DON HENLEY/EAGLES
USA Today, February 5, 2020
Don Henley and his band, Eagles, were approaching a milestone in their long history when he and I spoke by phone in early 2020. The plan was to launch a fiftieth-anniversary international tour, with Eagles performing in venues throughout the United States and in August at London’s Wembley Stadium. Each show would begin with a song-by-song recreation of their epic album Hotel California, augmented by full orchestra, chorus and special effects on a near-Biblical scale. Then, after an intermission, they would run through two hours’ worth of their hits and other notable tracks.
Of course, neither of us could foresee the pandemic that would begin turning these and everyone else’s plans upside down. The tour would be postponed, optimistically, to 2021. Luckily, when Covid began to dissipate, Eagles did hit the road, where they remained into 2024. But even if that had never happened, their history and work were already a living monument. Few bands can rival their significance in the chronicle of popular music.
Talking with Don was a pleasure. He was relaxed, amiable and without affectation. You might say that the experience gave me a … wait for it … peaceful, easy feeling.
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What makes this tour unique Is it performing with orchestra?
Well, this is not the first time that we’ve played with an orchestra. We did that back in the Seventies a couple of times. The thing that’s new about this tour is doing the Hotel California album top to bottom. We’ve never done that before.
We’ve been touring pretty steadily for the past couple of years, so we wanted to do something different. We noted that other bands in our generation have been doing their albums from top to bottom. We decided to try it. We did it for three nights in Las Vegas and it went over incredibly well. We got rave reviews. The fans were delighted. So we decided to keep doing it and to take it to some other cities.
It's a big undertaking. We’ve had an orchestra before but I don’t believe we’ve ever performed with choir. That’s a new element. And there’s a theatrical element now. I don’t want to give too much away, but we open the show with some sound and lighting effects and an actor involved. When we get through Side One of the album, another actor comes out. That gives it a bit of a theatrical quality. People seem to really enjoy that.
Do you work with local musicians or actually carry the players and singers?
No [laughs]. That wouldn’t be quite cost-effective. We’re sourcing locally and creating jobs in the process. I’m a symphony fan and I know that symphony orchestras all over the country have been struggling for a long time now. Any time we can give a job to a violinist or a cellist or somebody who plays a wind instrument, we’re happy to do that.
The Beauty of Album Formats
When Eagles began playing together, audiences tended to think of popular music in terms of albums.
We do think about that. But let me add that after we do the Hotel California album, we take a twenty-minute break and then play two hours of greatest hits. We kind of cover all the bases.
I think that people in my generation miss that concept of an album. On the other hand, we’ve seen a bit of an explosion in the sale of vinyl records. People have gone back to buying vinyl albums and using turntables and listening to analog music. I see that as a healthy sign.
The concept of an album is good for music because it gives an artist a chance to write and record songs that are not necessarily hit singles. Albums by their nature are uneven. Some of the songs are very catchy and radio-friendly, and some of the other songs might be, for example, more thoughtful or topically oriented. An album gives an artist a chance to stretch out and go through different emotions and present different scenarios. I mourn the loss of that opportunity for artists to do that, when record companies and radio just want hits. I don’t want to plug Sirius/XM, but they do have channels that play album cuts. I think that’s a good and healthy thing.
Whether I would listen to Sgt. Pepper or Kind of Blue, I could listen only to the album as a whole, not to isolated cuts. The album presentation was so solid and fundamental to what these diverse artists were doing.
Yeah, because it’s of a piece. You get accustomed to the sequence. You get accustomed to the mood changes and the tempo changes. It’s a complete, whole piece of work. If you took a painting, for example, and carved it up into separate parts, nobody would buy those parts. So I’m a big album proponent. That’s one of the reasons why our playing of the Hotel California album went over well in Las Vegas. It really resonated with people because they remember that album sequence, just like we remember the Sgt. Pepper sequence and I remember the Rubber Soul sequence. They really relate to that.
I’m gonna telegraph a little bit of what happens in the show. We get people primed. While they’re coming into the auditorium, we have sound effects. In the song “Hotel California,” the chorus is: “Welcome to the Hotel California.” I have always considered that to be a Greek chorus. They are not characters in the song. They are singing to the characters in the song as disembodied figures somewhere in the ether. We recreate that. We all get around a microphone, brought in a few other people and sang the word “welcome” in a spooky, drawn-out fashion. We have thunder and lightning and sounds of wind. It’s all done in surround sound, so it bounces around, all over the auditorium. Lights are flashing, as if there were lightning bolts. The thunder gets louder and louder. You can actually feel it; it vibrates the entire hall.
