When Kenny Rogers Calls
For years, fans and critics alike have debated the country-music credentials of the Eagles. The band started off with a healthy dose of twang but definitely moved toward rock and roll later, especially with the addition of heavy-rock guitarist Joe Walsh. But later, when Nashville—America’s mecca for all things country—embraced the Eagles in the ’90s with an all-star tribute album, Don Henley returned the favor by duetting with country starlet Trisha Yearwood (also the wife of Garth Brooks), and the “country or rock” debate fired up all over again.
Make no mistake: Nashville and its inner circle of writers and artists are typically reluctant to allow rockers into their Music City midst. Outsiders are treated with skepticism and disdain (ask Shania Twain!), unless, of course, they really do have some serious country credibility.
That Henley was the Eagle who scored a hit with a bona-fide country star should be no surprise, though, to anyone familiar with the singing drummer’s geographical and musical background.
Deep in the Heart of Texas
He may have composed some of the greatest lyrics about the West Coast for “Hotel California,” but Henley was no Angeleno. He was born and raised Southern, in Linden, in the Piney Woods of deepest Northeast Texas. Not that being raised in Texas necessarily ensures a country music sensibility, but Henley’s musical influences, from a very young age, must surely have played some part in his chord and harmony sense, as well as his method of storytelling. In July 2013, Henley told Chuck Yarborough of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “My native Northeast Texas was a musical, cultural crossroads—a sort of twilight zone where the Old South meets the West. As a kid, I was exposed to a great variety of musical styles: There was bluegrass from the Ozarks, blues from Texas and Louisiana, gospel, country & western, western swing; there was the music of New Orleans coming up over the airwaves.”
Radio Days
Henley grew up in a fairly modest house in small-town Linden, a place with a fine musical heritage that includes Scott Joplin, country crooner par excellence George Jones, and blues heavyweight T-Bone Walker.
Henley’s father had amassed a large collection of big-band records, featuring the likes of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, from his time with the U.S. Army. Henley’s grandma on his mother’s side lived with the family and liked nothing better than sitting on the porch singing hymns and old-time classic pop songs of the day.
Henley’s father was a huge country-music fan and an avid listener to the legendary Louisiana Hayride, one of the most influential broadcast machines in country-music and rock-and-roll history. The Hayride was broadcast across twenty-eight states from KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana, throughout the 1950s. Henley and family listened religiously to the country notables of the 1950s—artists at the top of the charts like George Jones, Kitty Wells, Hank Williams, Slim Whitman, Faron Young, and Patsy Cline.
Don Henley (top right) on the back cover of the Shiloh album.
Influences
It was on the Louisiana Hayride that a young Memphis singer named Elvis Presley made his radio performance debut in 1954. Presley’s own fusion of country music, the blues, and the new sound of rock and roll would have a dramatic effect on popular music. Like the Beatles, Elvis made a deep impression on Henley; later on, it was Henley’s ability to reimagine such childhood musical voices that would help give the Eagles their genre-busting and hard-to-categorize sound.
Henley was also influenced by African American church music. A local Baptist church held baptisms in a pond in the woods close to Henley’s childhood home. As Henley later stated in a Warner Bros. biography, “They would wade out into that muddy water with their arms stretched toward the sky. I remember the women being all dressed in white. The singing was unforgettable. At first, the whole thing was a little frightening, but the longer I watched the more I started to get into it. Underneath the fervor, there was a sincerity and openness about it—an expression of faith and longing like I had never heard before. That experience stays with me, not necessarily in terms of its religious connotations, but in terms of its humanity.”
As Don got older, his transistor-radio listening habits shifted more toward rock-and-roll stations. In his teens, he listened far into the night to the powerful KOMA, which broadcast from Oklahoma City, and the compelling tones of the iconic Wolfman Jack (a looming figure in almost every article or book on the early days of rock and roll and the British Invasion of the United States), whose station carried across most of the country from its headquarters in Mexico.
