Copyright © 1998, 2005 by Marc Eliot

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First Paperback Edition: 2005

This Hachette Books paperback edition of To the Limit is an unabridged republication of the edition published in New York by Little, Brown in 1998, with the addition of a Postscript. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

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ISBNs: 9780306813986 (paperback); 9780306836756 (ebook)

E3-20240621-JV-NF-ORI

Dedicated to the memory of

KAREN HUBERT ALLISON

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While the sun still spends his fabulous money

For the kingdoms in the eye of a fool,

Let us continue to waste our lives

Declaring beauty to the world.

—Kenneth Patchen

“We’re still alive. That must count for something.”

—Don Henley

INTRODUCTION

THE ROOTS OF THE AVOCADO MAFIA

INTRODUCTION

As American rock and roll staggered toward the end of the sixties, a festival took place on an upstate New York farm to celebrate “Three Days of Peace and Love.” Despite the enormous and well-organized hype, Woodstock, as it became known, was in reality less a commemoration of a decade’s musical, social, and political achievements than a memorial to what Lionel Trilling would later deplore as the sixties’ personality-peculiar “cult of sincerity.”

Although festivals remained part of rock’s annual summer rituals, nothing quite like Woodstock ever took place again, as the last vestige of hippie flower power washed away during those three days of peace, love, and torrential rain. Most of the seminal acts of the decade, sensing disaster, did not even bother to make an appearance, including a by-now reclusive Bob Dylan, the endgame Beatles, and the strung-out Rolling Stones. Of those who did, almost none carried any musical or cultural influence into the next year, let alone the next decade. The biggest-name performer, Jimi Hendrix, passed away not long after (as did Janis Joplin, who was there, and Jim Morrison, who wasn’t), putting an especially bitter coda on the dead-end destiny of the so-called psychedelic sixties.

The single previously heard but still unseen act that emerged triumphant from Woodstock was Crosby, Stills and Nash, joined onstage by Neil Young. Taking their turn at four in the morning, they sat themselves down on stools, reached for their guitars, performed their uniquely structured, lyrically sophisticated, harmonically vivid “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and at a generation’s wake became superstars.

The deliberately dressed-down four had come together during the last years of the sixties, in the legendary clubs along Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip, sharpening a sound part folk, part rock, part country, part blues. And all white. It was an amalgam of music at once familiar and surprising, the legacy of the best and brightest of the New York early sixties club scene and the British Invasion, most of the survivors having long since headed west. By the middle of the decade, such former Greenwich Village performers as the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, John Sebastian, Tim Hardin, David Crosby, David Blue, and Joni Mitchell had all landed on the night side of Sunset to play a hand in reviving and reenergizing what they still called rock and roll. By combining the fifties-based doo-wop harmonies of L.A.’s Beach Boys with the bouncing rhythms of Liverpool’s Beatles, and mixing in a little Nashville-style country to dress the sound in blue-jean blues, dozens of new West Coast groups had flourished. The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies, three of the Strip’s most popular and influential bands, eventually resolved into Crosby (Byrds), Stills (Springfield) and Nash (Hollies), and occasionally Young (Springfield). Having first perfected its act on record, the group then came to Woodstock to stake its claim on the seventies.

Crosby, Stills and Nash’s festival success established them with authority. They quickly assumed the position of godfathers of the “new” L.A. sound, the group everyone most respected and wished to emulate. As it turned out, while they pointed the way, C, S and N would not remain atop the rock pile for long. Although they managed to survive through the years in one configuration or another, personal demons, stylistic conflicts, and an idealism too heavily rooted in politics and pot ultimately narrowed their audience and flattened their impact. In retrospect, they were the last great group of the sixties rather than the first great one of the seventies.

Nevertheless, the trail they blazed became rock’s latest superhighway. When the next crop of young hopefuls raised their heads in the direction of the music, they too would inevitably look to the West. Indeed, by 1971, L.A. was the unchallenged new mecca of American rock and roll. Like the prospectors of the California gold rush a hundred years earlier, most hopefuls would soon return home in disappointment, their vein of gold records unrecorded. Some would stay a while longer before giving up, and a few would actually get to spend fifteen minutes playing out their fevered dreams.

