This week we speak to Don “fingers” Felder, lead guitarist for the Eagles. The classic band has sold over 150 million albums worldwide. Their album, the Eagle’s Greatest Hits, was the best selling album of the 20th century. The band accumulated five number-one singles, six Grammy Awards, five American Music Awards, and six number-one albums.
Felder is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and writer of the Eagle’s biggest hit, Hotel California — #3 on the all time best-selling albums. The Eagles are the only band that have 2 albums in the top 10 best sellers (The Beatles have two in top 20).
He is proud of his ongoing charity work for the likes of the Starkey Hearing Foundation.
His latest album is “American Rock ’N’ Roll.” The album was an opportunity to jam with some of his closest musical pals, including Sammy Hagar, Slash, Richie Sambora, Peter Frampton, Joe Satriani, Mick Fleetwood, Bob Weir, and more.
He tells the story of how he wrote the music to Hotel California — about a year before the band recorded it. The album Hotel California was an attempt to move the band away from the Soft Country genre and more towards a harder Rock sound. He created a guitar duel for the song so he could play with his pal and new band member, Joe Walsh. Felder also tells about crafting a new intro for the song for their live MTV acoustic show.
His favorite books are here; A transcript of our conversation is available here. [ed. Ignore the typos, it's a transcript.]
Felder is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and writer of the Eagle’s biggest hit, Hotel California — #3 on the all time best-selling albums. The Eagles are the only band that have 2 albums in the top 10 best sellers (The Beatles have two in top 20).
He is proud of his ongoing charity work for the likes of the Starkey Hearing Foundation.His latest album is “American Rock ’N’ Roll.” The album was an opportunity to jam with some of his closest musical pals, including Sammy Hagar, Slash, Richie Sambora, Peter Frampton, Joe Satriani, Mick Fleetwood, Bob Weir, and more.
He tells the story of how he wrote the music to Hotel California — about a year before the band recorded it. The album Hotel California was an attempt to move the band away from the Soft Country genre and more towards a harder Rock sound. He created a guitar duel for the song so he could play with his pal and new band member, Joe Walsh. Felder also tells about crafting a new intro for the song for their live MTV acoustic show.
His favorite books are here; A transcript of our conversation is available here. [ed. Ignore the typos, it's a transcript.]
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VOICE-OVER: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast I have an extra special guest and I know everybody bust my chops when I say that, but my guest is extra special. His name is Don Felder. He was the lead guitarist for the Eagles. He wrote Hotel California. He is a legend in the music industry and really a very nice guy and an informative raconteur who tells wonderful stories.
If you are at all interested in music or 70’s, or the Eagles, or the 80’s or guitar history, or the 90’s, you will find this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. So with no further ado, my interview with Don Felder.
FELDER: Thank you. It’s fabulous to be back here again.
RITHOLTZ: So you have really a fascinating background, and I was really, you know, stunned when I was reading you — you grew up in Gainesville, Florida, which somehow became a hot bed of music. Is that a fair statement?
FELDER: Yeah, for some reason and I don’t know if it was something that was in the water or in something that we were all smoking at the time that so many people came out of Gainesville that went on to become rock and roll legends, rock and roll hall of fame inductees, platinum-selling artist. We were all just kids in different garage bands down there. One of my guitar students was a kid named Tommy Petty who I taught how to play guitar. He was playing …
RITHOLTZ: Little Tommy Petty.
FELDER: Little Tommy Petty. He was playing base in this band called the Epics, and he thought it was kind of awkward and keekee to be fronting a band playing bass and singing. So he wanted to learn to play guitar so he could write songs instead of playing base, so I gave him guitar lessons. I helped with a little bit of the arrangement on a couple of their songs and their shows. I went to just hang out. We were friends. We were in Battles of the Bands together.
Stephen Stills and I had a band together in Gainesville. I think we were 14 and 15 years old. My mom would drive us around in these little events because we didn’t have a car or a driver’s license or anything.