Band of Brothers
Aside from passively listening to gospel, country, and rock and roll, Henley became an active musician, playing first the trombone—which didn’t last too long—and then the drums.
Henley’s close friend growing up was Richard Bowden. Bowden lived nearby and had his own band. When their drummer left, Henley—who’d shown an aptitude for rhythm while tapping away on school books in class and had utilized his newfound talents drumming in the school jazz band—got the gig. (In fact, Henley’s aptitude for the drums helped the school band win a state contest in 1964.)
Bowden’s band called themselves the Four Speeds, and they were quite a talented bunch. Jerry Surratt played above-average trumpet; Freddie Neese was a more-than-capable guitarist; Henley could play rock, country, blues, pop, and jazz, if needed; and bass player Richard Bowden oozed personality and exhibited a raw sense of stagecraft. But they didn’t really have a designated singer, which caused some debate among the group; no one wanted to volunteer, so Bowden’s father arranged an audition between the band members. Henley took his turn with single-minded aplomb. They all agreed that he was a natural and would sing and play drums.
High school rock-and-roll bands have a tendency to break up as players come and go, but the Four Speeds were more consistent than most. Bowden left town first, traveling to Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches after graduating high school in 1964. Henley followed a year later, but the band kept going. He and Bowden both moved to North Texas State University in Denton, and the Four Speeds changed their name to Felicity. (Later on, the band would change its name again, to Shiloh.) Henley’s college pal, keyboard player Jim Ed Norman, and Richard Bowden’s cousin Mike also joined the group.
Initially influenced by the Ventures—the 1950s instrumental combo so often referred to in rock-and-roll histories and encyclopedias as “the band that launched a thousand bands”—Felicity came to rely more and more on the Beatles for inspiration. Rock and roll was one thing, but the Beatles were quite another.
According to Henley, nothing could compare to the impact made on music by the Liverpool four-piece in their U.S. explosion of 1964. As he explained to Blair Jackson for BAM magazine in November 1982, “When the Beatles came along in the 1960s, it completely changed my life, and I knew I wanted to be involved in music. I said, ‘This is it.’” He told Modern Drummer’s Robert Santelli, “I don’t care what anybody says about Ringo. I cut my rock -n- roll teeth listening to him.”
Unlike Henley, who was his group’s main vocalist, Ringo only got to sing occasionally, but the simplicity of his approach was perfect for the role. Emulating Starr’s left-handed technique forced Henley to keep things simple. Talking to Modern Drummer, Henley explained, “The simple drummers were always my favorite kind of drummers.”
Bowden and Henley were friends first and bandmates second, and so it was with Norman (who would become a major music-biz figure in his own right in the 1970s and 1980s, working on several Eagles albums and running Warner Bros. Records in Nashville for many years in the 1980s). Henley and Norman shared a common passion for live music, notably the hard-driving bluegrass outfit the Dillards, who were one of Henley’s all-time favorite bands. The two friends made many a trip from college on weekends to see the Dillards’ blistering stage show. Norman, a skilled keyboard player, recalled to me in 2009 that his audition was more social than musical when he ventured back to Linden with Henley.
Years later, Norman talked to me about the musical value of the early Henley music. “I hadn’t listened to the Shiloh album in at least twenty years but I was recently transferring it to my iPod, and it’s an interesting record. Generally it was a mishmash of different kinds of material and there’s a lack of consistency, which would make it difficult on a marketing level. But I was also reminded about the songwriting talent of Don. I was an instrumentalist; I grew up with classical music so it took me a while to understand the role of the lyrics in music. Don was the one who understood. He got the importance of lyrics. We never really talked about it but it was obvious that Don, with his English major background, understood the value of the lyric.”
Felicity picked up a healthy following in the Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana area, playing a wide range of Top 40 material as well as some originals. The band pulled in decent money (up to $800 per show), bought a van, and booked even more gigs. Henley was also the band’s primary songwriter, and one of his compositions—a tune called “Hurtin’”—was even produced and recorded by a local record company, Wilson Records, which released it in 1965. Billboard called the single “teen-oriented rhythm-ballad material featuring an emotional performance backed by a Bo Diddley beat,” and went on to suggest that it “could prove a blockbuster.”