Fewer still would find glory. Four who did were Don Henley from Texas, Glenn Frey from Michigan, Randy Meisner from Nebraska, and Bernie Leadon from Minnesota. Each came to L.A. not knowing the others, or the city, or the world they wanted so much to be a part of. Each set out simply to make good music, and did, until the day they found themselves onstage together and realized for the first time their combined potential for greatness. Reborn as the Eagles, Henley, Frey, Meisner, and Leadon changed rock and roll again forever.

Their music dominated the seventies and displaced the previous pop-culture power clique of L.A.’s clean-cut, blue-eyed, soulful singer-songwriters. Under the shrewd guidance of David Geffen, the same youthful manager-on-the-make who’d orchestrated Crosby, Stills and Nash’s rise to superstardom, the Eagles became point men along the Strip for what was called, variously, the Mellow Mafia, the Southern California Mafia, and the Avocado Mafia, a seventies version of Frank Sinatra’s fifties Hollywood Rat Pack. They would be idolized and idealized by the children of the seventies for cutting the self-indulgent psychedelic excess from their big brothers and sisters’ music. Taking a vocal cue from the harmony-rich, romantically hip, acoustically countrylike sound of Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Eagles bypassed the more strident echoes of the sixties simply by ignoring them. Instead, in their various incarnations, they reinvigorated rock and roll with pop-heavy doses of rhythm and blues (“Heartache Tonight”), bluegrass (“Twenty-One”), gospel (“The Last Resort”), Motown (“One of These Nights”), surf (“Take It Easy”), reggae (“Hotel California”—listen to it again), blue-eyed soul (“I Can’t Tell You Why”), Top 40 (“Witchy Woman”), romantic ballads (“Best of My Love”), classic teenage pop-rock tunes (“New Kid in Town”), bar-band rock (“Chug All Night”), epic album cuts (“The Sad Café”), FM-friendly rock (“Nightingale”), and oh yes, country-rock (“Desperado”). By doing so, they became the quintessential American band, their original configuration (Detroit street-kid, Southern moralist, Midwestern barfly, and country-western banjo player) an apt metaphor for the seventies generational hopes and dreams of a creatively integrated America.

Even so, the songs of the Eagles sound-tracked a time that refused to long nostalgically for the fervor, action, and relevance of the decade just ended. Rather, they reflected the emerging musical style of a seventies postwar America that looked forward to growing up in actual as opposed to imagined peacetime and a better way of living with, if not completely in, the mainstream. To that end, the first truly sexually liberated generation, coming of age in the relatively brief, gloriously guilt-free period of anything goes after the Pill and before AIDS, had no trouble identifying with a band that sang like angels and partied like devils.

Throughout their career, the Eagles rode high with privilege down rock’s treacherous fast lane. When the first end finally came, perhaps fittingly at the close of the seventies, they were, perhaps understandably, emotionally road-weary from their increasingly dark journey. It would take fourteen years for Henley and Frey to come into the morning light of their own day-after nineties and reconcile their personal differences. Once they did, they invited their flock to share in the celebration, and for however brief the moment, the world again belonged to them.

In the nineties, the music of the Eagles returned to the charts and minds of the now grown-up children of the seventies, its rebel yell having become more anthemic than moral. Still, even as it remained the best sound track of a collective flight of a generation’s youthful fancy, for the Eagles, it all too quickly became the same old story. For what had first made them so great was also what had always driven them so crazy, from their first downshift in the speed zone to the final gassy rev down memory lane. Inevitably, it seemed, no matter how fast they drove, they could never quite lose the reflection that tailed them in the rearview: the image of their own heated youth, already exhausted by their high-speed, chrome-dipped, supercharged, and eternally conflicted souls.

