By: Rick Landers
Don Felder – Photo credit: Myriam Santos
Having co-written arguably the best Country Rock song in history, “Hotel California”, singer-songwriter-guitarist Don Felder has gifted us with clever melodic riffs, tasteful lyrical hooks, when he fuses country rock and hard rock together in a style that’s both unique and captivating.
Felder gained fame as a member of The Eagles, then after a good run went his own way running solo with his own tracks hitting the charts, gathering up a new generation of fans.
Don’s storied life followed a road that pulled him into the world of the blues, rockabilly and rock music. He studied the licks, the riffs and the styles of the pioneers of rock, R&B and the blues, including Elvis, Carl Perkins, B.B. King and Little Richard. And a young Don Felder would find himself buying mail order “race records”, that couldn’t be found in local shops.
Felder would bump into young guitar slingers on his way up, including a guy named Duane Allman who taught him to play slide guitar, Bernie Leadon (The Eagles), and a young Tom Petty who Felder taught the rudiments of guitar.
Don’s more than just paid his dues in the world of country-rock music, he’s one of its giants who’s have laid down some of its most memorable licks, written hit songs and built a solid reputation as a producer, all of which landed him into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2016.
His latest release, Rock ‘n’ Roll, is an eclectic mix of rock that runs the gamut from smooth to turgid rock and where is rolled in hot with some of his pals, including, Slash, Bob Weir, Sammy Hagar, and Mick Fleetwood.
Don will hit the road soon with a solid schedule of events Stateside, with a quick trip and a gig in Switzerland. And on May 21, he’ll be in D.C. to perform at the ASCAP Foundations’s 11th Annual “We Write The Songs” event at the Library of Congress.
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Rick Landers: I recently interviewed Jimmy Webb and we started talking about cars. He had a Shelby Cobra, and later talking to Carmine Appice, he has a Maserati. Funny, we all went off on these interesting tangents.
Don Felder: I’ve only got two cars. I’ve got a Ferrari California T.
Rick Landers: Nice!
Don Felder: And I’ve got a Cadillac Escalade. Everyone has to have a truck. You’ve got to haul guitars and amps. You can’t really fit much in the Ferrari. [Laughs]
Rick Landers: And, I read you had something like three-hundred guitars?
Don Felder: Yeah well, I haven’t counted them for about a year and a half. I probably have more than that by now. I just need to go away with a couple of the guys and do a full new inventory, take photographs, check serial numbers, add the ones that I’ve acquired over the last year and a half, which is probably another twenty-five guitars or so.
Rick Landers: Wow, so are you buying vintage guitars, new guitars or a mix?
Don Felder: It’s a mix. I have a bunch of different complete systems of band gear. I’ve got one in L.A., one in Dallas, one in Atlanta and one in Jersey.
Complete sets of band gear with amps and drums, and everything. And I have these four Fedex systems that I think are like eleven pieces each. I have all the pedal boards and guitars for myself and my other guitar player, not the keyboard, not the amps, pedal boards, cables, all that stuff, so that we can ship those to little short, one-off gigs.
You know if we’re doing a little private event somewhere, say, Minneapolis, instead of shipping an entire set of band gear there, we just ship enough of the bare essentials, and they provide a set of drums, the keyboards, the amps and the back line.
We can kind of leapfrog those little FedEx rigs and when we do the bigger shows in those main areas of the U.S., if it’s not in that particular city, we can ship at a very low cost and have our full band truck rolled to whatever town it’s got to go to.
Rick Landers: I’ve asked Johnny Farina, if you know him from from Santo and Johnny to come to D.C. to play.
Don Felder: Sure!
Rick Landers: He likes Twins, so I’m looking for a Fender Twin Reverb for him when he’s down here.
Don Felder: You ever go on Reverb?
Rick Landers: Yeah, I go on Reverb, but I think I want to rent one. A friend of mine, Ron Goad, who’s on the board of the Songwriters Association here in D.C. area, he’s hunting around for a Twin for me.
