“They won every single one”: The band Don Felder was happy losing to
Los Angeles-born Eagles are soft rock’s proto-archetype band. Formed in the ashes of Woodstock, principal songwriters Don Henley and Glen Frey scored the 1970s’ sunny embrace of easy melodies and beige flecks of country and funk, which bored the kids but cast a spell over their parents, who parted with their cash under their vocal harmony spell.
Indeed, Eagles were one of the decade’s biggest-selling artists, with Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) compilation and 1976’s Hotel California still standing as America’s two most commercially successful albums.
For many fans, it’s lead guitarist Don Felder’s entry into the Eagles fold that marked the beginning of their classic era. Pulling the band away from their lilting country foundations towards a more rock-oriented direction, Felder went from merely adding slide guitar to ‘Good Day in Hell’ and solo takes to ‘Already Gone’ as a session musician to swiftly joining the official line-up. Co-writing the monster ‘Hotel California’ single, Felder proved instrumental in the Eagles’ 1970s Billboard charts conquest.
Felder’s journey to musical stardom was a storied one. Born in poverty in Florida’s Gainesville, an infatuation with Elvis Presley as a boy resulted in the life-altering swap of a local kid’s battered old acoustic guitar for several cherry bombs and firecrackers. Unable to afford music lessons, Felder enlisted the help of a local musician to teach him how to string and tune the guitar, then he taught himself by listening to the radio hits of the day.
Spending years practising in his spare time, he eventually formed a teen band called The Continentals with none other than Stephen Stills. Departing after a year, future Eagles bandmate Bernie Leadon joined, his membership helping in no small part with his essential access to a car.
South Florida in the 1960s was a fertile time for local bands. Felder and Stills were representing Gainesville, a scrappy young band from Jacksonville called My Backyard, who would later find fame as Lynyrd Skynyrd, and over in Daytona Beach, The Escorts were making local waves led by brothers Duane and Gregg Allman before their acclaimed band in 1969. “We were always in battles of the bands together, and they won every single one,” Felder recalled of the brothers to Classic Rock in 2018. “If I was going to lose a contest like that, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather lose to.”
Musical and friendship bonds were forged in the Florida music scene. Felder routinely staying at the Allman brothers’ mother’s house to avoid forking out on hotel rooms, Duane would teach Felder how to master the slide guitar technique, which would later be smattered all over the Eagles’ work: “He was sitting there playing slide one night, and I said ‘You have to show me how to do that’…still the best slide player I’ve ever heard.”
All three would go on to achieve enormous success across the next decade and beyond, but it’s the Allman Brothers that, for a moment, set an example that Florida’s rising stars all took notes from.
