EaglesInterviewDon Henley: ‘There’s no partying, no alcohol, it’s like a morgue backstage'
Paul LesterThe Eagles man may have put the debauchery behind him but he still shoots from the hip, holding court on former bandmates (‘bitter’), Kanye West (‘arrogant’) and Frank Ocean (‘talentless’)
You would never know that a member of the biggest American band in history had just entered the building. Dressed down in chequered shirt and jeans, Don Henley has escaped the midday Texas heat and, without fanfare, made his way to a table at the back of the Louie Mueller Barbecue, a restaurant specialising in smoked beef apparently tasty enough to warrant a 40-minute drive from his hotel in central Austin.
Sitting at a table by a frankly pointless giant electric fan (it’s probably the only place to eat in America without air-conditioning), Henley is too eager tucking into the brisket and ribs to notice the temperature.
The customers are equally oblivious to the singer, drummer and joint-lead songwriter with the Eagles: the band who have outsold every other in the US with the exception of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and were awarded a disc proclaiming Their Greatest Hits (1971-75) the bestselling album of the 20th century. A couple of locals recognise Henley’s cowpoke garb and politely request a memento, but that’s about it. The Eagles have been called an “anonymous monolith”, and Henley likes it that way.
I can get along with good old boys – as long as we don’t talk about politics or religionDon HenleyDoes he ever demand preferential treatment? “Oh no, no, no,” he protests. “Sometimes I send Tony, my road manager, in in advance to say: ‘Mr Henley would like to come in, and could he please have a table at the back away from the rest of the patrons so that he doesn’t get disturbed?’” Technically speaking, that does probably constitute preferential treatment, but still.
“I don’t mind signing things if people approach me in a respectful manner,” he continues, “but if they come rushing up and start jumping and screaming and making a scene …”
Having witnessed the rapture that greeted his arrival onstage at the Moody Theater on Willie Nelson Boulevard the night before, for a televised performance of solo hits (including 1984’s Grammy-winning The Boys of Summer) and material from his sharp new country album Cass County, his first for 15 years, “scream” and “scene” are about right.
“Adults do it,” he sighs, baffled. “Grown women - and men. And I hate that.” It’s because he’s “shy, reserved”, he explains. The last thing he wants when he’s having dinner with his wife and children is a commotion. A word of warning to anyone considering approaching the Henleys: keep it down.
“As long as their voices are low, then I will accommodate them,” he advises. Just don’t be “rude or loud, drunk or obnoxious”, because he might get angry, and you won’t like Henley when he’s angry. As he glares: “Once in a while, I’ll tell somebody to fuck off.”
How do his kids react? “Sometimes, they’ll be, like: ‘You did the right thing.’ Other times, they’ll go: ‘Oh, Dad’, and I’ll go: ‘Look, I’m sorry, the guy was out of line.’ It’s all about timing, and basic manners. I was brought up in the south, where we were taught to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. I still say ‘sir’ to men who are older than me; my son calls me ‘sir’ sometimes.”
Right now, though, he has meatier concerns. “I’m going to eat,” he announces, in his soft Texan drawl, “till I puke.”
He’s a curious mix: the thoughtful former student of English and philosophy at North Texas State University, turned purveyor of heartland American country-rock, who has described himself as a redneck. “I’m an educated redneck,” he corrects me. Is he rescuing the term? “Oh, I’m an enlightened redneck.”
Do people assume he’s rightwing because of country and its connotations? “No,” he says. “I think people know [he’s a democrat].” He grew up listening to black music, and singing R&B in Texan dives; that’s how he acquired his rasp. Critics have tended to miss that aspect of his music.
“A lot of those early writers who said we were laid-back, mellow, ‘the LA cowboys’, yada yada, all that crap - there was nothing mellow about us. But that stuff stuck like glue. We did everything we could to shake it.”
Take It Easy may have been Eagles’ theme tune, but you don’t last this long by being, as Henley puts it, “a bunch of denim-wearing southern Californian hippies”. I wonder, though: is there any embarrassment at having an audience comprising what Randy Newman might call “good old boys”?
We were in a dark place, too many drugs, fucked up all the time. We should've taken a year off or hired a psychiatristDon Henley“Yeah,” he allows. “But that’s OK. I can get along with good old boys – as long as we don’t talk about politics or religion.”
Henley protects his privacy, but he’s not as guarded as he might be. He remembers a strange mile-high tryst with super-groupie Connie Hamzy when the pilot unexpectedly joined in, and says that “by the time I was my son’s age I was a lush”.
We don’t discuss his 1979 charge for contributing to the delinquency of a minor after a naked 16-year-old prostitute suffered a drug overdose during a party at his home in LA, where cocaine, marijuana and quaaludes were seized. However, on most subjects, he is candid. He recalls trying to follow up 1976’s Hotel California (total sales: 32m) with 1979’s The Long Run - just as Fleetwood Mac, whose Stevie Nicks he was then dating, were struggling to match Rumours – and failing miserably before splitting, bloodily, in 1980.
“We were in a dark place,” he offers. “We were doing way too many drugs, just fucked up all the time because we felt this tremendous pressure. We should have taken a year off, or hired a band psychiatrist. Or both.”
Henley decries contemporary pop culture for its crassness, but agrees the Eagles were no angels. Would he place them above Fleetwood Mac in the bad-behaviour superleague?
“No,” he says, laughing. “We didn’t sleep with each other … Zeppelin would be right up there, and the Who and the Stones. So would we. But I’ve never tried to chart it out like that. Obviously we weren’t as bad as our reputations, because we’re all still alive.”
