On his latest album, American Rock N Roll, Don Felder is aiming a spotlight upon his love for rock & roll. The fun he had making it, the excitement about the music and the good times he spent working with many of rock’s superstars who guest on the album, is so apparent that you can’t help but feel the enthusiasm popping out of the grooves. Felder, a former member of the Eagles who wrote the iconic melody for “Hotel California,” has spent the second half of his career making records and touring and downright enjoying his life by continuing to follow his passion – which started back when he was a kid learning songs with his dad. “All I knew was that what I really loved more than anything, I loved playing music and playing guitar,” Felder said in an interview with me for Hittin’ The Note in 2012. “And I realized at a fairly young age that I wanted to move out of Gainesville and pursue a music career.”
Gainesville, Florida, at the time, was a hotbed of talent: the Allman Brothers, Tom Petty, Stephen Stills and Bernie Leadon were all putting their toes into the local music scenes alongside Felder. “Stephen Stills and I had a band together when we were fourteen, fifteen years old,” he continued. “We all knew each other and we were just local kids kind of learning from each other and stealing from each other and emulating each other.” He taught Petty guitar lessons while Duane Allman taught him to play slide. Felder eventually moved to New York with his band Flow. “I could have gone to New York and starved to death. When I left I didn’t have anything to begin with. I was very poor and so I had nothing to lose. So at that age with nothing to lose you’ll try anything your heart desires, if you’re not afraid. So I just took a leap of faith and went for it.”
For Felder, California became the playground of dreamers. He joined the Eagles, had hit records and million dollar tours. He wrote the song “Heavy Metal (Takin’ A Ride)” for the 1981 animated film, Heavy Metal. His song with Kenny Loggins, “Never Surrender,” appeared in 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High. In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame with the Eagles, a band he would leave a few years later. He wrote a best-selling memoir, Heaven & Hell: My Life In The Eagles, in 2008. And in 2012, he released his second solo album, Road To Forever.
For American Rock N Roll, Felder wanted a different approach: “On my last solo album, I had only one guest on guitar, Steve Lukather, and I played every other guitar part on every other song,” Felder said upon the album’s release. “I didn’t want to do that this time. I wanted to have people come in and light it up. My goal was to play with them and have a good time. It was a ball!” And a ball it indeed is, with fuel-injected songs such as the title track and “Rock You,” soaring ballads like “The Way Things Have To Be” and “Sun,” and hip-swingers – “Little Latin Lover” – in-between. It’s a joyride with Felder as your driver and Slash, Peter Frampton, Sammy Hagar, Orianthi, Chad Smith, Mick Fleetwood, Joe Satriani and Alex Lifeson scrunched in the seat beside you adding their own flavors as each song rolls by.
Glide caught up with Felder recently to talk about his new album, his all-star guests, giving Tom Petty guitar lessons and being an early-bird.
Originally our interview was supposed to be at 7:30 in the morning. You must really like to get up early.
I do. If I’m going to be on the East Coast for a week or two or ten days, I try to get acclimated to that time as quickly as I can. And typically, I’m an early riser. I’m up in California somewhere around 6:30, before everybody and everything starts going crazy. Then I go into the studio and shut off the phones and the email and write and work in the studio. Then I come up for air for what I think is going to be fifteen minutes but actually turns into probably about an hour and fifteen minutes, catching up on everything I’ve just ignored (laughs). And then I shut that off and go back to work for a while. It’s the only way I can get anything done is to just shut down.
You mentioned your studio. How long have you had a studio in your house?
I have had some sort of recording device in my home since I was about fourteen. My dad actually bought a Voice Of Music tape recorder so he could borrow records and tape them onto tape so that I could learn to play different records. When I got tired of those, we’d erase that tape and borrow somebody else’s records. I guess we should have been paying royalties at the time (laughs) but it turned out that it was a nice cheap way for me to really build my ability to ear-train myself to listen to stuff and play it. It also had a feature on it called sound-on-sound where I could record on the one side a mono version, which most records were mono back in the mid to early fifties, and on the other side I could sit and record myself playing along with that record. When I played it back it would be in synch. It was an ability to actually learn something and then play with it and then hear if I was doing the right thing or not. So since I was about twelve or thirteen, maybe fourteen, I had that.
