INTERVIEW: Don Felder on his American rock ‘n’ roll life
Photo: Don Felder is a rock legend who has collaborated with a number of high-profile musicians for his latest solo album. Photo courtesy of Michael Helms / Provided by press rep with permission.
Famed guitarist Don Felder has lived a life that has been developed and nourished by the sounds of rock ‘n’ roll. Whether it was attending the Woodstock music festival when he was a young man or playing in the Eagles or carving out successful solo records, the musician has learned from the greats, become one of the greats and passed on his knowledge to future greats.
Evidence of his rock mastery is on full display on his new solo album American Rock ‘N’ Roll, featuring such tunes as “Charmed,” “Falling in Love,” “Hearts on Fire” and “Limelight.” On the record, Felder is joined by a motley crew of impressive rockers, everyone from Slash to Peter Frampton to Sammy Hagar, Bob Weir and Joe Satriani. This is a collaborative dream, a rock lover’s prayer fulfilled.
“It came to me originally by the album title track,” Felder said in a recent phone interview. “I had that idea a few years ago and never really got down to the point of developing it into a full song, but it was sort of like a concept of doing a rockumentary, an audio version of the history of different rock ‘n’ roll artists starting at Woodstock.”
Woodstock was a seminal experience for Felder. He didn’t play the iconic music festival (his time in the Eagles was a few years down the road), but he was in attendance, jamming out to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
“I was living in upstate New York in a little town called Dover Plains, which was a couple hours away from the Woodstock festival,” he remembers. “A friend of mine had what was called a Travelall. It was made by International Harvester, which used to build tractors, but it was the predecessor to the Suburban. It was a really boxy, ugly-looking thing, but it had that big back area like a giant station wagon in the back. So we threw a mattress in the back of that and an ice chest with a bunch of drinks and some food, and just drove over there not knowing what the heck it was going to be, but at least we had a place to sleep.”
The Travelall actually turned out to be fortuitous because Felder and his friend had a dry place to escape the torrential rains that plagued much of Woodstock (and made those unforgettable mud slides).
“We had the foresight to actually plan, and we just drove over there and parked,” Felder said with a laugh. “We were there a day or a day and a half before the festival started, got a place really close to the walking entrance to the festival, and so anytime it started getting weird, we just bowed out and left the tailgate of the truck open so we could still hear everything and have a little shelter from the pouring rain.”
To this day, he has fond memories of seeing Hendrix, Santana, CSNY and Joplin. To him, that festival represented the largest rock ‘n’ roll explosion of all time, and it still has no parallel, even 50 years after peace and love descended upon Bethel, New York, where the festival was held.
“I think that radiated worldwide and resonated with millions and millions and millions of people, and as a result of that event, which is yet to be equaled in its size, scope and impact, a lot of people through the decades were originally influenced by those artists, by Hendrix or Santana or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young or Janis Joplin,” he said. “[The new album is] kind of saluting not only the people that originally started the rock ‘n’ roll explosion at that level, but then the people that were influenced by it and went on to become rock ‘n’ roll icons themselves as a result of what happened in 1969. So it was a concept, and then when I got down to tracking it and making the track, I wanted it to start sounding like the ’70s.”
So Felder started thinking back to that bygone era of the 1970s and his time in the Eagles. He remembers the band co-headlining a tour with Fleetwood Mac. One night the Eagles would open, while the other night Mick Fleetwood and company would open. To honor that time in his life, Felder called up Fleetwood, still a good friend.
“I wanted to start the record with him playing and kind of set that feel and set that tonality for the song, and then about halfway through the song, Chad Smith [of the Red Hot Chili Peppers] comes in,” Felder said, almost like explaining the birth of an operatic composition. “It feels like a 5,000-pound bull on steroids when he plays. It’s so intense and so loud and just so aggressive, much like the Foo Fighters and the Chili Peppers and all those people in later decades that developed their own style of playing and sound. So I wanted it to musically migrate and mutate from the late ’60s / early ’70s all the way through the track musically.”
This sense of mutation and collaboration continued with the final verse of the song, which eventually became the title track on American Rock ‘N’ Roll. When Felder thought about the end of the tune, he had one band in mind: Guns N’ Roses. So what does a famous guitarist do? Well, he calls Slash on the phone.