Mr. Rogers
It was the spring of 1969 when Felicity got their chance at the big time. It all started when they ran into Kenny Rogers, then touring with his band the First Edition, in a clothes store in Dallas. Rogers had been signed by Jimmy Bowen to Amos Productions and was recording for Reprise at the time. He wasn’t a big star yet—that would follow in the 1970s—but he was a dozen rungs higher up the music-biz ladder than either Henley or Shiloh.
Country Music Hall of Famer Kenny Rogers was born in Houston and was in a fairly successful high-school rockabilly band (the Scholars was the name, and they got as far as appearing on the TV show American Bandstand). After that early flush of pop fame, Rogers veered away from rockabilly toward jazz and played stand-up bass for the Bobby Doyle Trio jazz ensemble. He later became a member of the popular folk group, the New Christy Minstrels.
Kenny Rogers, country star of the ’70s, had some early success in the ’60s with the hard-to-label First Edition. Originally known as the First Edition and looking like a typical folk act, they became much more than that, dabbling with pop and rock and even touching on psychedelia. Rogers was the first pop “name” to back the young Don Henley and his musical ensemble.
Formed by Randy Sparks in 1961, the Minstrels were a middle-of-the-road-pop-meets-folk act with a revolving door of members. As folk became more politicized on both the East Coast and the West in the middle of the decade, so the New Christy Minstrels became marginalized from the youth movement. Kenny Rogers and Kim Carnes (another performer set to be a star of the 1970s) joined for a while near the end of 1966; Mike Settle and Rogers left the group in 1967, looking to get a little closer to the bubbling-under counterculture style that was grasping at the reins of folk music and the folk lifestyle, and formed a far hipper group together, the First Edition. They went for a poppy, psychedelic sound and had themselves a #5 hit with the quirky tune “I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” They repeated that chart success in 1969 with a song that would become part of Rogers’ identity over the rest of his career: “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” a dark but melodic song about a wounded and paralyzed Vietnam veteran begging his wife not to leave him stuck at home and go into town to look for love by herself.
Rogers was a star on tour, as far as Henley was concerned—a connection with the “scene” in Los Angeles that they heard tales and read articles about in the music press. They started talking and traded phone numbers. Rogers recalled the Henley meeting to Billboard’s Chuck Dauphin in October 2013, noting that Henley “stayed at my house with the rest of his group (Shiloh) for about four or five months. I produced an album on them. I had all of his publishing, and when he went with the Eagles, he said he couldn’t really do it if he didn’t have his publishing rights. So, I gave him his publishing back, and said ‘good luck,’ and look what’s happened to him!”
Rogers remembered the band when he was offered the opportunity to produce an album for Jimmy Bowen at Amos Records and decided to bring the kids with an interesting sound and a terrific lead singer (now calling themselves Shiloh) to California to record a single, “Jennifer.”
Steel
Back in Texas one night, Shiloh were gathered together rehearsing in an old church building when several of the group got the urge to ride trail bikes. Tragically, Jerry Surratt rode his bike head-on into the path of a car and was killed.
Shiloh regrouped, however, and decided to add a keyboard player and a steel guitarist. The steel player, Al Perkins, was a Texas prodigy who every band on the scene knew about. A gifted guitarist, he excelled on the steel and played country-music exhibitions around Texas.
Perkins’ music career playing with some of country and folk music’s all-time greats—the Flying Burrito Brothers, Stephen Stills, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Mike Nesmith, Chris Hillman, and Dolly Parton—began when he was very young. Back then, a representative of a music school in Texas came knocking on Perkins’ door offering steel-guitar lessons. Hawaiian music was popular at the time, thanks to the success of a primetime radio show that featured Hawaiian tunes, so Perkins’ parents agreed to pay for some lessons. The teacher recognized that Perkins played naturally by ear and offered to give Al private tuition. Perkins quickly became the company’s star pupil and began playing talent shows as a music-school student rep. Delighted with their son’s progress, Perkins’ parents somehow came up with $1,000 (a huge amount of money for the time) for one of the first Fender 1000 pedal-steel guitars.