Duane Allman and Gregg Allman were in different bands in that time called, like the Allman Joys or The Spotlights. Duane taught me how to play slide guitar one night on the floor of his mom’s house in Daytona Beach about 2:30 in the morning. Who else was around there?
Lynyrd Skynyrd was right over in Jacksonville, Florida. Bernie Leadon actually moved to Gainesville because his dad was given the appointment of heading up the Nuclear Research Department at the University of Florida, so he moved his family, all eight kids over to Gainesville. And Stephen stills had just left to move to California. Bernie showed up and picked me up actually at a bus station where I was coming back from a little town called Lake City, about 30 minutes away, where I’ve gone up by myself and played this little women’s tea party in the afternoon.
So he had a car, he was 16. He picked me up at the bus station and actually wound up replacing Stevens Stills in that band. And Bernie went on to become one of the founding members of the Eagles. We’ve known each other since high school. So Stephen, Bernie, and Tom and myself all went to the same high school, Gainesville High School, together so …
RITHOLTZ: That’s astonishing.
FELDER: I don’t know how that all happened, but it did.
RITHOLTZ: And — and what first got you interested in music? The — the legend is you see Elvis Presley on television and that just sparks a lifelong interest.
FELDER: Well, there was a huge interest in that explosion of rock and roll in that time. It had a just a really strong, exciting energy about it, whether it was Little Richard singing Tutti Frutti or Elvis on stage shaking and gyrating, and flipping his greasy hair around, snarling his upper lip. And watching all those young girls screaming at him, I kind of said, you know, I think I’d like to do that. That looks like fun.
And so I traded a handful of cherry bombs to a kid that lived across the street for a broken guitar. It had a crack in it, it was missing strings. And I found the guy around the corner that helped me tune the thing, replace some of the strings on it. And I used to sit on my front porch down there on this dirt road in Gainesville on this metal collider just sliding back and forth and back and forth, trying to figure out how that guitar work. Where do you put your fingers? How do you make chords?
And there wasn’t a music school. There was no money to be had in my family for lessons if there was a music school. So I was pretty much self-taught, and it turned out that I gave myself kind of basic ear training by listening new stuff on the radio or listening to my stuff on my dad’s tape recorder and just playing it over and over and over until I could figure it out on guitar. And eventually, even today I can hear something two or three times and just play it right away because I’ve trained my mind and my body and my inside into music to be able to hear something and play it. (...)
RITHOLTZ: You start working at a music store, like an instrument store, and you were working essentially to be able to earn money for instruments. Is that …
FELDER: Yeah, I wasn’t getting paid money, I was given credit for every hour or every lesson that I taught there. I was given a credit on the store card. They had this thing, you know, they put in the register and give me $5 or $10 for every much I done, and I could use that money for strings, for pedals, for chords. If I saved up enough I could trade in my old guitar and get a better guitar and — or an amp or some tubes or I blew out a speaker and my amp had needed to be replaced, which happened frequently in those days. I would be able to work until I got enough money to get a speaker replacement. So yes, that’s where I was learning how to make money was in working in a music store.
RITHOLTZ: And — and where did the music theory in Gainesville first come into your experiences?
FELDER: There was a great guitar player that lived there whose name was Paul Hillis. He left the Gainesville and went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston and came back a few years later, but he given up guitar and started playing piano cause he thought you could see in compositions, and chord clusters, and progressions much easier on piano than on guitar, which is true. It’s a repetitive octave on piano, and guitar, everything is a different fingering as you go up the scale or up the neck.
So he opened a school of music, and for every hour that I taught there these incoming young kids who had gotten a guitar for Christmas who were complaining about their calluses hurting on their fingers, for every hour I taught them, he would teach me music theory, composition, chord progressions, how to read music. And I basically got a — the cheap version of a Berklee College of Music education for ball. (...)