PART ONE

DESPERADOES

ONE

For young Donald Hugh Henley, growing up in the fifties in a five-thousand-dollar brick house on West Houston Street in Linden, Texas, meant that no matter how far you looked in any one direction, all you saw were low roofs, dry crops, and green John Deeres. And those hulking tractors didn’t qualify as real vehicles as far as Henley was concerned, just bigger, noisier farm tools. Now hot convertible V-8s, those were the chariots of the gods! As a boy, Henley was obsessed with the new breed of sleek, fin-tipped, pedal-heavy American cars. At least part of the attraction came from the isolation and freedom the front seat of a car could provide, a special privacy difficult to get at home or in the crowded confines of the local schoolhouse. “The car is a nice little capsule,” Henley once recalled. “Nobody bothers you in there and you have a sense of movement.” Every night in his small room, Henley pored over any auto rag he could get his hands on, while the portable picked up the skipwaves of New Orleans’s 50,000-watt WNOE-AM. The slicks showed him the latest grilles and dashboards out of Detroit, and the radio turned him on to the sounds of the Delta blues. One offered the vehicles of physical escape, the other the language of creative freedom. As alluring as each was, at the time, neither seemed even remotely within his limited reach.

Linden, Texas, just west of Highway 59, is not far from the border that separates the Lone Star State from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. It is a verdant little farm town with a population of about 2,400, whose inhabitants’ primary claim to fame before bragging rights as the birthplace of one of the Eagles was that it had given the world singer-songwriter and pioneering electric blues guitarist Aaron Thibeaux “T-Bone” Walker, and ragtime legend Scott Joplin.

Linden lies forty-two miles from Gilmer, the town where Henley was actually born. They still talk about the night of July 22, 1947, the date of his birth, an unseasonably cold day in July, racked with hail and tornadoes so powerful the entire roof blew off Upshur County’s school gymnasium. Henley recalls, “My father and my grandmother always used to tell the story about how they had to turn on the heater in the car when they went to the hospital to see me and my mother.”

C. J. Henley, Don’s father, was born in a small farming town in Hopkins County, in the northeast of Texas. The family name meant literally “where the hens lay.” “It’s what is called a ‘place name,’” according to Henley. “Some people are named for physical traits, some for places, in this case a field, a meadow, or any nesting place for wild birds. Henley is often spelled with an S at the end but we didn’t.” He adds, jokingly, “My ancestors must have been hatched in a field somewhere.”

C. J. worked at various jobs, including at an ice plant and a friend’s dry-cleaning establishment until he was drafted into the army. Just before he entered the service, at age thirty-five—relatively late for a Southerner—C. J. married Hughlene McWhorter. Hughlene, like C. J., was native Texan. She was a local schoolteacher until her first and only child was born. After World War II, C. J. went into business for himself, the owner-operator of an auto parts store, where he served as a NAPA jobber.

For every member of the family the waking day began when the sun rose and ended when it set. To Don, as he preferred being called, school offered little relief from the monotony of growing up in a small town buried in Texas farmland. Even at school, many of the day’s lessons, like the FFA (Future Farmers of America) elective, were taught with an eye to the business of farming, the profession some of the boys in Linden were likely to go into as soon as they were old enough to work the land.

By the time he entered high school, Henley had developed a strong resistance to that life. He wasn’t sure at this point what he wanted to do with his future, but he knew it wasn’t following in this burg’s fertilizer footprints. Still, opportunities to rebel proved scarce. For the most part, he played the dutiful son and joined the Future Farmers of America. To fulfill the requirements for his senior project, Henley tended an acre and a half of cucumbers, which required getting up at five each morning to tend, harvest, and eventually take them to the pickle processing plant. It was an experience he would later describe as “pure hell.”

One way he found to play out the romance of the self-styled rebel was by building his own go-cart from a mail-order kit. When he managed to get it up and running, he loved to gun down the two-lane blacktop from Linden to Marietta, something he often did until he got his first real car, “a forty-eight Dodge that was a hand-me-down from my father. It was like a tank. We slept in it, we threw up in it, we hunted in it. We did everything in that car. I snuck away one summer day and won a drag-racing contest in it, in the lowest horsepower class available, K-stock. I beat a fifty-two Chevy and won a trophy. Which I still have. I didn’t tell my parents until a year or two later.” Alone behind the wheel, imagining he was starring in his favorite TV show, Route 66, Henley proudly wore a “Rat Fink” T-shirt he got from an ad he answered in Car Craft magazine.

Somewhere between cucumbers and cars, Henley got the chance to learn to play a musical instrument. “I had piano lessons when I was a kid,” Henley says. “My father loved music; my mother loved music. They always had records on in the house. We listened to Glenn Miller, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo—all the World War II and postwar big band stuff. There was an old black lady who worked for my grandfather who was always singing spirituals, what they called ‘negro spirituals’ back then. My grandmother was always singing hymns.