Don Felder: The Twin is way too loud for me. The biggest thing I ever play is Deluxe.
Rick Landers: Yeah and that was one of the problems I had with the Twin I had. I would get up to 2 and it was just too loud for my music room, and you know how heavy those are.
Don Felder: Yeah, they’re bad for your hearing and your back.
Rick Landers: Johnny’s got that pedal steel, so a Twin is a good choice.
Don Felder: You’ve got to tell him that I absolutely fell in love with “Sleepwalk”! That was one of my favorite songs growing up as a kid, and I learned to kind of sort of play it on slide, but it’s just hard to do the harmony. It’s just almost impossible to play those harmonies on a regular slide guitar. I could kind of fake it when I was in high school. I just loved it so much.
Don Felder: I do, it was a beat up used one, that was like the little mini-version of a Strat.
Rick Landers: Was it a Duosonic, looked a lot like a Mustang?
Don Felder: Yeah, it looked like a Mustang, but it was a two pickups and like this girly gold color with a maple neck on it.
Rick Landers: Yeah.
Don Felder: It was okay, it was my first solid body guitar, but then I saved up working in this music store to trade that in and get a used Strat. And it was like I can play like the Ventures. Now, I know they weren’t playing Fenders at the time.
Rick Landers: I think they had Fenders for a while, and then they had the Mosrites.
Don Felder: Yeah, that’s right Mosrites.
Rick Landers: Well, you know I had a couple of those, and I had a Ventures model and the neck was way too skinny up top and, you know, it’s was like playing a mandolin.
Don Felder: I just couldn’t. I didn’t dig the sound, the weird kind of look it was like a reverse cut away where the lower horn was bigger than the top horn. It was just weird.
Rick Landers: Well you know how that design happened? I interviewed Nokie Edwards and he said he was there when Mosley flipped over a Stratocaster and that’s the design of the Mosrite. It’s just a flipped Stratocaster.
Don Felder: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Rick Landers: No, me neither.
Don Felder: You look at Hendrix playing a right hand strat upside down, that’s what it looks like you know?
Rick Landers: Yeah that’s true. You’re from the Orlando area originally aren’t you?
Don Felder: Gainesville.
Rick Landers: Ah, right, so when you get down to Florida and you look back what kind of feelings surface when you return to where you grew up from?
Don Felder: I was just down there. I did a private in Miami and then I went up and did three days at EPCOT at Disney, which was great. It’s got a fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred seat theater there. Did three thirty minute shows for three nights. I did it a year ago. It was so much fun! It was great! My brother comes down from Gainesville with his wife. I get to see my Florida relatives and friends when I play there, or Saint Augustine or Tampa or anywhere I play shows down in Florida. They all come out and say, “Hello”.
It’s like ‘going home week’. The problem is my southern accent returns and so I come back to California and all of a sudden it’s like I have this renewed southern accent. I remember when I grew up there I had a really thick heavy molasses southern accent and I moved from there directly to New York City, and as soon as I start talking people would stop and look at me with a weird look on their face like, “Where are you from?” And I would go,”Well, I’m from Florida. and they would say, “Well it’s obvious you’re not from New York.”
Rick Landers: And you know you’re not a snowbird, because if you’re really from Florida you’ve got an accent, but a lot of people down there, they’re from the north.
Don Felder: Absolutely! It was brought to my attention plainly that I had a really different accent and I moved to Boston, and by the time I got to California I sounded less southern and more New York and Bostonian then I did from the south!
Rick Landers: That’s funny. When you were a young boy I read that you snuck into s kind of a juke joint which was on the Chitlin’ Circuit and you met B.B. King, so when you look back, what do you think of the little boy who did that who had the guts or whatever to do that?
Don Felder: Well, you know, I guess fearless would probably be the best word to describe my foolish youth. When you grow up really poor, you have nothing to begin with. You have nothing to lose. You can try to do anything you want. You can’t get any poorer then you are. You can’t get any hungrier than you are, you can’t get any more embarrassed if you failed.
