The artist Don Felder hailed as “a monster bass player”
What Don Felder brought to Eagles when he first started performing was always about more than a few tasty guitar solos.
He didn’t get the nickname ‘Fingers’ Felder by accident, but when looking at the kind of riffs he brought to the table, his playing helped give the band the edge that they needed to be a true rock outfit, which fit perfectly once Joe Walsh entered the fold. So when you have two guitar titans onstage playing off each other, how the hell is anyone supposed to pay attention to the bassist?
Granted, it’s not fair to call the California rockers the lone example of a band throwing their bassist under the bass. There are certainly titans of the genre like Geddy Lee and John Entwistle that have left their mark, but for all of the drummer jokes that the universe has spat out in recent years, it can be even more egregious for the person whose sole job is to stay in the background and play the root notes of the chord.
Or at least, that’s what most people think the gig is. If you look a bit closer, you’ll realise that the bassist is the one who has all the power half the time. They are the ones in charge of both the rhythmic and the melodic side of things at the same time, and even if not every bassist takes advantage of that opportunity, it didn’t take people long to see where you could on the four low strings.
Paul McCartney had already made the bass sound cool in The Beatles, and people like Sting did his part to try and make the instrument cool, but when Felder was starting to put together solo material, he knew he needed to get the best of the best whenever he could. He could have worked with the best session players, but his choice of bringing in Randy Jackson was bound to turn some heads.
Despite his time in Hollywood as a talent judge, Felder knew Jackson would be the perfect man for the job, saying, “Randy Jackson, who everybody knows as the dog dude from American Idol, came in. Nobody knows that he is just a monster bass player. He is one of the best bass players in Los Angeles. He played on this optimistic love song called ‘Someday.’ It needed to have a killer bass player on it and I tried a couple of other bass players, but it was made for Randy, so he played on it.”
While there’s a certain amount of vitriol that comes with any talent judge, it’s not like Jackson was looking for his big break outside of the show, either. He was already a great session player before, and he had even been through the wringer as a rock and roll star decades before he started using the word ‘dog’ at the end of every sentence.
Sure, not everything that he made was absolute smash hits or anything, but for a musical journeyman in the 1980s, getting a gig to play on a Stryper album was a good opportunity, and when Ross Valory left the fold, Jackson did find time to jam alongside Steve Perry and Neal Schon on a few Journey projects, which worked out so well that Schon asked him to be the bassist on a few solo projects.
Felder certainly had some more famous friends on the record like David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Tommy Shaw, but it wasn’t about trying to get everyone together for one big party. Sometimes, all you need is the right guy for the job, and by getting Jackson in the mix, he had the recipe that he needed for his comeback.