“My father also listened to country music on the radio during his half-hour drive to work, back and forth, twice a day. He’d listen to KWKH out of Shreveport, The Louisiana Hayride, which, whenever I’d make the drive with him, is how I’d hear a lot of fifties country music: Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, Patsy Cline, all of it. Later on, of course, there was Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ricky Nelson.

“My mother used to buy me forty-fives. I had one of those little RCA players with the fat red spindle tops. I remember one of my favorite records back then was Bobby Freeman’s ‘Do You Want to Dance.’ Later on, of course, the Beatles came along, and that was it. I was into music before, but after they arrived everything changed. They were a major influence for me. Of course, still later it was the B’s—the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Beach Boys.”

Henley set his sights on the trombone after he was assigned the instrument by the high school band. He practiced until he realized he simply lacked the interest and gave it up in favor of something that didn’t require the development of a horn lip. Henley’s next instrument of expression was the drums. He was encouraged to play at home, especially when he showed some early ability. Because he had already demonstrated a propensity for making noise in a number of ways—one time by blowing up a cast-iron washtub in the backyard—his parents believed the six hundred dollars invested in a drum kit was a small price to keep a safe peace, if not exactly a hushed quiet, in the household.

Hughlene’s loving encouragement helped bring mother and child closer together. Their especially close relationship did not go unnoticed by Henley’s schoolmates, who took to making fun of the frail youngster. Somewhat shy, he was one of the less popular boys in his class. The redneck ostracism by the other boys fed Henley’s insecurities, and the need to display what he considered his “manliness” would continue throughout his life. As a childhood friend later recalled, “In some ways he never did leave [home] and never grew up. I think that’s why he was always punishing himself in one way or another, no matter how rich or famous he became. I thought he was tragic in his self-abuse—all the drugs and women, in particular his inability to be faithful. It’s not that he didn’t love women. He just had to constantly prove he could do whatever it was he wanted. He had to prove he still wasn’t that dorky kid.”

Henley practiced his drums every day, sometimes for hours, until he became good enough to play with a local group. In the summer of 1962, at the age of fifteen, he joined a pal’s Dixieland jazz combo.

Henley’s best childhood friend was schoolmate Richard Bowden, whose father was the town insurance salesman. Overweight, loud, known for the intricacy of his practical jokes, and extremely popular at school, young Bowden was in many ways Henley’s complete opposite. He found a way to break through Don’s loner wall by making him laugh. Henley loved the way Bowden’s schemes always played out so perfectly, and they soon became familiar figures around each other’s houses.

Henley and Bowden even shared a private language—something they called Bowdenese—a sort of reverse talk, not unlike Cockney, in which words and actions did not match. In Bowdenese, they deferred to an opposite, saying how brightly the sun was shining during a thunderstorm, or smiling when they weren’t happy. The two delighted in their articulated privacy, seeing in it some proof that they were in fact hipper and smarter than anyone else in their world.

It didn’t take Bowden long to assess his new pal’s family situation. “Mrs. Henley was a real fine lady,” he later recalled, “but she didn’t have control over Don. Not that he didn’t respect her; he just didn’t always do what she wanted. And then Don’s father would have to gently but firmly come down on him.”

It was, in fact, with Richard Bowden that Henley had his first real band experience. His friend’s dad, Elmer, had formed a Dixieland band with his son, Richie, and one of Richie’s school friends, Jerry Surratt. They asked Don to join, and it was that group that became the foundation for the Speeds. Bowden played a pretty good guitar, and when his father left the group, it gradually shifted to an instrumental country bar/club/frat band that played mostly Top 40 covers.

Henley remembers: “We were playing a lot of frat parties and clubs, mostly in Austin, Texas, and Dallas. Later on when I started to sing, rhythm and blues was really popular. The frat boys would all want James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding music, which I had to learn. That’s how I got hoarse, singing that kind of music four hours a night, trying to sound raspy until my voice blew out. Those singers, and later on John Lennon, were major influences on my singing style.”

A local acquaintance remembers, “It was a small town, a limited circuit: high school proms, bars; and everyone wanted a new band every week. In order to keep working, the guys kept changing their name. No one really remembered who they were or what they looked like, and every band played the same basic hit tunes of the day.”

