Felder & friends
Former Eagles guitarist gets a little help from musical pals on new star-studded album
Don Felder didn’t set out to make a “celebrity CD.”
This may seem hard to believe when looking at the list of collaborators on the former Eagles guitarist’s newest album, American Rock ’N’ Roll. In fact, if you did set out to make a celebrity CD, these would be some of the people you would want to appear.
Most are historical figures who helped define hard rock music from the 1960s on. There are heavy hitters on guitar, including Joe Satriani, Richie Sambora (formerly with Bon Jovi), Rush’s Alex Lifeson, Australian virtuoso and former Alice Cooper backer Orianthi, Peter Frampton and Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Mick Fleetwood and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith play drums on a track. Sammy Hagar and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir add vocals on another. Even the cover art, strangely enough, was designed by Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin.
It seems Felder has built up quite the rock ’n’ roll Rolodex over the years. He also knew he wanted to take a different approach from what he did for his second solo record, 2012’s Road to Forever, which saw him playing almost every instrument himself.
“What it lacked, in my opinion, was the fire and inspiration of being able to sit in a room with somebody and play toe to toe,” Felder tells Postmedia from his studio in Beverly Hills.
So, as he wrote songs for the record, he kept hearing spots where his friends and acquaintances could contribute. When creating the ballad The Way Things Have to Be, for instance, he heard a space crying out for his friend and old tour mate Frampton’s trademark Telecaster. When he wanted to add a second voice to Rock You, a rollicking riff-heavy throwback to 1980s arena rock, the first person he thought of was Hagar, with whom he had done charity work in the past.
“I didn’t get one single rejection, to tell you the truth,” he says. “But to co-ordinate all that and to write songs and be able to select the right person to play on the right song was also a challenge as a producer. Slash playing on a really pretty ballad like The Way Things Have to Be or Little Latin Lover, it’s just not his bag. So you have to know how people are going to play.”
Slash is among the stars to appear on the title track. He is also among the musicians Felder name-drops into the lyrics, making reference to both him and Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose. American Rock ’N’ Roll is a pretty on-the-nose title for the song, which traces the history of modern rock back to the famed Woodstock festival in 1969.
Felder was there. By that point, he was years away from reaching his own historic standing as a long-serving guitarist for the Eagles. But he did catch performances by Santana, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
“I was just one of the 400,000 soaking wet, mud-covered people in the audience at that time,” Felder says. “But I realized that that weekend was probably the biggest event in the history of rock ’n’ roll. All of these artists that I invited in to play on the record were either there — Bob Weir was playing in The Grateful Dead and he sings on the chorus of Rock You — or have been affected by the repercussions of all those artists like Hendrix and Santana. Sambora, Alex Lifeson, Orianthi, Slash — all of these people who played on this record have, through the decades, been dramatically affected by that 1969 event.”
To represent that relay-race aspect of rock ’n’ roll inspiration, Felder enlisted old friend and Fleetwood Mac founder Mick Fleetwood to start the song on drums. Halfway through, he is replaced by the thunderous percussion of the Chili Peppers’ Smith.
Not everything on the record was so meticulously planned. Some were happy accidents. When Felder travelled to Hagar’s California studio to record vocals, he was pleasantly surprised when Satriani — who plays with Hagar in the all-star band Chickenfoot — wandered in. Weir also showed up later to “grab a coffee.” Felder put them both to work.
When Felder went to Sambora’s home studio to record the guitarist’s contribution to a “big, growly shuffle” called Limelight, Orianthi suddenly appeared in the kitchen looking for breakfast. (Sambora and Orianthi were dating at the time.) Felder has known the Australian musician since she first arrived in the U.S. to play in Alice Cooper’s band and suggested she play a solo.
“She comes down and grabs a guitar and just blows us both away,” Felder says. “It was 11 o’clock in the morning. I don’t think she had even had a cup of coffee. She plugs in and it’s my favourite solo on the record. So a lot of these things happened to be circumstance, being at the right place at the right time.”
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Felder is still held in esteem for his own place in rock history.
In 1973, after moving to Los Angeles from his hometown in Gainesville, Fla., he found himself on the road as a touring guitarist with Crosby and Nash just before being asked to join the Eagles — then featuring Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Randy Meisner and a fellow Gainesville resident and former high school classmate, Bernie Leadon.
From his 1974 hiring until the band’s first breakup in 1980, Felder played guitar for the Eagles. In that time period, he also witnessed the departures of Leadon and Meisner and the additions of Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit.
In 1994, he took part in the Hell Freezes Over reunion with Frey, Henley, Walsh and Schmit, and continued touring with the revived band until he was fired in 2001. It was an acrimonious split, resulting in years of lawsuits. Felder later wrote an autobiography, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974 to 2001), that was not warmly embraced by former bandmates Henley and the late Frey.
But Felder says he has never felt much animosity when it comes to the Eagles. There were “struggles and disagreements” — which Felder says were inevitable given that it was a band of five “A-plustype personalities.”
But even when touring his new album, up to 80 per cent of his live shows are made up of old Eagles tunes, including classics he cowrote: Those Shoes, Victim of Love and Hotel California.
“I have the ultimate respect for the music we created together,” says Felder, 71. “I’ve never seen or heard another band that had five writers, five singers — everybody could sing together, the harmonies — we had two or three great lead singers and the sound that we made when we played together was unbelievably tight. It was such a magical combination of talent.”