From growing up in poverty, to being in one of the biggest bands
in rock history as they flew high then crashed and burned,
Don Felder has had a self-confessed “interesting journey”.
Words: Dave EverleyF
or Don Felder, the bomb went off
during the second weekend of
August 1969. He and 500,000-odd
other freaks, dropouts and
rock’n’rollers had descended on
Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate
New York for the Woodstock festival, the point
where the burgeoning counter-culture reached
critical mass. They say if you can remember the
60s you weren’t there. But Felder remembers the
60s, and he especially remembers Woodstock.
“I was there,” he says. “I saw Jimi, I saw Janis,
Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Hundreds of
thousands of people just having a great time. It was
the biggest explosion in the history of American
music. The debris was cast up into the atmosphere
and around the world. Woodstock infected the
entire planet. Everything that came after it was
a result of that contamination.”
If he sounds like an evangelist for rock’n’roll,
that’s because he is. And one who hauled himself
out of poverty to play his own significant part in
this ongoing revolution at that. He’s part of an
astonishing yet unsung cluster of musicians from
Southern Florida who emerged at the same time
and went on to alter the course of music in their
own unique ways. He was the guitarist brought
into the Eagles to give them a rock’n’roll edge, and
the man who sparked off the song that would
assure them of immortality, before not one but
two bitter splits left him out in the cold.
Today, 50 years after the Woodstock Big Bang,
Felder remains a true believer. His new album,
American Rock’N’Roll, celebrates what he sees as one
of the great modern
art forms. The cast of
A-list guests he has
assembled for it
includes Slash,
Sammy Hagar, Mick
Fleetwood and the
Grateful Dead’s Bob
Weir, testament to
Felder’s standing as
one of the most
under-appreciated guitarists of his generation. And
if his relationship with his former band remains
complex, it hasn’t tainted his pride in either the
Eagles’ contribution to rock’n’roll or his
contribution to the Eagles. “It’s been a good
journey,” he says. “An interesting one.”F
elder grew up poor in the dirt and heat of
Gainesville, Florida. “Literally right next
door to destitute poverty,” he says. Like so
many kids of his age, it was the sound of ElvisPresley rattling from a cheap transistor radio that
changed his life. “He’s the one who started it all for
me,” he says.
One day the young Don and his brother were
exploding cherry bombs near their house when
a neighbourhood kid came out to investigate what
the infernal noise was. Don said he’d swap some of
the firecrackers for the battered acoustic guitar he
knew the kid had. “It had missing and broken
strings, but that didn’t matter to me,” he says.
“I found a guy two or three blocks away who
showed me how to string and tune the guitar.”
There wasn’t a music store in town. Even if there
had been, the Felders couldn’t afford guitar lessons
for their son anyway. So the young Don spent
hours and hours listening to music on an old
tape recorder, teaching himself to play by ear.
“I could hear something over and over and figure
out where that person was playing on the neck of
the guitar,” he says. “I could just see it in my head.
Even today I can hear something two or three times
and play it.”
Music promised a path out of poverty, and
Felder became obsessed with following it. He
would spend hours jamming after school, until his
parents returned from whatever jobs they were
holding down.
There was another kid at school who had the
same drive. One day this kid turned up at a frat
party, acoustic guitar in tow, to watch the band
Felder had put together.
“He started playing and singing, and his voice
was so good and his playing, rhythm-wise, was
so great that I said: ‘You need to be in my band,’”
says Felder.
The kid’s name
was Stephen Stills,
and Felder asked him
to join his band, The
Continentals. It
was the start of
a relationship that
endures to this day.
“Stephen is one of my
best friends,” says
Felder. “He’s been there whenever I’ve needed him.”
The ambitious Stills left The Continentals after
a year. His replacement was another young guitar
hotshot, a curly-haired California transplant
named Bernie Leadon. “He’d just turned sixteen,
and had a driver’s licence and a car, so that was
useful,” Felder says of his future Eagles bandmate.
Florida in the early 60s was just as much of
a hothouse for future rock’n’roll talent as New
York, San Francisco or Los Angeles. Maybe more- where those coastal metropolises acted as
“Graham Nash said: ‘You
don’t want to be a sideman
for the rest of your life,
go join [the Eagles].’”
Don Felder48 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM