Call him Forrest Gump, if you want (or Zelig), but Don Felder played with Duane Allman, Stephen Stills, Tom Petty and Bernie Leadon — all before he left his native Gainesville, Florida.
Though he’d worked with the jazz-rock band Flow, singer-songwriter David Blue and Crosby & Nash during the early ’70s, Felder really made his name when he joined the Eagles in 1974. He stayed with the group until his controversial dismissal in 2001, co-writing “Hotel California” as well as “Victim of Love,” “Visions” (on which he also sang lead), “Those Shoes,” “Too Many Hands” and “The Disco Strangler.”
On his own, meanwhile, he’s released four solo albums — including the all-star guest-packed American Rock ’n’ Roll in 2019 and last year’s The Vault — Fifty Years of Music — and contributed to the soundtracks of Heavy Metal and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He also published a bestselling memoir, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974–2001), in 2008.
Right now you can find Felder on the road, opening shows for the Guess Who — with Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman — into August. During a tour break, he took a few minutes to tour us through his famous guitar friends and their impact on his life and career.
Duane Allman
“Duane and Gregg used to live during the summer in Daytona Beach with their mom. There were no gigs, really, for local bands in Gainesville except fraternity parties and this one bar named Dub’s Steer Room, which me and [Tom] Petty and everybody played at one time or another. So we would go to Daytona Beach with my band with Bernie [Leadon] and play on the pier. I was in Rufus Thomas’s backup band one weekend, and we would play little dance clubs for teens and that kind of stuff.
“And then we met Duane and Gregg. We went into this bar after we finished playing and listened to them play. They had a drummer named Maynard who was missing his front teeth, and he played smiling, with no teeth. I don’t remember who was playing bass. But they were amazing. They were by far superior to every other band that I had ever seen live.
“So we became friends. When they got off work and we got off work, we’d go over to a little deli and have eggs at one o’clock in the morning, eat breakfast before we went to bed. And because Bernie and I lived in Gainesville, we’d have to drive over and do a show and then drive back that night because we couldn’t afford a hotel. So quite frequently we’d go over to the Allmans’ house after we ate breakfast and crash there.
“One day we were there, Duane picked up a slide; he was sitting on the floor playing slide with this Coricidin bottle. I said, ‘How do you do that? You’ve got to show me how to do that!’ I’d never played slide before, so he showed me the basic tuning and how to pull down on the fifths and slowly bend a little flat on the minor third and those sorts of really basic things. But he was light years ahead of any and everybody I’d ever seen play slide.
“Slide, to me, is a lot nastier than fretted guitar. It gets really raw, and the only other slide I’d ever seen played was some old African American blues players that just tuned to open tuning and would be playing not just notes but mostly just sliding around. Duane took it to a whole other level of it being melodic, where you could copy or repeat parts — it wasn’t just somebody playing a million notes. He’d taken the sound of that instrument and made it actually his own, with all new sounds and feelings and everything.
They had a yearly battle of the bands in the parking lot, and I have the distinct honor of having lost three battles of the bands to the Allman Brothers.“
— Don Felder
“So I never really tried to copy because, like I said, he was light years ahead of me, and I play a lot simpler, more melodic stuff, because I’m not a shredder. You should just be able to take the skills you learn from other people and make your own stamp, like your own signature, the way Duane did.
“We were in battles of the bands in Gainesville; there was this store, Lipham Music, that provided any band in central Florida with drums, bass, PA, mics, guitars, amps, anything — on credit. They had a yearly battle of the bands in the parking lot, and I have the distinct honor of having lost three battles of the bands to the Allman Brothers.
“It didn’t matter what name they were playing under; I remember the last one, it was the Allman Brothers Band with Dickey Betts, the whole band, and they were just ferocious. They were on fire. Then they disappeared; they just took off, and the next thing I knew it was At Fillmore East, and they were off and running.”
Stephen Stills
“The drummer in one of my first bands, the Continentals, met Stephen at a frat party and told us about him. I think Stephen Stills had gone to some military high school and hated it and went AWOL and showed up in Gainesville and got enrolled in Gainesville High School for his senior year. I was 14 or 15, something like that, and my mom would drive us around, because we didn’t have driver’s licenses or cars, to do these little gigs, like playing for women’s tea parties where they had finger sandwiches and cups of tea and they’d be discussing flower gardens, and we’d be sitting in the corner with two acoustic guitars, playing and singing, kind of putting some music in the room.
“And in that band, the Continentals, we were playing fraternity parties, and we would play Gatorland, which was a bar right on the corner across the field from the University of Florida football field, and on Saturdays right after home football games that bar would just fill up, packed, hundreds of people jammed in there to drink and party and celebrate or whatever it was. So we’d play that and Dub’s Steer Room and a bunch of sleazy little clubs around town.
“Stephen was never a shredder, but he had great charisma, and his voice was great. He was in the Gainesville High School choir — I was, too. He was very enthusiastic, and as soon as he graduated Stephen left Gainesville and moved out to California. The next time I saw or heard from him it was Woodstock and it was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on stage. I was, ‘Oh my God, that’s Stephen! What’s he doing up there?! Holy cow!’ Then I went, ‘Hell, if he can do it, I can do it.’ It gave me renewed enthusiasm about pursuing music as a full-time career.”
Bernie Leadon
“A couple weeks after Stephen moved to California I had gotten on a Greyhound bus and rode up to Lake City, probably an hour or an hour and a half, and I played a little women’s tea party by myself. I played acoustic and sang for the gals, and I came back and got off the bus and expected my mom to pick me up.
“And this guy comes walking up and he saw I had a guitar and said, ‘Are you Don Felder?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I went to the music store and asked who the best guitar player was in Gainesville, and they said you. Then I called your mom and asked if it would be okay if I picked you up and brought you home.’
æNow, that was a long time ago; you’d never let your kid get in a stranger’s car and drive off today. So I went, ‘Okay,’ and put my guitar in the back.
“Bernie had a beautiful Martin guitar and he had his banjo back there, too. So he comes into my house and my bedroom and sits down and just plays all this amazing flatpicking stuff. Then he takes out his banjo and just slays me with his talent on that, too. So we put together two bands — he was in the Continentals after Stephen left, which later became the Maundy Quartet, which was much more English-sounding to go with the British Invasion.
He kept calling me: ‘What are you doing in New York? The music business isn’t happening there — move to California!’ Finally I took his advice.”
— Don Felder
“Then I went and got a really good Martin and we had a bluegrass band that would play during the week at barbecues and stuff like that. We had a guy who worked for the Florida Fish and Game Commission who had a plane that could land on lakes, so we would fly all over the place in this little state plane — which was probably unauthorized use — and go play these little barbecues and stuff around central Florida, then fly back and go home.
“So Bernie was a really key person in my music development. He really broadened my country and bluegrass skills beyond what I ever knew, because when I met him I was more into electric guitars and rock and roll than flatpicking and banjo. But since we had those two bands I was forced to learn how to do other stuff, which I’m grateful for now, of course.
“It turned out as soon as Bernie graduated he moved to California, too; he was from California originally and just did not really like Gainesville. The next thing I know he’s in the Flying Burrito Brothers and working with Gram Parsons and really worked his way into that California deal out there. He kept calling me: ‘What are you doing in New York? The music business isn’t happening there — move to California! It’s happening here.’ Finally I took his advice and packed up and drove across the country.”
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