You might as well try to do anything you want to and I’d been listening to B.B. King on WLAC out of Nashville on a tube radio and at night with the local radio stations in Gainesville. WGGG (Gainesville, FL) shutdown, which they use to do right at sundown and instead of playing Pat Boone singing “Tutti Frutti”, you could go on and listen to WLAC and you could listen to the real deal.
Rick Landers: Yeah, Little Richard.
Don Felder: Little Richard and the hairs on the back of your neck would stand up and, oh my god, that’s the stuff that would make you turn on the radio the next day and you hear Pat Boone and go, “Oh”.
Don Felder – Photo credit: Michael Helms
Rick Landers: I think Pat Boone had songs like “White Silver Sands”, and his own “Tutti Frutti”.
Don Felder: That’s right, and so listening to WLAC I first heard B.B. King and Albert King and a lot of artists that white radio [didn’t play], I don’t mean to sound racist. In the deep south there was a huge division there, between of black and white.
Rick Landers: Yeah, there was.
Don Felder: And I would hear all of these amazing soulful guitar players playing on WLAC and I ordered these. They use to have this thing called Randy’s Record Mart [or Shop].
If you took two dollars which would take me several months to make, from mowing lawns and washing cars and collecting empty soda bottles for two cents back on their return, you’d get two bucks and you wrote on a card your name , address and the forty five (45 rpm record) you wanted and you send it off to Randy’s Record Mart in Gallatin, Tennessee.
You sort of get your version of a 1950’s iTunes download. You go to the mailbox every day and you take a look, nope, not here! Next day, nope, not yet.
Weeks later finally you’d open the mailbox. Yes, there it is! It’s the B.B. King 45, oh my god! You’d take it in, put it on and sit there and play it over and over and over and try to learn every lick on the record.
Rick Landers: And that’s how we learned how to play the guitar back then.
Don Felder: That’s it! And so, when I heard that B.B. King was coming to this kind of Chitlin’ place, it was actually like a barn out in the middle of a cow farm, a big barn. And they had kind of like a temporary set up where they had gotten kegs, because in Gainesville city limits African American communities were not issued liquor licenses.
They had a door turned over on a couple of hay bales on each end, it was their bar. They were serving beer and B.B., I think, played four or five sets. It wasn’t just one show, that was his gig. He was working like a club gig or something. He was skinny and he wasn’t playing the black Lucille (Gibson guitar), he was playing a red 330 or 335, I can’t remember which one and when he took a break he went to the back of this barn and he sat down in a stall, a horse stall, where they had a couple of hay bales with a blanket on it. That was his dressing room.
So, I was just peering into one of the doorways in the bar watching his show and women were screaming going, “Oh my god, tell it like it is B.B., oh god!” It was like a revival almost, like a holy roller church revival. You know it had such a soulful spirit to it, with what he was doing with his music. And he moved so many people, including me, that when he went in the back I went around and just walked in and told him how much I loved his work and that I was learning every guitar lick he was playing, and he was so gracious and so kind, and he took a moment and shook my hand and encouraged me to keep playing. I didn’t want to take up too much time and thanked him, went back out and watched the rest of his sets.
I had gotten home way too late for a fourteen or fifteen year old kid to be running around. A friend of mine, John Leonard, not the John Leonard, but another Johnny Leonard had borrowed a Jeep, neither one of us had a license, but we were driving dirt roads through these farms to get out to this barn. We stayed as long as we could and got the Jeep and drove back and went home.
Rick Landers: I think back then you could drive around at fourteen years old in Florida.
Don Felder: I think you could get a learner’s permit. You weren’t supposed to drive after sundown without being accompanied by an adult. We just went through the farm and little dirt roads.
Rick Landers: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Hey in ’56 I had a striped jacket that I called my Elvis Presley Jacket and that was based on seeing his Ed Sullivan Show appearances, when he came on and kind of unhinged me. How did you react when you saw Presley and how do you feel now when you know the songs you’ve written like “Hotel California”? Fifty years from now people will be looking at the song, listening to that song and singing along with that song? Don’t you think so?