Partly out of boredom and partly to separate themselves from the competition, the Speeds started playing their own songs, titles like “I’m Gone” and “God Is Where You Find Him.” However, for all the band’s intensity and purpose, the plan backfired when the boys realized that audiences were not particularly interested in songs they’d never heard before.

In 1964, the Speeds, or Four Speeds as they were sometimes called, both names an allusion to the road, not the drug, changed their name again, this time to Felicity. “In retrospect,” Henley observes, “it’s a stupid name, but we thought it was cool then. I’ve never known anybody named Felicity. We probably changed it in an effort to modernize, because we decided the Speeds, with its hot-rod allusion, was becoming a bit antiquated.” No one quite remembers where the name came from (one former member thinks it might have been the name of another member’s girlfriend), but none of them would ever forget the day they managed to snag a contract from a local independent producer and record one of their original tracks, a Henley composition called “Hurtin’.”

Without question it was the biggest thing that had ever happened to the band. In the early sixties independent record producer–label owner–distributors were rife in the South, bottom-feeders forever looking for the Next Big Thing to sell to the wheels up in New York City. They always made sure to sign the bands’ publishing rights as well, so that if any of them ever actually had a hit, the original label would keep a piece of the earnings pie, most often the biggest slice.

The recording contract seemed to elevate Henley’s unofficial position as the group’s songwriter and leader. Had it been up to him, he would have preferred to stay buried behind his kit. However, in spite of his shyness, it was soon decided by the others that Henley would be Felicity’s front man. According to Richard Bowden, “We eventually realized that [lead singers] were where it’s at, but nobody wanted to do it. So we put our names in a bowl and drew one out. Don lost and became our lead singer.”

Henley remembered the moment this way. “We all tried out for the lead vocalist’s job in Richard’s living room, and the consensus was that I was it. I was voted lead vocalist by all the other band members, including Elmer. It was as simple as that.” Although he may have preferred the anonymity, freedom, and power of being behind his kit, he accepted this upheaval for the good of the band. His shyness was what may have prevented him from coming out from behind the drum kit and standing up front.

After their “breakthrough” record deal, which failed to make any noise at the cash register, Felicity gradually morphed into Shiloh. It was then that Richard Bowden’s cousin Michael, whose family had moved from Dallas to Linden, joined the band. Michael recalled how he first met Henley: “When I was fourteen, I became friends with Don. He was in Felicity at that time, with my cousin Richard. I traveled with them on weekends, and when they became Shiloh, my cousin taught me to play bass. Richard had been the original bass player. When he asked me to join, I jumped at the chance.”

By now, it was clear to the others that Richard Bowden’s humor and Henley’s seriousness didn’t always go so well together. The jokester was no longer able to make the subject laugh so easily, and the subject found less and less that was funny about the jokester. Bowden didn’t understand where Henley’s new coolness came from. To Richard, music was about having fun, goofing off, and getting girls. To Don, playing in a band was serious business, requiring focus, rehearsal, and a certain degree of professionalism. In spite of his reluctance, and Bowden’s taunts, if the others wanted him to lead, that was exactly what he would do.

The deeper ties that bound them, however, proved stronger than their leader-of-the-band skirmishes. As with most tight small-town friendships formed in childhood, the only-child Henley and symbolic older brother Bowden’s relationship was close and meaningful to each of them, protected by an emotional shrink-wrap that allowed the others to look but not to touch. Despite, or perhaps because of, the creative and competitive bond, Richard and Don engaged in what amounted to a powerful, if fragile, sibling rivalry.

In 1965, at the age of eighteen, Henley graduated from high school, moved by himself one hundred miles due south, and enrolled at Stephen E Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, Texas. Years later, he would reflect upon the reasons he had decided to pursue his education. “[My father] saved twenty-five cents a day from the day I was born so that I could go to college. He had to quit school in the eighth grade, and he wanted me to have a better life than he had. I enjoyed school, or at least the academic part of it. I didn’t care for the social scene or even the general campus atmosphere.

