The Eagles

Don Felder takes us inside the making of the manic yacht rockers' 1979 album, The Long Run

- BY ANDREW DALY

AFTER HOTEL CALIFORNIA, the Eagles' massive 1976 album, saw them rise from country rockers to just plain rockers, Don Felder and his bandmates should've been on top of the world — but all was not well in paradise. Indeed, the warm smell of colitas was not rising up through the air, and there was a distinct lack of cool wind in the band's collective hair. Exhaustion, infighting, drugs and alcohol — basically the tropes that were supposed to drag down rock bands, as per Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous — had all but derailed the Eagles.

After the supporting tour for Hotel California, they could have stopped — and they should have stopped... for the night (okay, that's my last “Hotel California” reference!) — but they didn't. Instead, they hit the first of what would be five studios in 18 months and kicked off the sessions for aptly titled The Long Run.

Don Felder, one of the classic Eagles lineup's trio of guitarists alongside Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh, remembers this period well.

“The Long Run was a kind of crazy album,” he says. “We started without very many song ideas.”

Given the sheer strength of Hotel California, it's strange to think the Eagles suffered from a lack of tuneage, but it's true.

“Joe had joined during the Hotel California album,” Felder says. “When we got to The Long Run, we were right off the road, going into the studio, and nobody had a break or time to start writing. It was a difficult time personally, physically, emotionally and creatively in every way.”

On the surface, The Long Run doesn’t seem too far off from Hotel California. But Felder refers to The Long Run sessions as a dark time, adding, “If you look at it, that’s why the record is black. And when you opened it up, the photo of us was dark.”

To Felder’s point, if you dig deeper into