Don Felder was the new guitarist in Eagles when the group's fourth album, One of These Nights, was released 50 years ago in May.
But he wasn't thinking like one when he took his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard in hand to record his searing electric guitar solo for the title track, which Felder considers "the most deliberate solo I did" with the band.
"If you listen to that guitar solo, it's really an alto saxophone solo," Felder, who'd joined Eagles full-time the previous year, after playing as a guest on 1974's On the Border album. Approaching the "One of These Nights" solo, he remembers, "I kept listening to this track, and it wasn't like rock and roll; it was almost like R&B at the time.
"So I kept thinking, 'You can't go in there with some screaming, shredding guitar solo. I don't shred, anyway; I think shredding is like talking a foreign language to somebody at 10-times the normal speed of sound, and it goes right over your head. You can't remember anything, right?
"I kept thinking of David Sanborn," he says. Sanborn, who passed away in 2024, was the go-to alto sax player for countless artists across the genres. "David and I were really good friends; he was living in Malibu and we'd go fishing and hang out. I kept thinking, What would Sanborn play?
"So what I did, it's really a horn part; it's got places where a sax player would stop and take a breath. It's an alto sax solo that I play on guitar."
"One of These Nights," which was credited as a Don Henley-Glenn Frey co-write, was the first single from the album that bears his name and continued Eagles' number one streak on the Billboard Hot 100, following its predecessor, "Best of My Love," to the summit.
In the liner notes to the 2003 compilation The Very Best Of, the late Frey even described it as "a breakthrough song. It is my favorite Eagles record. If I had to pick one, it wouldn't be 'Hotel California,' it wouldn't be 'Take It Easy.' For me, it would be 'One of These Nights.'"
Recorded at Criteria studio in Miami, "One of These Nights" was among the first tracks put to tape for the album. As Felder explains, the guitar solo wasn't his only contribution to the song.
"We were in the studio in Miami, getting ready to start recording tracks for the album, and Randy Meisner got snowed in in Scottsbluff, Nebraska,” Felder says. Meisner, the group's bassist at the time, was a native of Scottsbluff.
"So we're sitting in the studio and we've got Glenn playing piano, trying to write some stuff for that song, and Don comes out and starts playing drums and Bernie (Leadon) picks up a guitar and I decided I’m gonna play bass, because it would sound weird without a bass.
"So I start playing and write that bass line for the song," he adds, singing the loping pattern that's so prominent in the track's opening. "When Randy came I had to sit down and show him how to play it. I usually write the bass parts on all my songs, but I don't play them. I know the pocket — how it's gonna work with the other tracks and the other guitar ideas. I wrote the bass part for 'Hotel California' and taught him that one, too."
The "One of These Nights" single, released three weeks before the album in 1975, is also notable for its B-side, "Visions," which was Felder's only recorded lead vocal during his tenure with Eagles.
"I was told by Bernie that if you want to write songs with Don and Glenn, don't write lyrics, don't write melodies," Felder recalls. "So I had written that track as a demo. Don Henley was kind enough to help write lyrics for me, and I went in and sang it. I had not sung a lot in my career — some, but not a lot."
One of These Nights became Eagles' most successful album to date. It was the group's first album to reach number one on the Billboard 200 chart and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It did net the band its first-ever Grammy Award when "Lyin' Eyes," the second single, won for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
For Felder, One of These Nights also stands as his first album as a full-fledged Eagle. A Gainesville, Florida native who knew Leadon from high school and from playing in early bands together, Felder also gave music lessons to a fledgling Tom Petty at a local music shop and was tutored in slide guitar playing himself by Duane Allman. He moved to Manhattan and Boston for a while before moving to Los Angeles in 1973 at Leadon's encouragement. Felder played as an accompanist for David Blue and then Crosby and Nash before accepting Eagles' offer during early 1974.
"We'd been out for most of the year touring together," when the One of These Nights sessions began, Felder says. "I was accepted as part of the band by then." The only downside, however, was Leadon's increasing dissatisfaction with the group's music direction, which on One of These Nights moved more into a mainstream rock-pop from the country-flavored rock focus of the group's first three albums. It led to Leadon leaving the band after touring to support One of These Nights, with Joe Walsh brought in as his replacement.
"When everybody wanted to start moving away from the country sound into what Top 40 radio would play, Bernie was resistant," Felder says. "I was close with Bernie, and he was such a brilliant country music artist — flat-top guitar, five-string banjo, pedal steel, mandolin, B-string bender. All those guitar parts on the first couple of Eagles albums are Bernie playing Telecaster with a B-string bender, just brilliant.
"So there was friction between Bernie and Don and Glenn, and I was stuck in the middle, to tell you the truth. I would sit with Bernie, as a friend, and listen to him and try to give him advice that, ‘This is a great thing. We’re on the launch pad here. We've got to just hang in there, and you can do a solo record, do all country if you want.’ But he was like, ‘No, this is what we've got to do…’
“So it was difficult watching a very close friend, who I'd known a long time, sour on the direction musically, sour on the fact he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, musically, in the band any more."
Eagles soared to even greater heights, of course, with Hotel California and its Felder-written title track, released in late 1976. The group would continue for another four years, breaking up in 1980 but regrouping during 1984. Felder was fired during February 2001, and more than six years later he settled lawsuits against the band and its organization for undisclosed terms. Later in 2007 he published a revealing memoir, Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974-2001) that he says now "was never intended to be a book.
"I was getting back in control of my whole life and was going through the cathartic process of daily meditations every morning...and turning it all into a book," Felder explains. "It was just the story of my life. I had to find out where I came from and how I got to where I am today and resolve that before I went forward carrying a lot of negative baggage. I thought it was a healthy way to address all of that, for my own well-being."
Speaking of health, Felder made headlines in February when he nearly passed out onstage due to dehydration, while performing the Eagles' classic "Tequila Sunrise" on the Rock Legends Cruise. The guitarist recovered quickly and was even joking about the incident later that night.
Felder is returning to One of These Nights territory this year on his upcoming fourth solo album, The Vault — Fifty Years of Music. Comprised of songs built from ideas dating throughout his career, it's led off by "Move On," a slide guitar-featuring track that he originally wrote during those 1974 recording sessions — which Henley dubbed "Slide On," although Eagles ultimately did not pick the song. The 11-track album — which includes a new version of Felder's title track for the 1981 animated fantasy film Heavy Metal — comes out May 23, and Felder will hit the road with Styx and the Kevin Cronin Band for the Brotherhood of Rock Tour, kicking off May 28in Greenville, South Carolina, and running through August 24 in Milwaukee.
"Old-school guitar players can play beautiful solos. But sometimes they’re not so innovative with the actual sound.” Steven Wilson redefines the modern guitar solo on 'The Overview' by putting tone first
“Somebody's getting paid, so why shouldn't it be the guy who sat down and wrote 'Yesterday'?” Paul McCartney fought against looser AI copyright laws in the U.K. Now he's standing up to similar measures in the U.S.
