In the next room, Frey is absorbed in a basketball game on TV. Chain-smoking and chugging Dos Equis, he rumbles the house with beery cries of “!!” After a while, Henley rips off the headphones and heads for the TV room in disgust, adding a new tablet to the heap. This one is blank except for two lines.“Naw, naw, naw. . . .” The game’s about over and, faced with another night at the legal pads, Frey and Henley are warming to the idea of a conversation.
Glenn Frey, 26, and Don Henley, 28, through their crisp, quotable lyrics and interviews, are chiefly responsible for creating what one band member calls “our punky James Dean image.” As a result, most journalists rarely bother to explore the band’s remaining three-fifths. They would learn that for Bernie Leadon, Randy Meisner and Don Felder – all comfortably settled into secluded home and road lives – the Eagles are not quite a “24-hour-a-day trip.
Twenty-eight-year-old Bernie Leadon, the only true Southern Californian in the band, cherishes the easy anonymity of his Topanga lifestyle. He strikes one as a commercially successful musician with a purist’s guilty conscience. He admits to twice leaving and rejoining the Eagles. His previous bands were Flying Burrito Brothers and Dillard and Clark, both critically raved and financially starved.
Frey is on the edge of his seat now, eager to make his point. “I just figure we can’t lose. The longer the Eagles stay together, the better it’s gonna be. No matter what. We never expected to get this far, anyway. I thought we’d break up after our first album.” After a brief apprenticeship with Bob Seger , Glenn left college and made his big move to L.A. Why not New York, which was closer? “Well, the truth was that I was gonna buy drugs in Mexico and see a girlfriend who moved out here with her sister. My parents told me that if I was going to California, they weren’t gonna give me a goddamn dime. They would send me five bucks/ten bucks in every letter. ‘Buy yourself a nice breakfast and a pack of cigarettes.’ I send them money now.
Don Henley, drummer and lead singer in a band named Shiloh , never spoke to Frey when they saw each other in the bar. “I just thought Glenn was another fucked up little punk.” Henley had also just made his move to L.A. Behind him were four years of college and Linden, a Texas town where he was the weird hippie. “In a town that size,” he says, “all you can do is dream. I had this one English teacher who really turned my head around. He was way out of place in this little college.