Then in 1973, I had a Teac 4-track tape recorder with some microphones and guitar amps and stuff that I set up a little studio in my bedroom so that I could write demos and stuff. Then I put my first real official recording studio in my home in Malibu, I think in 1980, and started working on a solo record [Airborne, 1983]. Then I started doing television scoring, like movie of the week, and writing songs for film and recording them there in my house, so I didn’t have to go on the road. I had four kids at that time and I wanted to stay home and record and write music and not have to get on a plane and leave my kids. So I stayed home for a few years and wrote and recorded and then over the years as technology advanced from 2-inch 24-track tape to digital recording, I moved right along with it.
I ran a studio in Boston, I think in 1970, 1971, 1972, where I was staff guitar player, staff engineer, staff producer, staff writer, everything (laughs). I just did everything there. I think I worked six days a week and I made fifty dollars a week. If you had to go to a university or a college today to learn how to make records in a professional studio, it would cost you about $50,000 a semester to go do that. So I think I got the better end of that deal because I learned how to make records and got paid for it at the same time (laughs).
Are you happy with how technology has progressed or do you still use some old school ways?
It’s a combination of both. The older technology of Class C microphone preamps and a lot of the old German microphones, the Neumann tube microphones and a lot of those older vintage mic pres and big capsule microphones, are incomparable to anything on the market that is made today. I’ve actually done what they call shoot-outs where I take my best classic microphones into a studio and somebody sets up their new hot rod digital microphone, or whatever it is, sing and play on one, sing and play on the other, and you can hear a remarkable difference. So I use on the front end of my recordings, those warm old Neve 1073 mic preamps, which are top line Class A console microphone preamps, and a combination of really classic C12 microphones, 251 Neumanns, a lot of really wonderful sounding M49 Neumanns, great high quality Class A microphones and mic preamps. And you can record those on tape, you can record them on digital, you can record them however you want but they just sound really amazing. So to me, the front end of audio recording is the key to making great sounding records. BUT, you have to have a great song or all that technology doesn’t matter at all.
Is that how you made your new record?
Yeah, we recorded it all at 96k in the latest version of Pro Tools with a Burl ADD analog-to-digital convertor system and on the input side of it was these old vintage high quality microphones and old vintage Neumann 1073 and API and SSL mic preamps that were on the front side of everything. So it sounds warm and rich cause it’s coming in on a tube level and a Class A level mic preamp but it’s being transferred by the highest quality analog-to-digital converters on the market today. So it sounds really great, the quality of it.
The song “Sun” has a lot of these beautiful harmonies which are reminiscent of the early to mid-seventies
It’s really funny because I wrote that song in about 1974. I just had the idea for it. Joni Mitchell used to use these really different, unique tunings on acoustic guitar that gave her this ringing tone and this beautiful kind of harmonic clusters of sounds that you just can’t get on a standard guitar and standard tuning. So I was playing around with all these different tunings and came up with this tuning and wrote the music for it and it was right very shortly after my very first son was born. So I wrote that song originally about the first glimpse of my son. I played it for Don Henley and Glenn Frey as we were starting to work on song ideas for the One Of These Nights record. I thought, you know, if we did something like this and finished the lyrics and had a nice group vocal on it, it could be really pretty. They listened to it and went, “Oh, that sounds really nice. I’m really happy that you wrote a song for your new baby.” And they just turned and went away (laughs).
Then I realized later when I was starting this record that I had that idea and concept but I think the lyric idea of it was too narrow. Not only did it exclude all the daughters but the idea of writing a song just about your son was just a narrow concept. So I broadened it lyrically into a much more kind of spiritual level whereas we come into life on this planet and we are literally born into this space and time and hospital and parents that we’re given, it’s really your first glimpse at life, or the first glimpse of the sun.
The very last verse talks about a warm crossing of life. When we reach the end of our journey here and we depart this heaven on earth and we cross over into the next level of wherever we’re going, we’ll see that first glimpse of that sun, that next level of spiritualism or whatever you want to call it. Wherever we go, or don’t go, that’ll be the first glimpse of that sun. I don’t know if that comes across in the lyrics but it has a much broader kind of concept instead of writing about just my son. So I felt that the sound and the timbre and this feeling in the music really supported that concept quite well and to put those harmonies on, that just worked out great. Instead of me just singing it by myself, I always heard it like a group vocal but the only group I could put together was me and Timothy Drury, who is a great singer, and the two of us did all the vocals on it ourselves by multi-tracking. It was not only fun to write and rewrite and rerecord, to stack all those vocals on the end, it was just a nice little glorious way to acknowledge that song.
