Heaven and Hell

I recently finished "Heaven and Hell" by Don Felder, who had been a member of the Eagles for most of the band's existence. This is very much the insider's look I wanted to see. You can't take any single band member's version of events as the gospel truth, but you can get a reasonably good idea of how things were.

Every band has its personal dynamic. It's not always a very functional dynamic, and in my experience it is frequently very dysfunctional, which of course makes entertaining reading. According to Don Felder's view, Don Henley and Glenn Frey tended to side together in most things, and eventually had functionally full control over everything the band did in every way. I've been on both sides of that dynamic in various bands, and it is absolutely no fun to be consistently on the short end of that particular stick. If you happen to be one of the people in control, the smart move is to make some reasonable concessions to the others to keep them happy, or they don't tend to stay in that situation. I know I usually didn't. But when there's enough money involved, most people will hang around at least for a while. That's when things get contentious, and that's exactly what happened.

This is exactly the kind of rock biography I like to see. It doesn't gloss over when the main subject is behaving badly. I don't need to know a lot of dirt about famous people, but I do want to see what sort of human beings they are, warts and all, and how those people get along (or don't), and it shows that. I also like to know how musicians' most well known work was created, and in this case there was enough of that to keep me interested. In this case, Don Felder wrote the music for the Eagles' most famous single song, "Hotel California", and he provides some details about other songs as well.

One of the amazing things about many of these rock biographies is how unhappy most of these creative people are when they are producing their most successful work. It's a strange thing to see people who outwardly have everything in terms of money and creative success, and in the process make themselves and most of the people around them utterly miserable. I don't know if that misery is necessarily a requirement of producing great creative work, but if it is, I doubt that I'd be willing to pay that price if I had the choice.