Life in the Slow Lane

But was acquisition more important to you, and the Eagles, in the 1970s?

Mainly we wanted to survive. We had seen so many of our predecessors end up with nothing — dead, drugaddicted or penniless. Most critics, let's face it, like their rock stars dead. We saw it differently. We saw music as a career, a calling, a job. The financial aspect did start to play a larger role after a while, because we looked upon the record companies as the enemy. I still do, to some degree. Any artist will tell you that it is a struggle to get paid by a record company. Nothing would make me happier than to see large record companies become obsolete. Because they've been screwing us from day one.

How do you feel about Napster and the idea that music should be available for free on the Internet?

The Internet is both a democratizing force and a force for undermining democracy. The concept that music should be free is some holdover from the Sixties, I guess. And I resent it when people imply that this is not a legitimate profession, that what I do for a living should be given away. Napster and MP3.com try to make people believe that they are some sort of Robin Hood organization, stealing from the record companies and giving music to the people. But they're stealing from the people who create that music.

How much time do you personally spend on the Internet?.

None. I have an assistant who has a computer, and if I want some information off the Internet, she finds it. I don't go on because I don't have time, and I have privacy concerns. E-mail is not a safe, private way to communicate with anybody. And I don't want to sit in front of a screen all day. I'd rather be active. I prefer to write the old-fashioned way.

As a songwriter, you often write about the lone worker — people who eke out their livelihoods in the shadows of a boom town, like the guy in "Sunset Grill." There is a kind of beautiful exhaustion about that song.

He was a beautiful, exhausted man. He reminded me of my father. My father was always exhausted because he worked too hard. He had an auto-parts store and did pretty well for a guy with an eight-grade education. And I revere that — the small-businessman, the mom-and-pop operation. The character of the American landscape has been destroyed by the franchises.

The Sunset Grill is gone now. It was on Sunset Boulevard, at Gardner. He had to retire because he couldn't stand up anymore. He sold it to some guy who tore the original place down, built a new place with a big neon sign, got a promotional copy of the single, had it framed, stuck it on the wall and put something on the menu about my song. The original owner, who I wrote the song about, had enough dignity and pride that he didn't want to exploit that. The new guy, who I don't even know, is workin' it.

I noticed that "For My Wedding," the most direct song about love and marriage on the new record, was actually written by another songwriter, Larry John McNally.

It comes under the heading of songs I wish I'd written. Somebody sent it to me. It was either a female writer named Jude Johnston, or somebody sent it to Bonnie Raitt and her office passed it on to me. I'm not sure which one of those things happened.

But it was a great song. I know that in this cooler-than-thou age, sentiment of that kind is frowned upon. I don't care. The song expresses the way I feel. Hopefully it will replace "We've Only Just Begun" as the big wedding song.

Now that you have a wife and family, do you wonder why you took so long to settle down and stop cattin' around?

Even if I'd wanted to a bit earlier, the circumstances weren't right. I've been engaged twice before — to very fine women, with whom I am still friends. But events conspired against us. And I'm glad, in retrospect, that I waited this long. Because having children, getting married, is much too important to screw up. I think I'm a better father now. I'm a more patient person, a wiser person.

The Eagles were often accused of being sexist. How do you look back on the harshness toward women in songs like "Lyin' Eyes" and "Witchy Woman"?

The Eagles being singled out for that was absurd. Rock & roll is sexist and always has been. Let's talk about the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. I don't think we were any more sexist than anybody else. We were frustrated little boys.

Why did you get particularly hammered for it?

Because we were from California? We were perceived as the embodiment of the hedonistic lifestyle out here — when, in fact, we all came from other parts of the country. I must take issue with the categorization of us as a Southern California band. We were an American band — from Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Florida. We came from all points east and brought our musical traditions with us. But once they slap these labels on you, it's impossible to undo that.

And the label of country rock — there was also folk music, rhythm & blues, bluegrass. Our music was an amalgam of everything.

Where was the R&B in the Eagles' music?

"One of These Nights," Witchy Woman," "Long Run." Glenn and I would listen to Al Green records and cop the drum parts.

A curious thing about the Eagles' 1975 greatest-hits album — the biggest-selling LP in American recording history — is that the songs are all pre-"Hotel California." There is a brightness and an innocence to the music that's missing on "Hotel California" and "Long Run."

That was before our innocence was destroyed.

What killed it?

The record business. Drugs. The more superficial aspects of life in this city. Coming of age, getting older, having a sense of mortality, not only in terms of our physical lives but in terms of our career. Knowing that what goes up must come down. Although we were flying high, it was going to come to a screeching halt in not too many years.

When we got to The Long Run in '78, '79, those were the darkest years. Not totally dark. I've never been so down that I couldn't get up. But the drugs did erode our objectivity. They brought out the worst in our personalities. While I don't believe things would have been a great deal different if we hadn't been doing drugs, the drugs had the effect of speeding up and exacerbating the separation process.

But we were fairly typical of our generation. We were reveling in the darkness. We weren't afraid of it. I'm still not afraid of it. I love Robert Frost's poem "Acquainted With the Night." Dark and light, yin and yang, peaks and valleys: Without one, the other is meaningless.