Your title track is filled with rock & roll history. Was there a name that came to you first that got that song started?
You know, I was at Woodstock in 1969. I was one of the 400,000 soaked, mud-covered fans out in the crowd (laughs). Except, I had the forethought that when I went there with my buddy, he had a Travelall vehicle, and a Travelall was made by International Harvester and it was the predecessor to what now is the Suburban. It looked just like that, four doors with a big thing on the back. And we threw a mattress in the back and some sleeping bags and stopped and got some food and water and a couple changes of clothes, and just threw them in the back of this Travelall. When it got really bad, we would run for cover and leave the back hatch open so we could lay there and have towels and clean, dry clothes and listen to the music.
We were parked right on the road that was the entrance into the park. But I saw Jimi Hendrix, I saw Janis Joplin and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Santana. A lot of those people went on to not only influence me but, to me, that was probably the largest rock & roll explosion in history that really sent the shrapnel out all over the entire globe. Not only influence me but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people thereafter, including all of the people that are playing on this record with me. Bob Weir was actually there with the Grateful Dead and I saw Bob and the Grateful Dead and it wound up he sang on this record, not on that track, but he sang on this record fifty-something years later.
If you ever looked at the lyrics to “Hotel California,” it says, “There hasn’t been that spirit here since 1969.” In 1969 was Woodstock and that’s what that’s talking about, that incredible explosion of flower power, peace, love, music; that whole magnificent thing that happened. So I thought it was a great place to start paying homage to the current day people that were so influenced by that and the musicians of the time. If you look through the verses, it chronologically goes from that first verse talking about Woodstock and every decade going on all the way up through the beginning of the twenty-first century with the grunge guys from Seattle.
And you have two drummers on this track
I thought the track should really sound like late sixties/early seventies so I got Mick Fleetwood to play drums on the first half of it and when Mick plays, it just sounds a certain way, he feels a certain way, it just sounds like that kind of really classic vintage quality and style. The way he plays – his pocket, his tone, everything – it’s very recognizable to that era. About halfway through the song, Chad Smith from the Chili Peppers comes in like a 5,000 pound gorilla and just picks up the whole track. He’s playing so strong and so powerful, like the Chili Peppers, like the Foo Fighters, and all those bands that came in later in the following decades. So not only does it lyrically make a migration but it has a musical morphing from Fleetwood and that sixties/seventies/early eighties into the rest of the decades until the twenty-first century when Chad comes in.
Slash plays on the track as well. How did that come to be?
The next-to-last verse I wrote about Guns N Roses and I mention Slash and Rose and I said, you know, I wonder if Slash would come in and just play a couple of licks in that verse. He plays a very recognizable way. The second verse I mention the Allman Brothers, who I knew growing up in Gainesville and Duane taught me how to play slide, so I emulated a Duane slide in honor, just tipping my hat to him in that second verse. So I thought I’d get Slash to play a couple of licks in that next-to-last verse but he came in and he said, “Where do you want me to start?” and I said, “I don’t know, where do you want to start?” And he said, “Just start at the top and let me play.” (laughs)
So we started at the top and put it in record and he made, I think, three or four passes from the top all the way through. Each one was different. We went in and edited and took the best licks from each little verse and put it where they were supposed to be. I came back in and played later around what we had edited of him and it was just a really fun project – to call in these different players that sound and have a feel and a character about them and put them where they help the song grow. It was a really fun project to do. It was kind of a rockumentary, musically, and a salute to all the people that not only came from Woodstock but were influenced by it and later went on to become stars of their own.
Whose contribution was the hardest to coordinate or to lock down to play on this record?