“I was going with a beautiful Linden girl, Jana, my high school sweetheart, and we decided to go to the same school. She was gorgeous, and that caused me a lot of problems. I got picked on a lot by these large, macho rednecks who just couldn’t stand that a scrawny little guy like me had this really pretty girlfriend. We’d be at the Sonic, the local drive-in, getting a milkshake and a hot dog, and they’d pull up on her side of the car, roll down the window, and start saying stuff. Guys would ask her out all the time. It was one of the things that led me eventually to transfer to another school.

“I did, however, have several good English teachers at Stephen F. Austin. One in particular, Professor Robert Fusillo, was the first real bohemian I’d ever seen. He’d hitchhiked all over Europe and seemed completely out of place in what was essentially this Southern redneck campus. He wore big polka-dot shirts with puffy sleeves and had long hair. This was 1965, and you just didn’t do that at Stephen F. Austin State University. He and his wife were quite colorful and the talk of the school. He’d come to class in these outrageous clothes and lecture cross-legged on top of his desk. One day he told the class, ‘Your parents are asking me what your future career plans are. I know there’s a lot of pressure on you to decide.’ Then he said something I never forgot. ‘Frankly, if it takes you your whole life to find out what it is you want to do, you should take it. It’s the journey that counts, not the end of it. That’s when it’s all over.’”

These words of encouragement affected Henley deeply, representing an oasis in what was otherwise a seemingly endless desert of beer-soaked redneck hostility.

Drinking helped pass the time between formal inspirations, but what it came down to, as Henley later remembered, was that Stephen F. Austin State, like so much of Texas, was a place where “all you can do is dream. There wasn’t anything to do but sit and watch the sun sink in the west.”

Whenever he had some free time, Henley liked to drive to Dallas, or east across the Texas border to Shreveport, Louisiana, to check out the music scene. Shreveport, the legendary home of the “Louisiana Hayride” radio broadcast, was the closest city Henley could get to see name bands. It was in Shreveport in 1965 that he first experienced the melded sound of two new white-on-white American folk-influenced country-rock bands, the Byrds and the Dillards.

The music of the Byrds, especially, led by Jim (Roger) McGuinn, was a revelation to Henley. Their unique blend of country, pop, and rock produced a sound that reached out, grabbed Henley by his large ears, and lifted him above the more traditional Delta-based Southern rock and roll on which he’d grown up. “Most of the shows I saw were in Shreveport, because that was the closest city to my hometown where bands would perform. I saw a few shows in Dallas as well. I think, however, this one show was very important to me, a real seminal experience. The funny thing was the odd bill. It had, besides the Byrds and the Dillards, the Barbarians, I think, Herman’s Hermits, and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, who blew everybody away. They really kicked some ass.”

It was a show he would never forget, one that helped clarify his sense of musical direction. He was convinced that now he too could have a place in that world. He wasn’t sure quite how to get there from here, but one thing he knew, for him Nacogdoches was nowhere.

That fall, Henley decided to transfer to North Texas State University. “I’d had enough and decided to change schools. There were a lot more longhairs at North Texas and a lot more serious musicians. People there were more interested in politics and art. It was just more of the kind of school I wanted to go to.”

It wasn’t the only change Henley made. Not long after arriving on campus at North Texas, Henley broke up with Jana. “She wanted to get married, and I didn’t. I had plans, I eventually wanted to go to California and give it a shot. The problem for her, a girl growing up in Texas at that time, was if you weren’t married by the time you were twenty-one, you were considered to be an old maid. She was great, there was nothing wrong with her, or me. We were just headed in different directions.”

At the age of twenty, Don Henley was already the veteran of a local rock band that had somehow failed to change anything, let alone the world, let alone his world. The extent of his rebellion had thus far been limited to the length of his hair: considered long, although it barely touched his ears; the amount of beer he could guzzle: pints; and the desire to make music: strong. The summer of 1967, the celebrated “Summer of Love,” introduced Henley to two other outside influences. The first was the revolutionary Beatles album Sgt. Pepper. The second was the drug of choice for hearing what was between its grooves, LSD. Living off campus in, of all places, the Eagle Apartments in Dallas, Henley remembers, “I bought the album right after it came out. I had some friends in Dallas who were a little more worldly than I was. They were mostly in bands, and one of them gave me the acid. I went into the bedroom, turned on the black light, listened to the album, and watched my face turn into about fifty different people. It was fun, though.”

