Life in the Slow Lane

Were you and Glenn Frey a yin-yang combination?

Yes, we were.

Who was which?

Each of us embodied both things ?and we would rotate roles. Glenn and I always struggled to achieve balance on those albums, to accommodate everybody in the band. That wore us both down, trying to make everybody happy while trying to achieve a certain level of quality and maintain a certain level of success.

Glenn's always been very sports minded. He thought of the group in terms of sports teams. He believed, and I believed with him, that each member should play his strongest card. We each had a position to play.

What did you do best?

Lyrics and vocals. I've never been a particularly good drummer. I'm a good drummer for singers, because I stay out of the way.

And Glenn's strengths?

He is an excellent arranger and a very good songwriter. He brings a lot of enthusiasm to the table. When I would pull out all of my book learning, he would help me put it into the vernacular. He had a wonderful sense of street language. In "Hotel California," for example, I sang, "Welcome to the Hotel California," and he said, "Such a lovely place/Such a lovely face." Then when I said, "Welcome to the Hotel California," he said, "Don't sing that again. Sing, 'They're livin' it up at the Hotel California.'"

In "Desperado," I had the title and some of the melody. He sat down at the plano and finished working it out. Because he loved Ray Charles, and we were trying to emulate Ray Charles via Stephen Foster. He was great at connecting the dots.

According to a 1972 profile of the Eagles in Rolling Stone, your first manager, David Geffen, sent the band to Aspen, Colorado, to hone your act by playing four sets a night in a bar. It's hard to imagine the Eagles as a bar band.

David Geffen is credited with all sorts of things. I'm not sure whose idea it was to go to Colorado. But never mind going to Aspen. I did four sets a night in Texas from '63 to '70, playing in absolute dives. Guns would be whipped out; there were knifings. We paid our dues. Everybody in the Eagles came up that way.

The first time we went [to Aspen], we didn't have an album out. We were doing some of the things we had written, and we were covering tunes — Chuck Berry, a couple of Bob Seger songs. Glenn was basically setting the repertoire. We'd do some country stuff with Bernie [Leadon] on banjo. I have fond memories of those times — the snow coming down and these wild people dancing, some of them on acid till they dropped; then everybody staggering home. And we'd come back the next night and do it all again.

We drove across the Southwest in a van. We spent the night in a commune in New Mexico. They had an underground hogan with a dirt floor. They ran an extension cord about a mile down the road to get power for our amps, and we played on that dirt floor with a fire in the middle. I remember shadows on the wall as people were dancing around the fire like Indians.

I have fond memories of going out into the desert and taking peyote and stumbling around, giggling and throwing up. And seeing eagles and hawks overhead and taking it as a sign. I think we were all blasted on peyote in that photograph on our first album cover.

Did that early camaraderie last long?

It started to deteriorate almost immediately [laughs]. But there were still moments of great joy and happiness and creativity. And there's not as much emphasis placed on those as there is on the negative times. Being in the Rockies, being young and optimistic, was a wonderful thing. Our entire lives lay ahead of us, and we had a great sense of possibility. And there were girls, free beer and a little skiing.

You tend to work with collaborators — Glenn Frey in the Eagles, then Danny Kortchmar on your first few solo albums and now Stan Lynch. What do you need in a partner?

I'm first and foremost a drummer and singer. I need others to supply the musical palette. And I like it that way. One of the curses of being a solo artist is that after a while, everything starts to sound the same. You're one guy, playing the same instrument, writing in one style. I'm fortunate to have a rotating cast of characters to keep me refreshed.

I have final cut. I'm a benevolent dictator. But I'm also open to compromise. When I think somebody else knows best, I will acquiesce.

Example?

In "Everything Is Different Now," the original first verse went, "You're not the kind to smile and bow out gracefully/You only feel good when other people fall." Stan and a few others said, "That's too mean-spirited. You're undermining the spiritual quality of the rest of the song." I said, "No, it makes perfect sense." They shut up for a couple of months, then came back to me. I said, "I'll think about it." Three or four months later, I went, "They're absolutely right." And so I changed it.

You have a reputation for perfectionism.

I don't think there is any such thing as perfectionism. I'm meticulous. Communication is important to me — respecting the language. I know that's the antithesis of theories in certain quarters in the music business. That's fine. There's a place for the raw and the ragged and the purposely unfinished. But that's not the way I want to do it.

I hear so many songs these days where the lyrics are so awkward. You can tell that the band gave the lead singer a track, he sat down and cranked it out in a couple of hours — the way they put the em-pha-sis on the wrong syl-aaa-ble. [Laughs] It's some incredibly bad stuff.