magnets, the southern states had their own
developing musical ecosystems.
Gainesville had Felder and Stills and Bernie
Leadon. Up the road in Jacksonville, a bunch of
roughhouse kids led by a teenage hothead called
Ronnie Van Zant were putting together their first
band, My Backyard, who would cycle through
a bunch of names before settling on Lynyrd
Skynyrd. Over in Daytona Beach were The Escorts,
led by brothers Duane and Gregg Allman and
rapidly establishing themselves as the kings of the
local scene.
“We were always
in battles of the
bands together, and
they won every
single one,” Felder
recalls of the
Allmans. “If I was
going to lose
a contest like that,
I couldn’t think of
anyone I’d rather
lose to.”
Felder and his bandmates would crash at the
Allman boys’ mother’s house to save money on
hotel rooms. It was Duane who taught him to play
slide guitar, an instrument Felder would make his
own during his Eagles heyday. “He was sitting there
playing slide one night, and I said: ‘You have to
show me how to do that,’” he says. “Still the best
slide player I’ve ever heard.”
Felder was working in a guitar store when
a blond-haired, sharp-featured kid named Tommy
came in one day. Don knew him from high school,
although he was a couple of years younger.
Tommy wanted to switch from bass to guitar, and
Felder ended up giving him lessons. Within a few
years Tommy had formed his own band,
Mudcrutch. A few years after that he’d upped sticksfor LA and changed the band’s name, giving
himself premier billing: Tom Petty And The
Heartbreakers. By that point, Florida was
everywhere you looked.N
ew York in the winter in 1970 was brutal
for anyone, let alone a hick from Florida
with nothing but a denim jacket for
warmth. The band Felder had put together with
Bernie Leadon had fallen apart. Bernie had moved
back west to California. Don had packed his guitar
and himself and headed in the opposite direction
to the Big Apple.
He was a sharp
player now. Jazz-
fusion was his thing- long, free-form
instrumental songs.
He was living in a
freezing-cold
apartment in the
guts of Manhattan,
decades before it
became a byword for gentrification, playing with
a band called Flow, who released one long-
forgotten album in 1970. He and his bandmates
didn’t have two nickels to rub together.
“We were close to starving to death,” he says.
“We’d pay fifty cents to get on this horrible train
full of junkies and ride all the way up to Harlem,
where we were the only white people around, to go
to this Chinese-Cuban restaurant where you could
get a bellyful of yellow rice with black beans for
sixty cents.”
The ambition that got him out of Florida got him
off of the breadline in New York. When jazz-rock
failed to pay one bill too many, Felder moved again,
to Boston. He got a job working in a recording
studio, learning how to produce and engineer
records, and taught music theory on the side.
He’d stayed in touch with Leadon, and his old
friend urged him to move to California. It was the
West Coast, not the East Coast, where it was
happening – sunshine, grass, great music. Bernie
told Don that he’d joined a new a group called the
Eagles, a country-rock outfit whose songwriting
chops were matched by their drive. When the
Eagles passed through town opening for Yes, the
two friends hooked up backstage to jam: Leadon
on guitar, Felder on slide. Eagles guitarist/singer
Glenn Frey was watching from the sidelines,
impressed, filing this six-string prodigy in his head.
Leadon’s pestering eventually paid off. Felder
packed his gear into a U-Haul and drove from
Boston to LA with 600 dollars in his pocket, and
crashed on his friend’s floor while Leadon headed
off on another Eagles tour. Felder soon picked up
work, and played guitar with the opening act on
a tour headlined by David Crosby and Graham
Nash. When the latter duo’s guitarist got sick, he
stepped up to play the parts his old buddy Stephen
Stills had originally recorded. Between stints on the
road with Crosby and Nash, he would jam with
Leadon and his bandmates in their rehearsal room.
It was that connection that prompted the Eagles
to call on Felder to come and play slide on Good
Day In Hell, a song they were recording for their
third album, On The Border. He agreed, and spent an
hour or so laying down four or five takes. “The
next day I got a call from Glenn asking me to join
the band,” he says.
Today, Felder admits that he half-expected the
offer, but at the time it wasn’t a nailed-on decision.
He was earning 1,500 dollars a week playing with
Crosby and Nash – a big chunk of money to give
up, especially to join a band who were already
notorious for their torrid internal dynamics.
“I had heard from Bernie how turbulent this
band was,” says Felder. “He said there was all this
fighting over control and power,GE
TTY“Music has been a stabilising
force in my life since
I started playing. It’s been
the one constant.”
Don FelderCalifornia dreaming- Eagles in ’76: (l to r)
Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey,
Don Henley, Randy
Meisner, Don Felder.
[Continued on page 53]50 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COMDON FELDER