Stick in the Mud: the Eagles member Glenn Frey thought was “never happy”
When judged against most workplaces, being in a rock band isn’t exactly fair to every one of its musicians. As much as some people try their best to present a group as a complete democracy in every sense of the word, there are just as many that seem to have either one leader or two co-captains that end up making the rest of the group look like glorified backing musicians by comparison. While there was no disputing that Glenn Frey was one of the core leaders of the Eagles, he believed that Don Felder was way too pessimistic during every era of the group.
Then again, Felder joining the group in the mid-1970s almost seemed like a complete fluke. After working as a session musician for years, Felder just went to an Eagles session and played on the track ‘Already Gone’ before being asked to join the group only a few days later. And when you’re a session musician scraping money together, how are you supposed to say no to an iconic rock band?
It’s not like Felder was just some hired hand or anything, either. His riffs are what sparked a lot of the group’s greatest moments, including laying down the famous bassline that opens up the beginning of ‘One Of These Nights’. While the song became Frey and Don Henley’s magnum opus, Felder was the one who came up with the initial chord progression for what would become ‘Hotel California’.
But if you look at their history, Felder was always a bit touchy regarding his own place in the group. He had been given the shaft by having ‘Victim of Love’ stolen from under his nose, but his overreaction to playing a benefit show in the early 1980s turned into the fight that broke up the band, with him and Frey arguing onstage and eventually speeding off at the end of the show.
While that should have been where the story ended, the band finally learned to settle their differences when putting together Hell Freezes Over, where they even debuted a handful of new songs. Once the tour started rolling by, though, Frey remembered Felder having the same problems again.
As part of the deal, Frey and Henley would be earning more money than everyone else, recalling in History of the Eagles, “We are the ones that have been keeping the Eagles name alive in record stores and on the radio. We reached an agreement that I was happy with, Don was happy with, Joe [Walsh] was happy with, Timothy [B Schmitt] was happy with, and Don Felder wasn’t happy with. [He] was never ever satisfied. Never ever happy. Always more concerned with how much money I was making.”
Despite the financial split not being fair, it’s not like Frey didn’t have a small point. He and Henley were the two faces of the Eagles who could claim to have had many incredible songs in their solo years, and the fact that they were even playing a few of them live during the reunion was a testament to why they were getting paid more.
Frey even admitted that it wasn’t fair by design, saying, “It’s more like a sports team. We all contribute, but not everybody gets to touch the ball.” That wasn’t enough of an argument for Felder, who refused to sign the deal and was ultimately fired from the group before going into the 2000s.
Still, that doesn’t mean that the spirit of him hasn’t lingered on every time they have played a show. No matter how often the Eagles want to ignore the fact that he isn’t a part of the group anymore, he will still be a presence at the show for as long as those opening strains of ‘Hotel California’ are still ringing.