Then just when things come to a peak, a figure appears on stage left — a tall, spooky-looking fellow, dressed in a black, antique European bellman’s costume, a little bit reminiscent of The Night Porter but with a cape. He walks across the stage, holding the vinyl album in his left hand so some of the audience can see it, to where there’s a turntable in a spotlight. He takes the album out of the jacket, sort of looks at it, blows the dust off of it — a symbolic gesture — and then carefully places it on the turntable and puts the needle down. We have a count in our earpieces that’s coordinated with that. I think there’s even a hissing noise, like a needle on vinyl. Then we start the song, the curtain rises and he walks off stage right, behind the turntable.
After we get through Side One we stand very still onstage. A beautiful girl in a cigarette girl costume crosses the stage, goes over to the turntable, picks up the album, flips it over, puts it back on the turntable, puts the needle down — and then we start Side Two. People go nuts; they love that.
Not Quite a Concept
How did this idea come up?
I think we stole the idea from Steely Dan, frankly [laughter]. But, as Chef Emeril would say, we’ve kicked it up a notch.
Why has Hotel California stood out in your catalog and your history?
We never called it a concept album. We didn’t set out to make a concept album. But all of the songs on it somehow work together as a piece. “Hotel California” might have been the first song that we came up with. Everybody heard that and then went to write their own stuff around that concept.
“Every band has a creative peak in its career. I think [Hotel California] was ours.”
Every band has a creative peak in its career. I think that was ours. We’d been building momentum for several years before that. At that point in time, we were hitting our peak. We had become very adept in the studio. We knew a lot about production. We knew more about songwriting. We had the musicianship to pull it off. We were willing to take some chances and risks and try to do something different from anything we’d done before.
The song “Hotel California” is the centerpiece, of course. It has a built-in appeal because of the word “California” and with what California represents to people all over the world, first because of the images the film industry created and sent all over the globe, and then the images and the music. A lot of it was made here and it represented a culture of sorts here in California. It has some sort of a mystical, magical meaning to people all around the planet, whether it’s real or not. A lot of it is based on fantasy and Horace Greeley’s admonition to “go west, young man.” It’s the Golden State, the land of opportunity. It’s where people come to reinvent themselves and start new lives. You had the Gold Rush of 1849, with people coming in search of instant riches.
When the spy plane was shot down with Gary Powers over Russia, they captured him and held him prisoner for I don’t know how long it was. After he got back to the U.S., he said that his guards would always ask him about that song and what it meant. The astronauts in the Space Station would get a wakeup call from the folks in the control center. They would play “Hotel California “ a lot. I don’t know if I would want to wake up to that [laughs].
Have you had to change any of the arrangements for the live format?
We are in fact using the arrangements that were on the original recordings. Those arrangements were written and conducted by my old friend from college, Jim Ed Norman, who has made quite a name for himself in the recording industry. He’s going on the road with us to conduct.
The primary problem is where to put all those people, how to get them all onstage and offstage. That’s where production comes in, where carpentry and mechanics enter the picture. We’ve got risers behind the band that go up and down hydraulically. The orchestra and the choir just sort of rise up from below. Then the lighting people light them up. The whole undertaking is a big logistical challenge. But the arrangements are basically the same as they were in the Seventies.
The charts on the albums seemed like they were written solely for strings.
I think there are some other instruments. A horn section travels with us. They meld into the orchestra. So there are strings and brass. I’m not sure there are woodwinds. It changes some nights. But there are strings and brass for certain.
Are you adding orchestra to any tracks that didn’t have that originally?
No.
So for certain songs they’ll wait until they’re needed.
For certain songs the orchestra will disappear or sit in the dark.
What about the choir? Eagles have always been a great vocal band, so how do you interact with them?
To be honest, we’re using them on only one song. And they’re only singing the word “ah” at the end, on “Last Resort” during what I call the ascension part.
The Long Run
We’re coming up on half a century of Eagles. Can you go mentally back to when the band came together? When did you begin sensing that there was something here that would last longer than a couple of albums, that would in fact embed itself in American musical history as it has?
We certainly didn’t have that sense when we started out. The lifespan of a rock ’n’ band is relatively short, with a few notable exceptions. Glenn [Frey, co-founder with Henley of Eagles] had a lot of ambition. He was a student of all the bands that had come before us and how their careers were handled and what resulted in their careers ending, all the financial difficulties and shenanigans that bands had with managers and accountants. We wanted to avoid all of that. We were huge fans of the Beatles. We aspired to have a career like that, where we’d have radio appeal and hit records but also records that were not necessarily radio-friendly but had an appeal to fans nonetheless. So we started out trying to accomplish that.
