If any band proves that large good fortune is not essentially a path to psychological well-being and all-round happiness, it is The Eagles. Glenn Frey fell out with Randy Meisner. Joe Walsh and Bernie Leadon fell out with everybody. And, maximum damagingly, Glenn Frey fell out with Don Felder.
Issues got here to move in July 1980, at the ultimate date of The Lengthy Run excursion. The display, which Frey had organised as a receive advantages in strengthen of Democratic State Senator Alan Cranston – then engaged in an election marketing campaign towards Republican Paul Gann – came about on the 14,500-capacity Lengthy Seaside Area in California. And Felder wasn’t glad about it.
“I did not even know who the Cranstons had been,” Felder wrote in his autobiography, Heaven and Hell: My Lifestyles within the Eagles. “I made my perspectives transparent, however I knew that if ‘The Gods’ [Frey and drummer Don Henley] sought after to get into political campaigning, then I wasn’t able to argue. Nonetheless, you by no means noticed John Lennon, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix coming into mattress with a political candidate.”
Felder’s reluctance was once compounded when the Senator’s spouse, Norma Weintraub, offered herself simply previous to the display.
“Hi! Great to fulfill you,” Felder spoke back, prior to including, “I assume”, beneath his breath as she walked away.
Glenn Frey heard the remark.
“I were given truly mad,” he stated within the documentary Historical past Of The Eagles. “I used to be ingesting a long-neck Bud, and walked into the tuning room the place Walsh and Felder was once, and took the beer bottle and threw it towards the wall and smashed it. I stormed out, and were given extra mad, and extra mad, and by the point we went onstage I used to be seething. I sought after to kill Felder.”
Don Felder: “We walked onstage, and he came around whilst we had been enjoying The Very best of My Love and stated, ‘Fuck you. I am gonna kick your ass after we get off the level.’ Either one of us had been burned out after our months at the highway. Neither people truly sought after to be there that night time, and for me it was once one gig too many.
“Frazzled and fractious, we targeted our disappointment that night time on every different. I began ingesting Jack Daniel’s and was once quickly drunker than I would been shortly. Because the night time advanced, we each grew angrier and started hissing at every different beneath our breaths.”
Audio of the pair insulting every different was once recorded by means of the band’s sound engineers, and captures Frey satirically calling Felder “an actual professional”. When Felder complains about the way in which Frey treats folks, Frey responds, “Fuck you. I have been paying you for seven years, fuckhead.”
“We commence getting in opposition to the top of the set, and I am having a look at him going, ‘3 extra songs, asshole,’ Frey remembered. “I am having a look at him, and I’m able to move. I will be able to’t wait to get my fingers on him. When the set ended [the last song was Take It Easy], he was once out forward of me, took his most cost-effective guitar, busted it into one million items, jumped in his limousine and drove off. And that was once it. It was once the straw that broke the camel’s again.”
The display was referred to as ‘Lengthy Evening at Fallacious Seaside’, and Don Henley was once famously quoted as pronouncing that the band would simplest excursion once more “when hell freezes over.” When it did, in time for the 1994 MTV particular that resulted within the Hell Freezes Over are living album, Felder was once again on board, albeit receiving a smaller cut up of the band’s income than prior to now. In 2001 he was once fired, and quite a few court docket instances adopted.
When Frey died in 2016, he and Felder had nonetheless no longer reconciled, and Felder advised the Related Press, “I had all the time was hoping someplace alongside the road, he and I might have dinner in combination, speaking about outdated instances and letting it pass with a handshake and a hug.”
