1, 2, 3, 4.

A lot of tensions between Glenn and Felder

and the real manifestation of it came that night.

Somebody is going to hurt someone before the night is through...

So now we are playing the show

and trying to act like everything is OK and we get through the songs,

and I just keep looking over at him, You ungrateful son of a bitch.

There's going to be a heartache tonight

A heartache tonight, I know...

Just seeing that, I really saw how serious it was at that show.

They were fighting on stage, Szymczyk has audio of it.

You are a real pro, Don, all the way.

Yeah, you are too, the way you handle people, except for the people you pay.

Nobody gives a shit about it.

Fuck you, I have been paying you for 7 years, you fuckhead.

So it starts getting towards the end of the set

and I am looking at him going, Three more songs, asshole.

And I am looking at him and I am ready to go.

I can't wait to get my hands on him.

When we get off the stage, I am going to kick your ass.

Fucking kill you. I can't wait.

When that kind of stuff is on stage and you're in front of people,

you've got problems.

Thank you very much.

We got through the show and it just, all hell broke loose backstage.

When the set ended, he was out ahead of me, took his cheapest guitar...

...busted it in a million pieces, jumped into his limousine and drove off.

And that was it. That was really the straw that broke the camel's back.

Well, baby, there you stand...

Someone wrote the Eagles went out with a whimper not a bang,

which was true.

...Oh my God, I can't believe it is happening again...

I didn't want to hear it. This was like my super dream had come true.

...And it looks like the end...

So I called Glen and I said, What is the status? What is going on?

Is this thing really broken up?. He said, Yeah, it is over.

We were beat and it was really affecting the foundational core,

the soul of the band. We hit the wall.

You work, work, work, you get up to a peak

and then it is almost invariably people head-butt and, "Whose band is it?.

And, I am in charge. And, "No, you are not. And there you go.

...You never thought you'd be alone. This far down the line...

We had always said that we wanted to step off the wave just before it

crashed into the beach. And we did.

...You're afraid

it's all been wasted time...

...The autumn leaves have got you thinking...

The Beatle guys say they never thought, McCartney never thought that

band was going to last more than 2 years, because no pop band did.

I think it's part of it. It comes together, it's magic

and it falls apart.

But how cool that it even happens at all.

...I could have done so many things, baby...

It was magical.

...If I could only stop my mind...

They wrote a lot of great, great songs that will be celebrated

and listened to and loved for a long time.

We managed to represent that period of time in the '70s,

Southern California, which was very artistically creative.

I hope that is remembered like the roaring '20s are, you know?

Our generation and what we did.

...You can get on with your search Baby

And I can get on with mine

And maybe some day we will find

That it wasn't really wasted time.

We set out to become a band for our time, but sometimes

if you do a good enough job, you become a band for all time.

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

I was thinking 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...