Life in the Slow Lane

Didn't you do the same thing when you were twenty-two?

Perhaps — although I've always been aware of that. That comes from my background in English literature and poetry. But there are some instances in my own work, or in the Eagles' work, that are a tad awkward.

For instance?

There's one in "Desperado": "It's hard to tell the nighttime/From the day." No, maybe it was [Linda] Ronstadt who did it that way [laughs]. There was some point when the emphasis was on the. Now I put it on from. It's a matter of marrying the right note to the right word.

You're right — I've become more aware of that as I've gotten older. I don't want to be too hard on young kids learning to write.

In your current show, you do some good-humored mocking of two Eagles hits: a skaflavored "Hotel California" with trombones and a rap-funk "Life in the Fast Lane." Do you have a love-hate thing going with your Eagles history?

I just want to stay interested. There is no mocking in the "Hotel California" arrangement. There were reggae elements in there from the beginning. "Life in the Fast Lane" seems anachronistic to me now. It was about the excesses of that time. My life is so different now that I feel the need to spoof it.

Was it hard for you to go back to the Eagles catalog on the reunion tour?

There was a certain comfort in it. It was like being in college. I know my place, I know exactly what I'm supposed to do.

Did it seem redundant?

At times. On the other hand, it was gratifying to know that a huge number of people were interested in coming to see us. I never got to see the Beatles, and I've always regretted it. Some of those songs are thirty years old, but when 30,000 people stand up and scream, believe me, you can get into it just as if it was the first time. When I do get weary or bored, I stop and remind myself how lucky I am to have this life.

Let's talk about those Eagles ticket prices.

I remember getting bad-mouthed by Keith Richards, who said, "How much do you want to pay for nostalgia?" What are their ticket prices now, $300?

But you first broke the $100 mark on the reunion tour, and then you had a top ticket price of $1,000 last New Year's Eve.

We were well within the parameters of New Year's Eve ticket prices. We checked.

Is there a moral parameter?

If you want to talk about unbridled greed, start with the corporations — the oil companies, the timber companies, the mining companies — then work your way down to rock & roll.

Eagles ticket prices were a decision by committee. I was one person on that committee. I felt badly about it. I still feel badly about it. Ticket prices on my solo tour will be well within the parameters of my peers out there. One could argue that the market was undervalued and we simply made, as they say in the stock market, a correction. I don't care to make that argument.

I'm not going to defend the Eagles. I took the brunt of it because no one else would talk to the press about it. I will say that we set aside a lot of money for charity in every city we played in. That's not a justification, but we did spread the wealth around to a great degree.

It's a no-win situation for me. If I try to justify the ticket prices, I sound defensive. If I apologize, I sound guilty — and I don't feel particularly guilty. If I tell you how much of my income, not only from that tour but from the beginning of my career, that I've put back into society in one way or another, then I sound pompous and self-aggrandizing. So I can't win.

Do you have an official position and day-to-day responsibilities at Walden Woods and the Thoreau Institute?

They asked me if I wanted to be called chairman or founder. I said founder would be fine. My role is to raise money. I'm involved in day-today decisions. But I leave certain things to the experts. My primary role now is to raise a $15 million endowment so the institute can be self-sustaining in the future. Because making this yearly nut — it's approaching $1 million now — is killing me.

I was surprised to find that there is a Henley Library at Walden Woods. That is usually an honor reserved for dead scholars and for nineteenth-century railroad magnates.

They practically had to force me. I didn't want to do it. But it's a modest library, and there's a sign above the door that you can barely see. It's in the dark, carved into a wood panel. That was the only concession I made to being identified. Some of the developers, when we bought the land from them, stipulated that we name trails after members of their family. Look at all the baseball parks; everything is named after a corporation. They won't do anything just for the act of doing it.

If you go there, you will find [the panel] is a very modest thing. I did it as much in honor of my mother and father as anything. I've certainly had my time in the limelight. But I have devoted a great deal of the last ten years of my life to this project. It's been rough going. There's a lot of competition for the charitable dollar. I'll probably spend the rest of my life keeping this thing afloat. I want to die knowing that it's going to be all right, that it's going to be here from now on.

One of your new songs, "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming," suggests that no alien in his right mind would come here, because the planet is in such a mess. Isn't that a bit harsh?