The one song Don Felder struggled to give to the Eagles: “I still have the reel myself”
The story of Don Felder in the Eagles has always felt like watching brothers fight a lot of the time.
As much as he brought a lot of great music to the band, he was always going to be playing second fiddle to Glenn Frey and Don Henley, and given their track record, it’s not like that wasn’t for a reason, either. But when looking through a lot of the riffs that he had in storage, Felder knew that a lot of his greatest tunes were getting stifled far too often for him to ignore.
Because when you think about it, it’s not like Felder was a one-trick pony whenever he got behind the fretboard. He was always trying out new approaches to rock and roll and even if there were songs that didn’t work for the rest of them like ‘The Disco Strangler’, the fact that he had a hand in ‘Hotel California’ pretty much cements his status as one of the main figureheads of their style.
But when taken with the rest of their catalogue, Henley and Frey were the true craftsmen behind all of their tunes. Felder wasn’t a lyricist by any means when he first started writing for the group, and since a lot of the tapes that he sent were glorified instrumentals when the band received them, it’s not like he was earning many points with the people who only wanted to sing along to ‘Desperado’.
When you’ve written one of the band’s most legendary songs, though, you’d think that he would have had a lot more say in what turned up on the record, but that’s not what happened. Henley and Frey had firmly turned into the leaders of the group, and while Felder did still have a few decent tracks on The Long Run, he felt that there were a few tracks that he could never get the band to go for.
The record was all about them switching things up, and it’s not like Felder wasn’t willing to go along with what they were doing. He created a damn guitar-harmonised symphony on ‘King of Hollywood’ and a talkbox extravaganza on ‘Those Shoes’, but once he came together with the bones of his own track titled ‘Heavy Metal’, there was no way the rest of the band was going to go for it.
He knew there was something in there, but he felt that the band would never take it seriously, saying, “I had about twelve or thirteen song ideas. I still have the reel myself, as a matter of fact. And I turned in stuff for The Long Run that we cut a basic track for, and Henley couldn’t finish writing the lyrics for in time, and I took it and wrote it and rerecorded it, and it became ‘Heavy Metal’ in 1984.”
While the band did share a studio with Black Sabbath at one point, the fact that they were so hesitant to get heavy on Felder’s tune is a little bit surprising. They had already begun going in different directions across the album, and while they might not have wanted too much experimentation, Felder’s tune certainly had a lot more teeth to it than whatever was happening on ‘Teenage Jail’.
But never once did it feel like they were making the record specifically to hurt Felder. They had simply been growing apart, and while Joe Walsh was more than welcome to throw whatever idea he had at the wall to see what stuck, Felder seemed to be fighting for his material the same way George Harrison had to during the end of The Beatles’ run.
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