“We never in our wildest dreams thought that it would go on this long.”
We had the same difficulties eventually that all bands have. We had personnel and personality differences and challenges. But we never in our wildest dreams thought that it would go on this long. We didn’t realize that we were creating a catalog of so many songs that would endure and that we would be playing almost fifty years later. When we were in the middle of doing it, we didn’t think so much about the future. We were just interested in what was going on in the moment.
We were all blue-collar kids. We had a strong work ethic. We’re famous for partying hard and all that stuff, but at the same time we worked hard. We rehearsed a lot. We dedicated hours and hours to songwriting every day. And we discussed songwriting with our peers: Jackson Browne, J. D. Souther and all the other guys in that group. We would talk about songwriting as an art and a craft, because it’s both.
When we go onstage and we’re able to play two and a half hours of music and people know every song and sing every word, it’s still astonishing. It’s all because of this catalog we created back then. We’ve suffered losses and setbacks. We broke up for fourteen years. But in the end it’s the songs that have endured. They resonate with people. We tried to incorporate universal themes. We tried to write memorable melodies. Somehow it all worked out. It’s pretty miraculous because the odds are very long.
Bands on the Run
You’ve framed everything we’ve talked about in terms of the band as a single unit, not so much from the perspective of its members.
Well, on the other hand, all the fans had their favorite Beatle. You could pick one and focus on that person. At the same time, it was a band. there was a camaraderie among those guys. They resonated with people. We tried to emulate that. Glenn wanted a band where there were four guys who would take turns doing vocals and everybody was a songwriter and looked pretty good. People related to that.
I too mourn the loss of real bands who are all good musicians, who can all sing and write. That’s sort of going by the wayside. Of course, we went through an era in the late Sixties and early Seventies of the solo singer/songwriter, people like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor and Carole King. That works too. A lot of great people came out of that movement.
“Being in a band is an exercise in great joy and great heartbreak.”
But Glenn and I both liked to collaborate. It makes the work more varied and interesting, if you can do it. Frankly, being in a band is an exercise in great joy and great heartbreak. It’s a very challenging thing to work with people who are strong-willed, creative and single-minded. It requires some compromise, which some people are better at than others. You can ask anybody in any band: It’s hard.
We did break up for fourteen years, but then we got together after we had grown, had families and gotten our emotions and our egos a little more under control. It’s the old saying: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
As an iconic image of music in the Sixties, I have that picture in my mind of Lennon and McCartney sitting in the same room, facing each other from just a foot or so apart, writing their songs back-and-forth in real time. That’s the power of collaboration, of group energy.
Yeah, I know that image and I love it. Glenn and I used to do it as well. Glenn was a big sports fan, so he conceived and operated this band very much like one would a sports team. You have your quarterback and your running backs. That’s the way he approached it. He recruited great players like Joe Walsh and Randy Meisner. You surround yourself with the best possible players. He did the scouting, he did the recruiting and he did the playing. He would have been a great coach.
And now his son Deacon is an Eagle.
I’m the one who said, “Let’s get Deacon into the band” I knew he could do it. Understandably he was a little uncomfortable for the first six or eight months, maybe the first year. But we all surrounded him with love and support. It was very emotional for him, singing his father’s songs only a year or so after Glenn’s passing [in 2016]. We encouraged him. He had some big shoes to fill. But he’s a chip off the old block. He’s pretty quiet and reserved, but he’s very brave and he’s a great musician. He’s been correcting us, actually. He remembers the parts from the record so well that if something has changed or slipped a bit over the decades, he’ll go, “You know, on the record there was this part that we’re not doing.” And we go, “Oh, yeah, you’re right [laughs].” It’s a little surreal to me when I’m on the drums and he’s standing directly in front of me. Seeing his hair and his profile is eerily reminiscent of his father. But it’s heartwarming and uplifting. And the audience just loves him.
Your son also performed with the band a few years ago.
I think it was 2017. I just brought him out for a few shows, just to get the feel of being in front of that many people. He’s a very good musician. But I said to him what my father said to me: “I don’t care what you do with your life, son, as long as you get a good education.” So he’s in college. He’s always invited to come back and play a show with us if he wants to. But, you know, it gets a little crowded up there. It’s a good thing he’s so thin [laughs].
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