Don Felder: Well yeah, I’m not quite sure how to answer your gracious words. I do remember seeing Elvis and how he impacted me. By seeing him just how cool he was.
Rick Landers: Yeah.
Don Felder: Really great looking. Had this guitar strung over his shoulder, greasy hair was flipping around, snarling his lips all these girls were screaming crying. “Oh my god”! It was like, “I think I would like to do that!”
Rick Landers: There you go!
Don Felder – Photo credit: Michael Helms (c) 2019
Don Felder: The most ironic part of it all is when they finally, decades later, get someone to do my ’59 Les Paul Don Felder Hotel California Les Paul and issue of my Don Felder Hotel California white double neck, and so when I went back to the custom shop they had a Gibbons’ Pearly Gates hanging on the wall there.
I took it down and looked at the back and it was all chewed up with belt buckle rash, and said well how do you guys do this on the back of this guitar and the guy said, “Here, I’ll show you.”
He walks over to his bench, pulls the drawer out and reaches in and takes out this studded Elvis belt that says “Elvis” on it in rhinestones. He said, “We just take this thing, grind it in the back of the back of the guitar.”
I said, “You have to use that belt buckle on my guitars, because that was the guy who inspired me from day one.”
Rick Landers: Hilarious.
Don Felder: Isn’t it funny how things come back sort of like. that?
Rick Landers: Yeah, it is.
Don Felder: Sort of like, I packed up a guitar and a suitcase in 1968 and moved from Gainesville to New York City. The second day that I was there I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because I heard so much about it and there were no museum in Gainesville, there was no culture, there was nothing.
Pickup trucks and red necks you know, so when I got there I went and spent the entire day at the Met just looking at the paintings and the Egyptian art that goes back four thousand years, at the very dawn of man’s artistic creativity.
Fifty something years later to be hanging on the wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is even more ironic than seeing Elvis, and using the Elvis belt buckle on the back of my guitars for the Don Felder model. It was just something that has a way of coming around, when it’s time to supposed to come around.
Rick Landers: Yeah, what a great honor. I remember I went to the Museum of Modern Art and I saw a Gittler guitar. Are you familiar?
Don Felder: I’m not.
Rick Landers: So, I ended up buying one. It looks like a railroad track so if you get a chance check out them out. They stopped making them back in the early 90’s. It’s a pretty strange guitar, but awkward to play.
I was surprise to find that your new album’s concept gathered up a lot of guitar masters. I think it takes a certain personality to come up with a concept drawing other folks together. Logistically, I’d think it becomes quite a project.
Don Felder: My last record (Road to Forever) which I put out in 2012 I played guitar on it, except for one track, I put Steve Lukather on the “The Road to Forever” track. I played all the electric guitars, slide guitars, acoustic guitars, everything on it that had strings on it, and it came out really well, but it was me doing all of my guitar, arranging it myself.
Rick Landers: Okay.
Don Felder: And what I thought it really lacked was that fire and momentary instantaneous, spontaneity of creativity.
Guys are sitting in the room and playing together, and somebody plays a lick and you can’t fall back and grab some old lick that you had in your pocket. You’ve got to step up and dig deep, and comes up with something that’s just as good back at him. Know what I mean?
It takes you out of your safe zone, you can’t go back and do three, four and five takes. Most of the stuff on this record was done pretty much live. We may have done a couple of different passes. I think Slash played three or four different passes. Just top to bottom I just let him go and went in and edit what I thought were great licks of his, just put them where they were supposed to fall. Made room for me to answer a lick with him and, you know, that sort of stuff.
Alex Lifeson’s up in Canada. I had to send him some stems. He said, “What do you want me to play? “I said I want you to play you. Just do you. I know it will be fantastic.”