RITHOLTZ: I want to talk about California right now. Hotel California, let’s talk a little bit about your writing that song because my — I — I mentioned my pet theory is the Eagles were kind of thought of as like a kickback mellow country, not quite rock band. And I know the rest of the band really wanted to be more of a Led Zeppelin type of both with hotels destruction and with rock and roll. And Hotel California just took the band to an entirely different level, not only is the song ranked 49 on the list of greatest songs of all time.
The album sold 17 million copies in the U.S., 32 million worldwide. I think it was number three on the all-time list, something like that. So — so you deserve a whole lot of credit for really taking the band up and to the next level. I have to ask because it’s so different from everything else that was done. How did you come up with that that intro and then how did you basically just write the music for that song?
FELDER: At the time I was living in a rental beach house on Malibu Beach, and I had two little kids. One was about a year old, one was about 2.5 years old. And I was sitting on the couch one day just playing an acoustic guitar and looking out at the sun glistening on the Pacific Ocean, and watching my two kids playing in the sand and this little swing set we had on the beach. And out came that progression two or three times and I — I had to go record a little bit of it so I wouldn’t forget it.
Much like a dream, when something comes through me, I have to write it down or record it or, you know, two days later I can’t remember what it was.
RITHOLTZ: It’s gone, right.
FELDER: It’s gone, you know. So I run into my daughter’s back bedroom who was almost a year, and when she was awake I’d set up this little recording studio back there where I could go in and make demos. So I went back and recorded that little progression three or four times, and turned it off, and went out and played with my kids on the beach.
Years — well, months later when it was time to sit down and write the songs that we’re going to become candidates for what was going to be the Hotel California record, I had put together about 15 or 16 song ideas. And I heard the little three-time loop through the progression and I said, “I got to finish that,” so I really rebuilt the whole idea of playing acoustic guitar, 12 strings starting it off, and I played bass on the overdub. I played the drum machine that ran through it. This sounded kind of like a cha-cha beat or something.
And I thought Joe how should just joined the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record Joe Walsh should just the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record. And Joe and I had been playing together a lot before he joined the band. If you go online and look at Joe Walsh and friends, you can see him and I doing all this guitar trading and jamming together. I wanted to have something on this record that he and I could do together. (...)
RITHOLTZ: So — so let me ask you a few questions about that because I’m — I’m fascinated by this process. First, the — the guitar duel at the end, so you want to incorporate Joe Walsh more into the band, what — what did you use as inspiration for that because when I was thinking about this I immediately think of the end of — of Layla or the Beatles Abbey Road Medley where there’s three guys swapping a — a guitar licks back and forth. What — what was the driving force that said, hey, let’s do a little guitar duel on here.
FELDER: I think Joe and I had already been doing that, and you were talking about Layla, that was Duane Allman playing …
RITHOLTZ: Right.
FELDER: … the high slide guitar part on that and Eric playing below it. It was just — it was something that all guitar players like to do, to go together against somebody that plays really well, and it pushes you up to another level. And so I wanted to do that with Joe on this record, so I kind of designed that whole track with that in mind.
RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast I have an extra special guest and I know everybody bust my chops when I say that, but my guest is extra special. His name is Don Felder. He was the lead guitarist for the Eagles. He wrote Hotel California. He is a legend in the music industry and really a very nice guy and an informative raconteur who tells wonderful stories.
If you are at all interested in music or 70’s, or the Eagles, or the 80’s or guitar history, or the 90’s, you will find this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. So with no further ado, my interview with Don Felder.
FELDER: Thank you. It’s fabulous to be back here again.
RITHOLTZ: So you have really a fascinating background, and I was really, you know, stunned when I was reading you — you grew up in Gainesville, Florida, which somehow became a hot bed of music. Is that a fair statement?
