(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 20 April 2025 19:00, UK
The first hurdle that any rock band has to go through is getting everyone on the same page. Anyone can try to get the best lyricist and the best players in one room, but if no one is concerned with playing the same kind of music, everything’s going to fall apart pretty quickly. And while Eagles did have a set plan for what their music was supposed to be in the early days, Don Henley knew that they were always bound to move in a different direction after one too many albums.
Take their debut album, for instance. There are pieces of the record that sound magnificent in the right context, but that was almost expected. Every band member had been playing the same kind of country-rock tunes for years, so it wasn’t hard for everyone to find their place when working on tracks like ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’. But by the time of Desperado, something had to give.
Make no mistake, the record itself was stellar in many regards, but when looking at it from the perspective of fairweather fans, this was too far into cowboy territory for anyone to care. They needed to switch things up, and Henley and Glenn Frey figured that they needed more guitar chops behind them when they called in Don Felder.
Frey and Bernie Leadon made for quite the guitar duo, but as soon as Felder laid down tracks on ‘Already Gone’, they had the kind of fire that their hard-rocking peers had. They had slowly morphed into something a lot more eclectic, but while One of These Nights sold in droves, Leadon was far from happy. He was hoping to join a badass country-rock band, and now they were flirting with the rhythms you’d hear in disco and R&B.
You have to remember that Leadon’s training was always in country, folk and bluegrass, so asking him to play like a rock and roll gunslinger seemed counterproductive. He could play the signature banjo rolls that people heard, but it was always better to leave the hard rocking moments to Felder, which made for little room for Leadon to work on music outside of tunes like ‘I Wish You Peace’, which he practically forced the band to record.
As soon as they let him go, Henley had no problem talking about their internal issues with Leadon either, saying, “[Bernie] never really messed with rock and roll guitar, and he never really understood how to get that dirty rock and roll sound. He was just not schooled or programmed in that area. We also knew that Joe [Walsh] was so controlled that he could play the ballads with no problem at all, and a lot of people doubted that. Also, Felder can play the banjo and a mean mandolin, so we didn’t lose anything in that area when Bernie left.”
Despite how that is phrased, that’s not to say that Leadon didn’t contribute a lot to the band in their early years. His chops made for some of the beautiful melodies in their catalogue, and when he actually sat down to sing one of his tunes, ‘My Man’ and ‘Train Leaves Here This Morning’ had a common thread that traced all the way back to the titans of country music before rock and roll even existed.
It was a fine place to start, but Eagles had to spread their wings a little bit more when Leadon left and Joe Walsh was brought in. That kind of departure was bound to sting, but there’s a chance both parties were happier playing the music they wanted to make rather than being forced to compromise.
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