The one musician Don Henley didn’t want to get attention: “He was insidious”
Don Henley didn’t get into the music industry to be the consummate entertainer by any stretch.
He did know that show business would have been a lot of fun when he first saw Elvis Presley for the first time, but looking at what the rest of the world was doing in the 1970s, the Eagles weren’t going to go the way of punk bands or glam rock outfits and try to wow the crowd at every turn. They did most of the talking with their music, but there were some bandmates that Henley felt really overstayed their welcome by the time they embarked on their solo careers.
But being a member of the Eagles is already a hard tightrope to walk. Everyone needed to understand that Frey and Henley steered the ship every single time they played, and while everyone else could add their extra spice into the mix, there was no questioning what they were doing half the time. And that also tended to apply to every single note that the guitarists played as well.
Henley and Frey didn’t want their songs to transform every single time they went out onstage, and even when they were tracking ‘Hotel California’ for the first time, Henley knew it wouldn’t be right until Don Felder played exactly what was on his original demo. Everything needed to sound perfect, but if the rest of the band were going for perfection, Joe Walsh was the one adding some zany energy to just about everything they played.
And if we’re being honest, that’s something the band sorely needed. Their records were already in danger of becoming way too serious by the time they released One of These Nights, and while Walsh did have his fair share of ballads to throw into the mix, ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ was the first time any one of their songs sounded like fun. But when they broke up, Henley felt that Walsh was flying a little too close to the sun whenever he used some of the band’s old songs live.
That could have been because of Walsh’s constant substance abuse around that time, but Henley always felt it was more than that. He had been going in a much different direction than his bandmates when working on The End of the Innocence, so when he saw Walsh trying to resurrect some of their old tunes from back in the day, Henley found a lot of what he did downright pitiful.
Walsh was still a guitar god throughout every facet of his career, but Henley felt that he should be ignored because of how much he was screwing up the band’s legacy, saying, “He was an insidious troublemaker. He would split the band into factions. He was a very divisive presence and very covert about it. He was very hypocritical. Glenn and I used to laugh and say,`Yeah, Joe`s a very interesting bunch of guys.` You can print that, too. I`m tired of being Mr. Nice Guy. I`m not going to try to do anything about Joe doing `Life in the Fast Lane,` though. It would just bring more publicity where there probably shouldn`t be any in the first place.”
A lot of that resentment did at least start to fade once Walsh started to float the idea of joining the Eagles again, but they all had one condition for him coming back: he needed to get sober. It wasn’t going to be easy, and Walsh did admit to feeling terrified going back onstage without something to drink, but he seemed to have a whole new lease on life when he performed with the band again.
So while those restless hearts did eventually mend at the end of the day, Henley was happy not to hold a grudge against who he considered to be one of the finest guitarists in the world. Walsh was going down a very dark path, and Henley knew that he didn’t want to look if a trainwreck unfolded.