FELDER: Yeah, for some reason and I don’t know if it was something that was in the water or in something that we were all smoking at the time that so many people came out of Gainesville that went on to become rock and roll legends, rock and roll hall of fame inductees, platinum-selling artist. We were all just kids in different garage bands down there. One of my guitar students was a kid named Tommy Petty who I taught how to play guitar. He was playing …
RITHOLTZ: Little Tommy Petty.
FELDER: Little Tommy Petty. He was playing base in this band called the Epics, and he thought it was kind of awkward and keekee to be fronting a band playing bass and singing. So he wanted to learn to play guitar so he could write songs instead of playing base, so I gave him guitar lessons. I helped with a little bit of the arrangement on a couple of their songs and their shows. I went to just hang out. We were friends. We were in Battles of the Bands together.
Stephen Stills and I had a band together in Gainesville. I think we were 14 and 15 years old. My mom would drive us around in these little events because we didn’t have a car or a driver’s license or anything.
Duane Allman and Gregg Allman were in different bands in that time called, like the Allman Joys or The Spotlights. Duane taught me how to play slide guitar one night on the floor of his mom’s house in Daytona Beach about 2:30 in the morning. Who else was around there?
Lynyrd Skynyrd was right over in Jacksonville, Florida. Bernie Leadon actually moved to Gainesville because his dad was given the appointment of heading up the Nuclear Research Department at the University of Florida, so he moved his family, all eight kids over to Gainesville. And Stephen stills had just left to move to California. Bernie showed up and picked me up actually at a bus station where I was coming back from a little town called Lake City, about 30 minutes away, where I’ve gone up by myself and played this little women’s tea party in the afternoon.
So he had a car, he was 16. He picked me up at the bus station and actually wound up replacing Stevens Stills in that band. And Bernie went on to become one of the founding members of the Eagles. We’ve known each other since high school. So Stephen, Bernie, and Tom and myself all went to the same high school, Gainesville High School, together so …
RITHOLTZ: That’s astonishing.
FELDER: I don’t know how that all happened, but it did.
RITHOLTZ: And — and what first got you interested in music? The — the legend is you see Elvis Presley on television and that just sparks a lifelong interest.
FELDER: Well, there was a huge interest in that explosion of rock and roll in that time. It had a just a really strong, exciting energy about it, whether it was Little Richard singing Tutti Frutti or Elvis on stage shaking and gyrating, and flipping his greasy hair around, snarling his upper lip. And watching all those young girls screaming at him, I kind of said, you know, I think I’d like to do that. That looks like fun.
And so I traded a handful of cherry bombs to a kid that lived across the street for a broken guitar. It had a crack in it, it was missing strings. And I found the guy around the corner that helped me tune the thing, replace some of the strings on it. And I used to sit on my front porch down there on this dirt road in Gainesville on this metal collider just sliding back and forth and back and forth, trying to figure out how that guitar work. Where do you put your fingers? How do you make chords?
And there wasn’t a music school. There was no money to be had in my family for lessons if there was a music school. So I was pretty much self-taught, and it turned out that I gave myself kind of basic ear training by listening new stuff on the radio or listening to my stuff on my dad’s tape recorder and just playing it over and over and over until I could figure it out on guitar. And eventually, even today I can hear something two or three times and just play it right away because I’ve trained my mind and my body and my inside into music to be able to hear something and play it. (...)
RITHOLTZ: You start working at a music store, like an instrument store, and you were working essentially to be able to earn money for instruments. Is that …
FELDER: Yeah, I wasn’t getting paid money, I was given credit for every hour or every lesson that I taught there. I was given a credit on the store card. They had this thing, you know, they put in the register and give me $5 or $10 for every much I done, and I could use that money for strings, for pedals, for chords. If I saved up enough I could trade in my old guitar and get a better guitar and — or an amp or some tubes or I blew out a speaker and my amp had needed to be replaced, which happened frequently in those days. I would be able to work until I got enough money to get a speaker replacement. So yes, that’s where I was learning how to make money was in working in a music store.