You know, everybody that I actually reached out to and that we tried to coordinate with gave us dates and times. Nobody said, “Oh well, maybe in a couple of months I’ll have some time.” Nobody put us off. Everybody gave us dates and times and I think there were a couple of things that we actually had to send files to somebody – like Alex Lifeson. He lives in Canada so I’m not going to hop on a plane and fly up to Canada, get the guitar part and fly back (laughs). So we sent him some files, he made four or five passes and he wrote me back and said, “What do you want me to do on this?” and I said, “Anything you want. Just be Alex.” So he played acoustic guitar on the bridge on a song called “Charmed” and he played solos at the end of it. We went in and kind of edited his best performances and made some room for me to answer and I played harmony on some stuff and kind of put it together.
Actually, Mick Fleetwood was in Hawaii at the time and we sent him some files and he did that drum track in Hawaii and sent the files back. So there were a couple of places where we had to actually use technology to get people who were just too far away to be able to hop on a plane. Although, I jumped on a plane and flew to Nashville to get Peter Frampton in his studio. He was there for a week and I said, “I’ll come to Nashville. What’s a good day?” “Wednesday.” So I hopped on a plane on Tuesday and went there and Wednesday morning we spent two or three hours in the studio telling jokes and laughing. He played on this song called “The Way Things Have To Be.” This was probably a year and a half to two years ago and he was aware at the time of his diagnosis. I was unaware at the time and I found it really ironic that the song I selected for him to play on, in a sad kind of ironic way, it was probably the best choice of songs for him to work on.
I’m not a keyboardist, although that one song I actually wrote on piano. And that’s how I wound up recruiting Frampton on it. You know, Peter and I did about, I don’t know, twelve or fifteen shows together with Frampton’s Guitar Circus and he plays this Les Paul in this revolving organ speaker that is turning around really slowly and it just sounds beautifully angelic, ethereal; just gorgeous sound. As I’m sitting at this piano playing this thing and writing this song, I kept hearing Peter’s guitar effect on that record. That’s the tone and timbre that should be underneath that and that’s why I asked him to play on that particular record. It was the most appropriate tonality of a guitar to have on it. I think I played a couple of acoustics but that’s about it.
What’s the story with Orianthi and Richie Sambora?
I went out to Sambora’s house and he had a studio set up in his kitchen. Now, I’ve made records everywhere – in trailers and back halls and dressing rooms – but I’ve never made a record in a kitchen (laughs). But the good thing was, you could sit there and reach over and grab the coffee pot and fill up your coffee without having to get up and leave the room (laughs). So Richie and I are there recording on this song called “Limelight.” And I look around and Orianthi comes walking down the staircase and I’d completely forgotten that she and Richie were together as a couple at the time. Orianthi and I have played together on many charity events, she used to come out and play “Hotel California” with me and we did some charity events with Alice Cooper and we did some charity events for the veterans here to raise money with Billy Gibbons and Joe Bonamassa, Stephen Stills, a bunch of people. So she comes walking down the staircase and I go, “What are you doing? Oh my God, that’s right, you guys are together! (laughs) Orianthi go get a guitar, you’re going to play on this track!” She had on cutoff jeans and a t-shirt and a baseball hat, just out of bed. It’s like eleven in the morning and she goes and grabs a guitar, plugs it in and turns it up and just kills it. I mean, she is such an amazing player.
I’ve been raving about her since I first met her, probably ten years ago, maybe more. I was at a NAMM show in Anaheim and Paul Reed Smith says, “Felder, come here, you’ve got to hear this girl play!” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And he’s like, “No, no, no, you got to come with me.” He grabs my arm and takes me into his booth and she’s standing there, she must have been like eighteen or nineteen, something like that, fresh from Australia, still has that strong Australian accent and she’s standing there just singing unbelievably, by herself, with an electric guitar and amp, no band, no backing track, no nothing, and she’s killing it. I said, “Paul, you’re absolutely right. I’m so glad I came up here.” So I’ve kind of been watching her bloom and blossom over the years. I just cannot give her enough acknowledgment and support and a helpful hand anywhere I can. She’s just fantastic. But she just happened to come walking down the staircase.
About midway through the album, you do this big rock anthem kind of song called “Rock You.” What inspired that?
