Richard Bowden: the person who turned Don Henley into a musician
Most artists have that one song, musician, or lyric that sparks their desire to become a superstar. It’s more than a passing interest; it’s something powerful enough to put a drumstick in their hand or a microphone in front of them. The biggest artists often have a passion buried deep within, waiting to be unleashed. While Don Henley had a natural love for music, it was Richard Bowden who truly opened the door to his musical world.
Because while Henley certainly admired what he heard on the radio in Linden, Texas, he wasn’t looking to be a musician at first. He had been there to hear the very first broadcast Elvis Presley ever made on the radio, but once The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, he knew that there was something else going on with rock and roll than a handful of chords.
Since Henley’s family wasn’t looking to have a rockstar for a son, though, Henley ended up leaving his hometown for college. Even during his downtime, he admitted that he had no interest in pursuing music as a career, saying, “I took one music classic. I believe it was the beginning theory, and I flunked. I got an F, but I didn’t really care because I was an English major.”
While Bowden had been friends with Henley for a while, the future Eagles frontman got behind the drumkit because of him, saying, “It all started when I was beating on schoolbooks with my fingers. I would beat out these little candences, and I used to drive my classmates crazy. At some point, someone said, I believe it was Richard Bowden, said, ‘Why don’t you just start playing the drums?.’”
Despite having the kind of singing voice that most people would kill for, the first outfit that Henley and Bowden were in had no singing whatsoever. Since they weren’t as well-versed in rock and roll, much of what they played owed more to Dixieland jazz than anything that Chuck Berry could have conceived.
Once Henley bothered to open his mouth, though, his next band, Shiloh, was what set him up to become a superstar. Even though he was far away from California, a chance meeting with Kenny Rogers led him out to Los Angeles, where he met Linda Ronstadt and Glenn Frey working on the gig circuit at the Troubadour.
Although Henley was clearly a superstar vocalist, it’s clear that he matured since drumming on his schoolbooks as well. While it would be stretching to call anything that he did too intricate, hearing him adapt to genres like new wave and disco throughout his career showed that he was at least listening to the backbeat of every song to see what people’s ears were attuned to.
While Richard Bowden isn’t the first name that anyone thinks of when talking about the formation of the Eagles it’s important to realise how much his impact was on Henley. Because if it wasn’t for that one passing comment in between classes, songs like ‘The Last Resort’ and ‘The Sad Cafe’ may have turned out to be great tone poems instead of songwriting epics.