RITHOLTZ: And — and where did the music theory in Gainesville first come into your experiences?
FELDER: There was a great guitar player that lived there whose name was Paul Hillis. He left the Gainesville and went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston and came back a few years later, but he given up guitar and started playing piano cause he thought you could see in compositions, and chord clusters, and progressions much easier on piano than on guitar, which is true. It’s a repetitive octave on piano, and guitar, everything is a different fingering as you go up the scale or up the neck.
So he opened a school of music, and for every hour that I taught there these incoming young kids who had gotten a guitar for Christmas who were complaining about their calluses hurting on their fingers, for every hour I taught them, he would teach me music theory, composition, chord progressions, how to read music. And I basically got a — the cheap version of a Berklee College of Music education for ball. (...)
RITHOLTZ: I want to talk about California right now. Hotel California, let’s talk a little bit about your writing that song because my — I — I mentioned my pet theory is the Eagles were kind of thought of as like a kickback mellow country, not quite rock band. And I know the rest of the band really wanted to be more of a Led Zeppelin type of both with hotels destruction and with rock and roll. And Hotel California just took the band to an entirely different level, not only is the song ranked 49 on the list of greatest songs of all time.
The album sold 17 million copies in the U.S., 32 million worldwide. I think it was number three on the all-time list, something like that. So — so you deserve a whole lot of credit for really taking the band up and to the next level. I have to ask because it’s so different from everything else that was done. How did you come up with that that intro and then how did you basically just write the music for that song?
FELDER: At the time I was living in a rental beach house on Malibu Beach, and I had two little kids. One was about a year old, one was about 2.5 years old. And I was sitting on the couch one day just playing an acoustic guitar and looking out at the sun glistening on the Pacific Ocean, and watching my two kids playing in the sand and this little swing set we had on the beach. And out came that progression two or three times and I — I had to go record a little bit of it so I wouldn’t forget it.
Much like a dream, when something comes through me, I have to write it down or record it or, you know, two days later I can’t remember what it was.
RITHOLTZ: It’s gone, right.
FELDER: It’s gone, you know. So I run into my daughter’s back bedroom who was almost a year, and when she was awake I’d set up this little recording studio back there where I could go in and make demos. So I went back and recorded that little progression three or four times, and turned it off, and went out and played with my kids on the beach.
Years — well, months later when it was time to sit down and write the songs that we’re going to become candidates for what was going to be the Hotel California record, I had put together about 15 or 16 song ideas. And I heard the little three-time loop through the progression and I said, “I got to finish that,” so I really rebuilt the whole idea of playing acoustic guitar, 12 strings starting it off, and I played bass on the overdub. I played the drum machine that ran through it. This sounded kind of like a cha-cha beat or something.
And I thought Joe how should just joined the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record Joe Walsh should just the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record. And Joe and I had been playing together a lot before he joined the band. If you go online and look at Joe Walsh and friends, you can see him and I doing all this guitar trading and jamming together. I wanted to have something on this record that he and I could do together. (...)
RITHOLTZ: So — so let me ask you a few questions about that because I’m — I’m fascinated by this process. First, the — the guitar duel at the end, so you want to incorporate Joe Walsh more into the band, what — what did you use as inspiration for that because when I was thinking about this I immediately think of the end of — of Layla or the Beatles Abbey Road Medley where there’s three guys swapping a — a guitar licks back and forth. What — what was the driving force that said, hey, let’s do a little guitar duel on here.
FELDER: I think Joe and I had already been doing that, and you were talking about Layla, that was Duane Allman playing …
RITHOLTZ: Right.
FELDER: … the high slide guitar part on that and Eric playing below it. It was just — it was something that all guitar players like to do, to go together against somebody that plays really well, and it pushes you up to another level. And so I wanted to do that with Joe on this record, so I kind of designed that whole track with that in mind.
by Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture | Read more:
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