Well, I remembered being onstage at Wembley Stadium in London in 1974 or 1975 and we were on a show with Elton John headlining when he had his flamboyant, big glasses and feathery costumes and there was like one hundred and something thousand people at this stadium. That was like my first real huge gig and I remember standing there and some of the songs we were playing, like “Take It Easy,” had the crowd jumping up and down and having a great time. But when Elton came out, he got the place just frothing at the mouth, everybody jumping up and down. So I said, I want to write a song like a stadium rock song. So I wrote “Rock You” and I said, you know, it would be great if I could do a duet with somebody that’s got one of those really strong, growly kind of unbelievable rock voices. Who could I get? Oh wait a minute, Sammy Hagar fits that bill exactly! (laughs) Sammy and I have known each other for decades. We both wrote songs for the Heavy Metal soundtrack and we played shows together, I’ve done charity events for him, I’ve been on his TV show. So I call him up and go, “Hey, I’ve got this kind of stadium rock song I’d love to do as a duet.” He says, “Get on a plane, come up to my studio in Sausalito and we’ll do it tomorrow.”
So I grab my little hard drive under my arm and jump on a plane and go up to San Francisco, go up to Sammy’s studio. He’s got a mic set up, an engineer and we bring my track up and I go out and sing my parts and he sings the little answer lyrics and he says, “You know, this is so easy.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he says, “You’ve written the song, you’ve written the melody, you’ve written the lyrics. Every song I ever record, I have to write everything and that’s the hard part. And you just say, ‘Here, sing this.’” And I said, “If you want to rewrite some lyrics, go ahead if you want.” And he says, “No, no, no, this is too easy.”
Just as we finish that, Joe Satriani comes in and he and I sit down and do the guitar parts on that track and make it up there on the spot – the harmonies, trading the solos, what we’re going to play where, just throwing it together – and just as we’re finishing, Bob Weir, who has a studio about two blocks away and if there’s nothing going on in his studio, he always comes over and meanders around Sammy’s studio looking for a free cup of coffee and wants to hear some new jokes. So he comes walking in and I go, “Bob, you’ve got to come and sing on this track.” So we got about four or five Bobs singing “Rock you” on the chorus and we just copied them and stuck them in. I think there’s about thirty or forty people singing on that chorus. It should be about 2000 or 3000 people but I don’t know how you simulate that many voices in a big stadium. We try to do it in a studio and it comes kind of close but it doesn’t sound like a live stadium version of it. We’ll have to wait and record that live one day.
You mentioned Satriani. He was a guitar teacher in his younger days and so were you.
I didn’t even know he was a guitar teacher. I’ll have to call him up and ask him how much he charges for lessons (laughs). I had no idea. But I just have the highest respect for Joe, his technical facility, his tone, what he’s taking that instrument to. There’re so many different players I know, from people like Joe Bonamassa, who is probably the greatest blues guitar player today, to Billy Gibbons, who’s got this kind of funky Texas soul thing; he doesn’t play really fast, he doesn’t shred. But with Joe it just happened to work perfectly for that track. So we recruited him to play the guitar on it with me.
You were one of Tom Petty’s guitar teachers
Yeah, Tom and I and Stephen Stills and Bernie Leadon all went to the same high school. We were just a year or two apart from each other. Tom was the younger of all of us; I think Bernie or Stephen was probably the oldest. But we were all at the same high school but in different bands. Stephen and I had a band together when we were fourteen/fifteen but he left to move to California. Bernie Leadon showed up and replaced him in that band. I was teaching guitar in this music store, not in exchange for money but in exchange for credit. For every hour I taught, I got I think like a five dollar credit. So if I taught five, ten or twenty lessons a month, I’d get a hundred bucks and a hundred bucks in the early 1960’s was a lot of money. So I could get strings and cables and straps and save up and trade in a guitar and get a better guitar and a little amp upgrade. It was the only way but I figured out years later they were getting the best end of the deal because they were selling me that stuff at retail and paying me five bucks an hour. They should have been selling it to me with an employee discount (laughs).
Anyway, Tom came in and he was playing bass in this little band called the Epics and he really did not want to be playing bass and fronting a band. He thought it was much cooler to play guitar. He also wanted to write but you can’t write on bass. So I started teaching him guitar. I went over to his house to a couple of the Epics garage rehearsals and their dad actually owned a gas station and at night after the gas station closed, they would set up in the garage bays and play in there without disturbing the neighborhood. So I went over to a couple of their things and they had two guitar players that would just flail artlessly. It was Ricky and Rodney Rucker – say that really fast five times (laughs). They were beginning guitarists and were just flailing away so I kind of helped one guy play rhythm and the other guy not play or play a line or something when Tom wasn’t singing so it wasn’t just this cluster of guitars.
