“Glenn Frey said it best when he said we ‘created a monster with Hotel California, and it ate us’”: Don Felder on the making of the Eagles’ The Long Run

Don Felder plays a white double-neck onstage with the Eagles in 1979.

After Hotel California, the Eagles’ landmark 1976 album, saw them rise from country rockers to just plain rockers, Don Felder and his bandmates should have been on top of the world – but all was not well in paradise.

The warm smell of colitas was not rising up through the air, and there was a distinct lack of cool wind in the band’s collective hair. Exhaustion, infighting, drugs and alcohol – basically the tropes that were supposed to drag down rock bands, as per Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous – had all but derailed the Eagles.