Henley kept up his studies, did well enough to make the dean’s list, and along the way compiled a set of literary heroes whose writings would deeply affect him. He was especially drawn to the protagonists of novelist Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure) and to the ideas of essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Years later, Henley would tell an interviewer that it was “Emerson’s essay on self-reliance which helped give me the nerve to be a songwriter.” Among his favorite passages of Emerson’s was one that cautioned, Beware what you set your heart upon. For it surely shall be yours.

Kenny Rogers had been born and raised in Texas and played in a number of local bands until 1964, when he joined one of the many touring incarnations of the New Christy Minstrels. Two years later, he quit the group and, with fellow Minstrel Mike Settle, formed the country-rock band the First Edition. The group had a series of soft country hits that managed to cross over to the national pop charts and should have established Rogers as a major star. Instead, he experienced the frustration of finding himself dismissed by rock fans who found him too country (and faux at that) and country fans who found him too pop.

In 1967, Rogers left in favor of a career as a producer. His goal was to develop a stable of crossover groups he could produce and send out on the road. Rogers took his cue from the franchised Christy Minstrels and an old friend, former country singer and present First Edition producer Jimmy Bowen.

Bowen, a one-hit country-singing wonder of the fifties (“I’m Stickin’ with You”), had gone on to become a millionaire producing records for Frank Sinatra’s Warner-distributed boutique label, Reprise. His work on “Strangers in the Night” and “Everybody Loves Somebody” was credited with reviving the sagging recording careers of Sinatra and Dean Martin. Eventually, Bowen left Reprise to start his own label and cut a deal with Rogers to discover and produce bands that could play the popular hot new sound of country rock. Rogers began listening to unsigned demos and visiting small clubs whenever possible. After one year, hundreds of tapes, and endless visits to the gin mills with live music that dotted the small towns of the Southwest, he believed he had finally found the sound he was looking for in a tough little Dallas joint, the Studio Club, that featured a band called Shiloh.

“This was still when long hair was considered to be something wild and outrageous,” Henley recalls. “Longhairs were considered by many in Texas to be dirty communists or criminals or some kind of gay perverts.… Anyway, it was the sixties, we played Dallas a lot, we were continually persecuted for the way we looked, and we had previously been in a couple of encounters where we barely escaped without getting hurt very badly. We became afraid, and justifiably so, when we would go into restaurants after shows, around midnight or one in the morning… and it was really rough. We would get a lot of catcalls and whistles. We would be stared at and laughed at the entire time we were eating. There were often threats made. When we would leave the restaurant, people would follow us out to the van sometimes and try to start fights.

“One night, I don’t know whose it was, I think it was registered, we brought along a gun in the glove compartment of the fifty-five Chevy that belonged to original band member Jerry Surratt. We were going down Stemmons Freeway in Dallas; Jerry was speeding and was pulled over. The cops found the gun in the glove compartment and they took us to jail. The Dallas police were quite intimidating, making fun of us. They’d walk by and yell to other cops that they’d brought us to the wrong jail, we should have been put in the women’s jail, that kind of thing. Because of some obscure Texas law that was still on the books, the ‘saddlebag law’ dating back to the eighteen hundreds, we got a break. In essence, if a man rode on horseback from one county to another, he could carry a weapon. They had to let us go.”

After completing three semesters at North Texas, Henley went home when his mother told him that C. J. had developed heart disease and arteriosclerosis and was forced to sell his business. Henley felt the need to give something back by helping to care for and spend as much time with him as he could before his father’s health worsened, which it inevitably would. The one good thing that came out of this was the time it allowed for Henley to play more regularly with his band, and to be there the night Rogers first came to check them out.

The way Michael Bowden remembers it, Rogers’s visit was the result of a chance meeting. “Jerry Surratt, a member of our band who played the trumpet and keyboards, happened to be out looking for clothes when he met Kenny. Jerry got into a conversation with him about the band, and he seemed interested. Jerry invited him to hear the group play, and he came back that afternoon to hear a sound check. He liked us and came by again that night. We all struck up a friendship, which eventually evolved into our cutting a couple of songs for him in Memphis. One of them eventually became our first single, something I believe was called ‘Jennifer,’ which Don sang lead on and Jerry played keyboards.” Rogers thought “Jennifer,” about a Civil War veteran coming home from the front to his girl, was good enough to earn the band a quick recording trip that February to Los Angeles, which led nowhere. When they returned to Linden, a tragic accident broadsided their fate and altered their destiny.