So Tom wanted to play guitar and I gave him some lessons, went to his house a couple of times. He had a piano there so when I went in and sat there just goofing around on piano, he wanted me to show him some piano chords so he could write on piano too. So I taught him what little I know about piano. So I taught Tommy some piano, I taught him some guitar lessons; enough to be able to chord around the instrument, you know. He never became like a great guitar soloist like Satriani or somebody like that but that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to be able to really front the band playing rhythm and write songs and I thought he did pretty good with those two goals.
How has your relationship with the guitar changed? Do you still view it like you did in your twenties?
You know, I have to say that probably the best thing that’s come into my life, outside of my children, has been the guitar. It has been the one passionate love of my life, the one mistress that has never betrayed me, that has always brought me so much love, so much joy, so much satisfaction, by just being with it, playing it, holding it, writing on it, playing live with it, working in the studio. It’s just such a fulfilling part of my world and my day. It doesn’t really matter particularly what guitar it is. Whether it’s my original 1959 Les Paul or an old Stratocaster or some new guitar, I just love the instrument. It’s been very much like golf, something you will never master and no one has ever played a perfect game of golf (laughs). There’s always a shot or two that goes awry and it’s the same with guitar. You never pick it up and play it just perfectly. I don’t care how good you are, there is always room for improvement and different areas to study and ways to do things differently and different styles.
That was one of the reasons I did that song on the record called “Little Latin Lover.” I spent a lot of time in the Holiday Inn in Cambridge Square in Boston, sitting in that restaurant playing nylon string guitar for people while they were having their dinner and ordering more wine and, “Hey, can I get my check!” (laughs) And I’d just be sitting over there playing. But the kitchen was my dressing room, cause it was a restaurant, right, in the Holiday Inn. You can imagine the quality of it and the ambience of it but it was a good paying gig and I only worked there about an hour and a half to two hours a night. I’d work in that recording studio from 9:00 in the morning till 5:00, get on a train, go down to Cambridge Square, start playing nylon string guitar from 6:00 to 9:00, get on another train and go out to a dance band that would have already started at 9:00. I’d get there about 9:30, go in and sit with them and play till one in the morning in some club, go home, go to bed, get up the next morning and go back in the studio. I was just living, eating and breathing guitar. But while I was there I developed a lot of really great nylon string guitar skills, some of which were displayed on the Hell Freezes Over acoustic version of “Hotel California.” When I rearranged that track and wrote the introduction to it, we did the solos on the end of it, just kind of put it together a different way. It’s the only song that’s been recorded by the same band twice that both times it’s been nominated for Grammys.
So I wanted to be able to use those skills and step out of that electric guitar/hard rock & roll thing or that kind of ballad thing and do something that was kind of fun and upbeat and latin-flavored. It gave me a field to play on with nylon string guitar. So I kind of wrote that and put that together specifically to have a little area to play on with my nylon string, to show off my Holiday Inn skills (laughs).
Your daughter, Leah James, put out a beautiful album last year [While She Sleeps]. Where do you see you the most when you hear her songs?
I don’t. As a matter of fact, I don’t know where her gifts and talents came from. I recognized it when she was eight years old and actually took her to a vocal coach, who is a really famous vocal coach here in Los Angeles called Joel Ewing. He works with just about everybody that’s going in to do records in a recording studio, sing in a movie. He worked with Elton John, a bunch of different people. So I took her there and first thing he said was, “I’m sorry but I don’t take kids.” I said, “No, no, I don’t want you to teach her. I just want to hire you for thirty minutes to listen to her and you tell me if I’m just being a proud dad or if there is something there that really should be noticed and taken seriously.” He said, “Okay, thirty minutes, that’s it.”