How have they managed that? “We were binge-purge people. We didn’t debauch all the time. We had our periods of cleaning up. Plus,” he adds, “we’re genetically lucky, working-class kids from blue-collar backgrounds. We’re a bunch of tough little sons of bitches.”
Rock stars of Henley’s magnitude aren’t always generous with their time. With a record to promote, you’re usually granted a cursory hour in a hotel. But this is, after all, a band on whom hirsute rockers Stillwater – from Cameron Crowe’s early-70s reminiscence Almost Famous – were partly based. So the access is old school: I follow Henley, over the course of a week, from event to event: the recording of that TV show; a Q&A session for satellite radio station SiriusXM; a car journey he spends on his mobile, trying to find drugs (cough medicine for his daughter, not cocaine); and the barbecue feast.
Also at the restaurant is his manager, the notorious Irving Azoff, also known as “the Poison Dwarf”, one of the subjects of Hit Men, Fredric Dannen’s 1990 music industry exposé. He seems innocuous enough, a diminutive, silver-haired sexagenarian quietly demolishing a plate of charred cow. But this is the character (“One of the most loathed men in the music business,” according to Dannen) who once sent an adversary a boa constrictor, and threatened to defenestrate a TV set because hotel staff couldn’t silence construction workers on the street below.
In 2012, Azoff topped Billboard’s Power 100 (this year, he is merely No 3). Henley quipped of him, “He’s Satan, but he’s our Satan.” Nevertheless, it’s a measure of Eagles’ turbulent career that an individual of Azoff’s fearsome repute was required to keep them on track.
Felder wrote a nasty little tell-all, a low, cheap shot. I could write stuff about him that'd make your moustache curlDon HenleyBack at his hotel, I remind Henley of that quote about Azoff. He smiles: “He’s mellowed. He used to be a holy terror. Some of that reputation is undeserved. He’ll go to the mat for his artists. But if you’re the enemy – look out.”
How about Henley: does he have a ruthless streak? “Not among people that know me well,” he decides. “If people say anything about me, it’s that I’m overly generous.”
The question has got him thinking. He remembers Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles, the 2007 memoirs of Don Felder, guitarist and co-writer of Hotel California who quit in 1980 just as tensions were reaching boiling point (at his last concert, bandmate Glenn Frey hissed to Felder onstage: “I’m gonna kill you. I can’t wait”). Felder rejoined for the Hell Freezes Over reunion tour in 1994 and their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but was sacked in 2001. He sued Henley and Frey for wrongful termination, seeking more than $50m in damages; Henley and Frey counter-sued for breach of contract; and, in 2007, all parties finally settled out of court.
“A lot of people on the outside believe a lot of the bullshit in Don Felder’s book and believe Glenn Frey and I are some kind of tyrants,” says Henley through gritted teeth. Indeed, throughout he and Frey are tartly reimagined as “the gods”.
“The fact is,” he goes on, “we are largely responsible both for the longevity and the success of this band. Because we did it our way, and a lot of people didn’t like that. Felder’s just bitter because he got kicked out of the group so he decided to write a nasty little tell-all, which I think is a really low, cheap shot. I mean, I could write some stuff about him that would make your moustache curl.”
For Henley, now 68, one of the joys of growing up is “you finally bury the hatchet with so many people from the past that you had a tenuous or competitive relationship with – it feels good,” he says. He might sound as though he wants to bury that hatchet in Felder’s skull, but there is more acceptance than anger.
“It’s bands, isn’t it?” he shrugs. “There are factions: the two guys like Mick and Keith against everybody else, or Roger Waters against whoever. Every band has that.”
Henley’s flashes of indignation would make you hesitate before crossing him. Such as when I raise the subject of Frank Ocean. Last year Henley criticised the R&B wunderkind’s “illegal” sampling of Hotel California on his 2011 mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra. “You can’t rewrite the lyrics to somebody else’s songs, record it and put it on the internet,” he said at the time. He hasn’t changed his mind.
“Some of these young kids have grown up in a world that doesn’t understand or respect copyright material or intellectual property,” he complains. “They look at songs as interactive playthings.”
Was he not flattered that an artist of Ocean’s cool calibre … “I didn’t think he was cool,” he interrupts. “I thought he was a talentless little prick. And I still do.”
I didn't think Frank Ocean was cool. I thought he was a talentless little prick. And I still doDon HenleyWould he feel differently if it was, say, Kanye? “No, I’d be just as pissed off,” he insists. “I don’t like him, either.”
So he’s not looking forward to him becoming president? “He won’t be president,” he says. “He’s either incredibly arrogant or incredibly insecure, or some combination of the two.”
Did someone say mellow? Henley is part cynic, part stoic. There’s a song on his new album, The Cost of Living, on which he sings: “Me, I take the hand I’m dealt.” This attitude enables him to face life’s travails, from his wife’s multiple sclerosis to his mother-in-law’s Alzheimer’s. He celebrates Eagles’ new abstemiousness – “Our concerts are so sedate; there’s no partying, no alcohol, it’s like a morgue backstage” – and counts his lucky stars.
“It’s been a great ride and I’ve been extremely fortunate. I have to pinch myself sometimes,” he glows.
Just don’t expect his autobiography, when it’s written, to exhibit all the skeletons in his closet. “I believe some things should go to our graves,” he avers. “And some things are nobody’s fuckin’ business.”
Cass County is out now on. Paul Lester’s trip to Texas was paid for by Virgin EMI
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