He played the acoustic on the bridge on that song and a couple of solos on the end and I went and did the same thing. I kind of edited his best parts and gave myself some room to answer and he played this great line on the very end of the song and I went in and did a harmony on top of it.
So, it was just fun being able to put it together, although I really enjoyed going out to Sambora’s house, putting together three solos. You play here and I’ll play that, we’ll do these harmonies, just throwing it out there and everybody digging deep and coming up with fun stuff.
And when you listen to it, it’s really kind of there in the moment, live playing.
I think when things get too technically perfect you beat something to death and it loses the fire, energy and passion. Like if you were to go back in and have them redo those solos perfectly by the fifth, or eighth or tenth take, it would be really perfectly in tune and perfectly in time. But, it would have lost all of that fire.
Rick Landers: Yeah it would have gotten flat a bit, I think.
Don Felder: That’s right, you’ve just got to settle up into the spurs of the pony and take off. That’s what was really fun about doing this record, rather it was Fleetwood and Chad Smith play on” American Rock and Roll”. Slash comes in on it, Fleetwood plays on it, “Flying Back to Nashville” and getting Frampton to play guitar on “The Way Things Have to Be”.
Alex Lifeson, Slash and just a bunch of different people that I know have played on and off with the charity events. The most fun part was picking the right person to play on the right track. Slash would not have worked on “The Way Things Have to Be”, that soft tender ballad.
For instance, we were doing these shows together and there’s this one thing where Frampton plays the Les Paul into a Leslie. And he just got this angelic surreal kind of tone, and the whole time I wrote that song on piano, the whole time I’m playing it, I kept hearing Peter’s Leslie accompanying this.
It was just the perfect thing, so when I called him up he said, “Yeah sure, I would love to be play on your record.”
I hopped on a plane and flew to Nashville with my little hard drive tucked under my arm. Spent a couple of hours in the studio telling jokes, laughing, having a good time. He had recorded that song on a [Fender] Chorus with me and we had fun playing together and putting things together.
I didn’t start out the project thinking of the concept of having a lot of guests. After I had done it a couple of times and realized… wait a minute, this is really a combination of controlled tracking and the over dubs on top of the theme, that fiery, spontaneous just almost live on top of this controlled track on the bottom of it. Just takes it up a notch up, a couple of notches up the ladder. It’s like heat and having those other guys bring their rock star to the show.
Don Felder: Yeah, it’s really funny, because I wrote that song originally as S.O.N., the first glimpse of my son. I wrote it back in 1974 when my son was born. Not the whole thing. See, it’s a weird tuning that I had, tuned everything to D, A, D, D, A D. It’s just all D’s and A’ s roots. You play the whole thing, the G string and the D string both play D, but I take the G off and put another D string on it. And when you play those two strings together it sounds like a mandocello or something, you know they’re not exactly in tune, so it’s like a mandolin
Rick Landers: Interesting, yeah.
Don Felder: I’d come up with the whole tuning in that and I played it for Don (Henley) I played it for Glen (Frey) and they were like, “Oh that’s really pretty, that’s really nice about your son.” And they were on to the next idea.
So, I look back at it and I said, “You know, I’d really like the timbering tone of this, but I’d like to do something that has more of a vocal showcase on it and at the same time I brought in Greg Leisz to play pedal steel.
I love Greg, he’s my favorite pedal steel player in the world. We wrote it about the sun as we’re being born onto the planet, the first glimpse of this magnificent life we’ve been given, is getting your first glimpse of the sun, and then as of the last verse goes on to say about a warm crossing of life as we depart this place, and cross onto wherever were all going. We’re going to get the first glimpse of that next sun, whatever it is.
It became more of a universal kind of spiritual tone lyrics and temper to it, and not so specific about just my son. So anyway, that’s one of my favorites too, I like that.
Rick Landers: I like it too, and I can’t say it exactly reminds me of the Beach Boys, it felt similar but didn’t sound like them. I mean it was a different kind of harmony. It sounded good.
Don Felder: Well thanks. I’m glad you like it!