“Slash is one of my favorite younger guitar players, so when we got to that verse, I thought if I could get Slash to come in and just play on that verse, do a couple of his iconic recognizable Slash licks,” he said. “So we reached out. He lives not far from me and dropped in one day with a Les Paul that we plugged into one of my own old Marshall 51-watt shortstacks, and he said, ‘Well, where do you want me to play?’ I said, ‘Well, where do you want to play?’ He said, ‘Just start at the top,’ so we let him start playing from the top all the way down, and I think he made three complete passes, which gave us a lot of material to select from. We went in and edited it down to what we thought would be the best appropriate places for him to show up, mostly in that verse that he plays, and we kind of share the solo together in the middle. It was a great project to come together.”
Because this first collaboration went so well, Felder continued the energy and sought out others to make the full album come to life. This style was in stark contrast to his last recording effort, which was Road to Forever, an album in which he played all but one guitar part — acoustic, electric, steel, slide. For this one, he wanted to up the ante.
“[Road to Forever] came out really great I think musically, but it really lacked that fire and spontaneity that you get when you sit down with somebody and play off of them and with them,” Felder said. “I wrote this stadium anthem rock song called ‘Rock You,’ and I wanted to have another rock singer as well as myself on it. I kept thinking who can I get to sing on this album. I’ve known Sammy Hagar since the ’80s, and we’ve done charity work together. When we do shows, I play my version of heavy metal, and he plays his version of heavy metal. I called him, and he said, ‘Yeah, come on up to my studio, man. I’ll gladly sing on that for you.’ So I hopped on a plane and flew up to San Francisco. His studio is in Sausalito, and we set up a vocal mic. And in less than an hour he and I were trading verses off on this little song called ‘Rock You.’ Satriani keeps his gear in the back of Sammy’s studio, and we got him to come in and set up. I set up with a guitar, and we did the two guitar parts, solos, that you hear throughout the ending of that song and worked out all the harmonies and traded off the solos. It was just fun standing there toe to toe with Satriani.”
The collaborators kept stacking up: Richie Sambora, David Paich, Steve Porcaro, Alex Lifeson and Orianthi. “It wasn’t intended to start off being a celebrity guest record, but it was just so much fun,” he said. “I really enjoyed it, so I kept doing it.”
The end result of the recording session is a rock ‘n’ roll party, Felder said. The songs sound like the guitarist invited a bunch of friends over for some good times, experimenting their way through vocals and guitar licks, which is precisely what happened.
He was also clever in how he decided which songs were appropriate for which musician. For example, in his estimation, “Little Latin Lover” and “The Way Things Have to Be” are not songs intended for the guitar playing of Slash.
“I’m certain he would have played a great job, but he really wasn’t in my opinion the right player,” Felder said. “And that was the most fun part was knowing how all these guys play and finally being able to sit down with these songs and go, ‘You know, Frampton would be perfect on this song. He’s got this way of playing this guitar through a Leslie speaker that just sounds very ethereal and beautiful and almost angelic in nature.’ So I called Peter up. He and I toured together and did a bunch of shows with Frampton’s Guitar Circus. I inducted him into the Nashville Hall of Fame. He inducted me into the Nashville Hall of Fame. I’ve known him a long time, a great player and a really sweet man, and so I flew back to Nashville and went in his studio.”
When they reconnected, there was almost an hour of telling jokes and catching up. Then they sat down, set up the Leslie, and 20 minutes later the recording was finished. Felder said it wasn’t like pulling teeth at all; it was easy and enjoyable.
“We had fun in the studio making this record, and I have made records that have been laborious, just so detailed, so difficult,” he said. “You struggle through it, that by the time you’re done, you’re like, oh thank God, that’s over. I didn’t want to do that. I won’t make a record that way anymore. It’s too hard. Whether I’m doing it by myself, with other guests or anything like that, it’s gotta be fun, or I don’t want to do it. This record turned out to be a lot of fun, very inspiring for me and challenging for me too as a player. I had to sit with Satriani and Slash and all these great players, and go toe to toe, and hold my own.”
No doubt his collaborators were thinking the same thing about Felder.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Don Felder’s new album is called American Rock ‘N’ Roll, and he is currently touring the United States, with concerts scheduled in Texas, Maryland, Pennsylvania and other states. Click here for more information and tickets.
