If any band proves that enormous success isn’t necessarily a route to mental well-being and all-round happiness, it’s The Eagles. Glenn Frey fell out with Randy Meisner. Joe Walsh and Bernie Leadon fell out with everyone. And, most damagingly, Glenn Frey fell out with Don Felder.
Things came to head in July 1980, on the final date of The Long Run tour. The show, which Frey had organised as a benefit in support of Democratic State Senator Alan Cranston – then engaged in an election campaign against Republican Paul Gann – took place at the 14,500-capacity Long Beach Arena in California. And Felder wasn’t happy about it.
“I didn’t even know who the Cranstons were,” Felder wrote in his autobiography, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles. “I made my views clear, but I knew that if ‘The Gods’ [Frey and drummer Don Henley] wanted to get into political campaigning, then I wasn’t in a position to argue. Still, you never saw John Lennon, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix getting into bed with a politician.”
Felder’s reluctance was compounded when the Senator’s wife, Norma Weintraub, introduced herself just prior to the show.
“Hello! Nice to meet you,” Felder responded, before adding, “I guess”, under his breath as she walked away.
Glenn Frey heard the comment.
“I got really mad,” he said in the documentary History Of The Eagles. “I was drinking a long-neck Bud, and walked into the tuning room where Walsh and Felder was, and took the beer bottle and threw it against the wall and smashed it. I stormed out, and got more mad, and more mad, and by the time we went onstage I was seething. I wanted to kill Felder.”
Don Felder: “We walked onstage, and he came over while we were playing The Best of My Love and said, ‘Fuck you. I’m gonna kick your ass when we get off the stage.’ Both of us were burned out after our months on the road. Neither of us really wanted to be there that night, and for me it was one gig too many.
“Frazzled and fractious, we focused our unhappiness that night on each other. I started drinking Jack Daniel’s and was soon drunker than I’d been in a while. As the night progressed, we both grew angrier and began hissing at each other under our breaths.”
Audio of the pair insulting each other was recorded by the band’s sound engineers, and captures Frey sarcastically calling Felder “a real pro”. When Felder complains about the way Frey treats other people, Frey responds, “Fuck you. I’ve been paying you for seven years, fuckhead.”
“We start getting towards the end of the set, and I’m looking at him going, ‘three more songs, asshole,’ Frey remembered. “I’m looking at him, and I am ready to go. I can’t wait to get my hands on him. When the set ended [the last song was Take It Easy], he was out ahead of me, took his cheapest guitar, busted it into a million pieces, jumped in his limousine and drove off. And that was it. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
The show became known as ‘Long Night at Wrong Beach’, and Don Henley was famously quoted as saying that the band would only tour again “when hell freezes over.” When it did, in time for the 1994 MTV special that resulted in the Hell Freezes Over live album, Felder was back on board, albeit receiving a smaller split of the band’s earnings than previously. In 2001 he was fired, and a number of court cases followed.
When Frey died in 2016, he and Felder had still not reconciled, and Felder told the Associated Press, “I had always hoped somewhere along the line, he and I would have dinner together, talking about old times and letting it go with a handshake and a hug.”