He’s got this huge grand piano that was built for an opera star in Hollywood who used to have these big parties at her house and she had this room built so she could stand up onstage and sing opera to all of her friends. So Leah walked up to the piano and he says, “Sing something.” She says, “What do you want me to sing?” He said, “Sing something from Showboat.” So she just sings a cappella this song from Showboat. Then he says, “Okay, I’m going to play something on piano and I want you to sing it.” So he plays this little melody, she sings it, goes a little higher, she sings it, goes a little higher, higher, higher; he’s trying to find the top of her range and he goes down lower, lower, lower trying to find the bottom of her range. He says, “Okay, I want you to sing that Showboat song again and I’m going to play piano with you.” She sings it, he plays piano and he turns to me and says, “I want to see her every week.” I said, “But you don’t take kids.” “No, no, there’s something here. I think if I work with her, I can make something spectacular out of her voice.” She’s eight years old.
So for ten years, we had to drive her till she turned sixteen and got her license and she started driving herself from sixteen to eighteen, taking vocal lessons from this guy. He would record on a cassette every one of her vocal lessons and every day I would hear her up in her bedroom on her own putting that cassette in and singing her lesson. Every single day for an hour. I never had to go, “Did you do your vocal lesson today? You better turn off that TV.” Never. She was just obsessed with it and she loved it so much and Joel was right. If you took a kid that was eight years old and sent them to the gym for ten years solid and built their body, which your voice, your larynx, is a muscle, to control the dynamics and breathing and understanding of tonality that he gave her, was unbelievable. So when you hear her, it’s not me, that’s her. I can’t claim anything of that except I just happened to notice and thought I should have a professional opinion about it.
The kind of music you were making with Flow, does that still interest you today?
Yes and no. What I was developing, or trying to develop, was I admired Jazz musicians for many reasons. Number one, they had developed the ability to improvise on the spot. They could walk up onstage and they don’t play the same solo twice. I saw Miles Davis, I think when I was eighteen or something, and Herbie Hancock was playing piano with him, Ron Carter was playing bass, Wayne Shorter was playing sax, he had a seventeen-year-old drummer named Tony Williams that was out of this world. So that band goes onstage without Miles and Miles is sitting on the side of the stage at just a regular table down there by the bathroom and the band is cooking along. Herbie Hancock is taking a solo and then Wayne Shorter takes a solo and the bass player takes a solo. That goes on about five or eight minutes and slowly Miles gets up, walks up the stairs on the side of the stage in this club, stands there in the middle of the stage with his back to the audience. And everybody is just waiting on baited breath to hear what he is going to play. And he starts out by playing three notes. The band is cranking along and he plays really simple, really sweet but so melodic and it was like a warm welcome. You don’t greet someone at a fast pace. You greet them casually and warmly and introduce them to you in a very graceful way and that’s exactly how he performed.
What I got from watching those guys, what they had developed, was an incredible ability to improvise on the spot. So that band Flow was a Jazz Fusion Rock band. We did that, or tried to do that, inside the rock idiom. We’d have long extended solos, we had one guy that played Hammond organ, this guy named John Winter, who also played soprano sax that was on the record. We had that same philosophy. We didn’t go out and play the same solo two nights in a row. It was just developing the ability to improvise in a rock idiom instead of a Jazz idiom. And what that did after two years of starving on the streets of New York, it made me realize that that particular talent is a wonderful thing to have, especially in the studio when you go to make up a solo, when somebody comes in and has got a song started and you’ve got to write a bridge for it, you can just let it come out. Once you develop those skills, they come in unbelievably handy. So I don’t know I would go back to doing that as much as what I’ve gleamed from the experience of learning how to improvise has helped me immensely from writing songs to writing parts and solos and organizing vocals and just creating stuff based on that freedom of being able to improvise.
And the rest of your year, what’s in the plans?
I wish I had another five hundred days in this year because I’m pretty well booked wall-to-wall between promotion, touring, and also when I’m home in my studio I try to write. Like I said, I shut everything off, I go in the studio for a couple of hours, come out, see how much is happening and try to catch up with that and then go back in the studio for a couple of hours. It takes a long time for me to accumulate enough song ideas and music ideas and lyric ideas to sit down and write and produce another record. And I don’t want to wait another seven or eight years to be able to put out another record. I want to try and get another one out within the next two or three years while I can and I think if I can manage my time properly I’ll be able to do that.
Check out Leslie’s 2012 Glide interview with Don Felder
Live photographs by Leslie Michele Derrough