They had been rehearsing in a small vacant building in Linden that had housed various enterprises over the years, including a restaurant, a gas station, and a church. The sessions included a bit of partying and occasional breaks when the boys would get on their dirt bikes and, just for the fun of it, leave a little rubber in the parking lot. One afternoon, Surratt took off on his bike, rode straight into the path of an oncoming car, and was killed instantly.

Henley remembers: “We grew up together in this small town, we were in the high school marching band, the high school stage band, we all won awards and stood out. Surratt was a world-class, brilliant trumpet player. We spent a lot of time together, Bowden, Surratt, and me, riding dirt bikes, driving around in our cars, playing in Shiloh. It was just a freak accident, what happened that day. We could all see that car coming down the road. Before he knew it, it was right there. Surratt was just kind of puttering across the highway. The kid who hit him happened to be a friend of ours. He wasn’t looking straight ahead, but over to where we were. He’d seen all these motorcycles and the Kenny Rogers tour bus. Surratt’s mom and sister were there and saw the whole thing. The car just picked him up on the hood and threw him over into the bushes.

“That changed everything.”

Henley and the rest of the band took Surratt’s death hard. Michael Bowden remembers: “Jerry was killed just before ‘Jennifer’ was released. Two or three months passed, and although it didn’t go anywhere, we had to reorganize, to think about if we even wanted to carry on. We all decided it was the best thing to do. Don returned to North Texas State University, where he asked Jim Ed Norman, a keyboard player he was friends with, to audition for the band. Jim came to Linden for a weekend, and we went back to our rehearsal building to try him out. We liked him; he was a good guy, a fine keyboard player, and a good rhythm guitarist.”

“After Surratt was killed,” Henley says, “I recruited Jim Ed Norman, who’d lived two rooms down from me at school, and another guy named Al Perkins, a pedal steel player. We were really getting into country at that point, heavily influenced by the Burrito Brothers and Poco. We found out about Perkins from some friends of ours in a band in Abilene who played the same circuits we did. One of them was Tommy Nixon, who became a good friend of Glenn and still works for the Eagles. Anyway, it took two talented guys to replace Jerry.”

Rogers, meanwhile, who’d remained in California, kept in touch with the band by telephone for another year while the boys continued to work on their music in Texas. According to Jim Ed Norman, “Kenny, after making a deal with Jimmy Bowen, was essentially going to be the group’s producer. He took Shiloh’s contract to Bowen’s newly formed, Los Angeles–based Amos Records. With Bowen’s approval, Rogers finally brought Shiloh to Los Angeles.”

In June of 1970, they finally got the call to come back to Los Angeles and begin work on an album. Although he was excited about the career break, Henley had mixed emotions over making the actual move. On the one hand, he sensed his vision starting to take shape. He had always wanted to move to L.A., and now he had the opportunity. On the other, he hated leaving his sick father behind. His being an only child meant that the burden of caring for C. J. would fall fully and only on his mother. He struggled between the pull of his dream and the grip of his guilt. In the end, after much agonizing, the dream won.

So it was, then, that early one morning in 1970, the boys packed their few belongings and headed out to find rock and roll glory in the City of Angels. Taking Michael Bowden with him, Henley made the journey west in his ’67 SS 396 Chevelle. Richard Bowden followed in his Buick Riviera with his wife, Shane, beside him. Jim Ed Norman manned the Ford van and the U-Haul hooked behind full of the band’s equipment.

The others may have seen it as just another gig, with a trip to California added to the mix. For Henley, it meant nothing less than deliverance to the Promised Land, the chance to leave behind forever the Southern-bully rednecks and the Jesus-freak, no-brain crazies, the loneliness and the loonies; to wave a middle-fingered adios to “the Baptists and the Methodists and the Southern purgatory they laid on me when I was a kid and scared the holy fuck out of me so I couldn’t sleep at night because I thought I would die and go to hell.”

Instead he headed West.