The reason why Eagles refuse to speak to Don Felder
There has never been any member of Eagles that seemed to be the most important member of the band.
It’s easy to look at a band like CCR and see that John Fogerty was the standout or even pick Kurt Cobain out as the heart of Nirvana, but it was truly a team effort to get every single one of those classic Eagles tunes going. But there is a definite time and place for everything, and when everyone seemed to be on good terms, it only took a few wrong moves for them to permanently turn their back on Don Felder.
Then again, was anyone really going to be questioning what Don Henley and Glenn Frey wanted for the band? They were two of the biggest songwriters in the world, and their way with words was half the reason why the band sounded so perfect whenever they played. And yet, if you were to take Felder’s contributions out of the equation, there is no way they would be considered the same musical juggernaut that they were back in the day.
First of all, Felder was the one bringing chops into the mix, and had he not been sitting on a beach in Malibu at the exact right time, we probably wouldn’t have been able to listen to ‘Hotel California’ today. He was practically a co-leader of the band on the musical front, but whereas Randy Meisner and Timothy B Schmit could go with the flow occasionally, it was going to get ugly when they blocked Felder out of the room on their last records.
Although they had their time to recharge their batteries after the infamous fight onstage between Frey and Felder, there was still time for them to put their pettiness aside during the 1990s. They all seemed to be cordial enough working on Hell Freezes Over, and they even managed to get a few new tunes out of the deal, but when Felder had problems with how much money he was making, Frey and Henley were convinced that they needed to cut him loose.
Frey was already looking to make more money, but when Felder had problems, it was as if the final straw had finally been pulled for him, saying, “I said, ‘I’m not going to do it unless [Henley] and I make more money than the other guys. Don Felder was never ever satisfied. No rock band is ever a perfect democracy. It’s more like a sports team. No one can do anything without the other guys but not everyone gets to touch the ball.”
And when playing his final tour, Felder remembered all of that musical brotherhood being dead and buried, saying, “I didn’t sense a great deal of camaraderie. You hardly saw anyone if it wasn’t walking on the plane or onto the stage. Instead of being able to sit down and talk about stuff, that independent isolation didn’t really add the comfort to make it work. It just broke my heart. It’s not just playing with Joe [Walsh]. I miss these guys, but I also miss the friendship and the music.”
But looking at the way that the band has panned out, they haven’t exactly been looking to welcome him back any time soon. Even after Frey’s passing, the band were never able to mend those musical wounds with Felder, usually opting to bring in someone like Vince Gill, session musician Steuart Smith, or even bring back original guitarist Bernie Leadon on the rare occasion whenever they were looking to shake things up.
It’s a shame that the band were never able to truly mend things over with Felder, but it was about more than disagreements over money half the time. They had simply grown apart, and for Henley, he’s probably more comfortable leaving that side of his career in the past and trying to figure out what he can do to keep the spirit of Eagles alive today.
