The Don Felder song Eagles and “the Gods” rejected immediately
In his 2008 memoir, Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles, guitarist Don Felder doesn’t tend to speak about his famous bandmates Don Henley and Glen Frey with a great deal of warmth, claiming the duo were known within the band as “the Gods,” and that the rest of the group were treated like hired hands.
For context, Felder had been fired from the band in 2001 and was now free to speak about the Eagles’ infamous internal politics, even if it earned him a lawsuit in the process.
In a more recent interview with American Songwriter, the 77-year-old Felder seems to have softened a bit on the subject, describing “the combination of Don [Henley] and Glenn [Frey]” as “the American Lennon and McCartney; just a great songwriting team.” Still, as a talented songwriter in his own right, Felder certainly struggled at times, much like George Harrison with his Beatles mates, to get his own ideas on the table during the Eagles’ 1970s heyday.
Despite some noteworthy credits, including a co-writing role on arguably the band’s biggest hit, 1976’s ‘Hotel California’, Felder was usually running uphill when it came to getting “the Gods” to adopt one of his own compositions.
Based on some advice he received from bandmate and Eagles co-founder Bernie Leadon (who had his own falling out with Frey and Henley), Felder took an unorthodox approach with his submissions. Rather than trying to write a memorable lyric or a catchy melodic hook, Leadon suggested that Felder focus on writing “music beds in a song structure—the intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus—just a framework.” The idea was that Frey and Henley would be more interested in developing a song from a malleable root than just accepting one of Felder’s ideas on its own merits alone.
One of Felder’s early attempts at this approach, however, didn’t quite achieve the desired goal. In 1974, when still a new member of the group, he used a four-track recorder to produce a demo of a song tentatively titled ‘Move On’, complete with two minutes of Felder drumming on a cardboard box.
“So I mixed that [‘Move On’] down onto a little cassette and gave a copy of it to Don Henley, just like Bernie suggested,” Felder recalled to American Songwriter. “He [Henley] said, ‘I really like that. We should write a song called ‘Slide On,’ and I went, ‘That just sounds a little corny to me.’”
Felder at least came away from the chat feeling like ‘Move On’ / ‘Slide On’ would have a good shot at appearing on the next Eagles album, 1975’s One of These Nights. Instead, the song wound up sitting in a box collecting dust for the next 50 years, as Frey and Henley’s tunes bumped it from One of These Nights and all subsequent records. The tune only resurfaced in 2020, and was released officially this year—in a blindingly slick new arrangement—as part of Felder’s career-spanning compilation album The Vault: Fifty Years of Music.
“I learned how difficult it is to just write music beds without any melody, so when I went back and heard those cassettes, I wrote the melody and lyrics,” Felder said. “Each one of them took me back to exactly where I was when I wrote them.”
The Vault includes contributions from Felder’s daughter and granddaughter on vocals, as well as guest musicians Steve Lukather, David Paich, Joseph “Joe” Williams, Greg Phillinganes, Greg Bissonette, Brian Tichy, and Todd Sucherman.