Pedal steel is an extremely complex instrument to learn and master, but it was a key component in Texas-style country music, and an essential part of the L.A. country-rock sound of the late ’60s. The pedal-steel guitar comes on a stand with legs that hold a series of foot pedals that are used to adjust the strings and hence the sound of the instrument. Good pedal-steel players are few and far between; great ones are a very rare find. Perkins was gifted with the pedals, too, and got as much work as he needed from country-music groups in the local area.
A little later, Perkins’ appetite for electric guitar was whetted by the instrumental band the Ventures, and with a new Gibson Les Paul Jr. in hand he dropped the steel for a while and perfected his electric lead skills. “I just loved learning new things,” he told me in 2009. “Steel was my passion, and then I found I could play pretty good lead electric guitar, well that took my interest for a while. I figured it could only be a good thing to be proficient on electric guitar as well as pedal steel, if I was going to be a serious professional musician.” The army interrupted Perkins’ musical progress for a year or two, but after that he’d been playing in a Texas band called Foxx when Henley’s boys came knocking.
Shiloh
“I liked the guys in Shiloh but I wasn’t sure about their music style,” Perkins told me in a 2010 conversation. “You know, this was the time of heavy blues, Clapton and Cream and these guys were doing Poco, Burrito Brothers country stuff. It was the Eagles sound really, if you think about it. And none of those L.A. country and rock and roll bands had been too successful. They are probably better known now than they were back then, you know, like Gram Parsons is revered now but pretty much ignored back in the day. And I’d been out to California before. I went with another musician, and we were part of a band called Sparkles. But the whole thing was very Hollywood. We had this kind of showbiz manager, and he changed the band’s name to Pearly Gates, and well, it just wasn’t right for me.”
This self-titled album by Shiloh—formerly Felicity, and before that the Four Speeds—remains a stellar example of the pioneer days of country-rock, laced with some very 1960s psychedelia. Don Henley (seated, left) surfaced from this band, of course, and so did several others, including Jim Ed Norman, who became head of Warner Bros. in Nashville, and Al Perkins, who joined the Flying Burrito Brothers.
But Perkins recognized quality where he saw it, and Shiloh were a better-than-average young band. Everyone could play, and they appeared serious and professional—far more so than most of the bands he encountered on the circuit. “There was a good feeling about the band, so I did indeed agree to join them full time. Some artists you meet and work with just have that seriousness and such dedication and professionalism that you know they will do well. Don had that, I remember clearly, he had a great rock-and-roll voice, but he had this mentality you need in the music business.”
Even more so than his passion for music, Henley’s personality and character were ready for both success and a geographical move. He was too intellectual, too liberal, and too curious about the world and its new thinking to not leap at the chance to try a new landscape, especially California, where so much change was happening. He certainly didn’t fit in in his hometown.
“If you didn’t play football, you were nothing, zero,” he told Robert Hilburn in an L.A. Times article in May 1982. “One of the only things that kept me going was music, especially the Beatles. I would go in and listen to the Beatles records every morning just to get me through the day. I kept waiting until the day I could get out of school and out of town on to someplace where I would fit in better.”
Music and some good experiences at college gave Henley the inner belief to take the risk to leave the familiar and pursue his dreams. His parents scrimped and saved to send him to college. His father worked in an auto-parts store and was not a wealthy man, but he saved as much as he could for Don’s education.
Aside from the friends and colleagues Don gathered through his college experiences, it was a teacher who really fired the desire in him. As he recalled to Cameron Crowe in a Rolling Stone interview in September 1975, said English teacher had a profound effect on him as an eager young man. Henley was struck by the man’s uniqueness—he was the first bohemian Henley had ever encountered—particularly his wild clothing and the way he would teach seated on his desk with his legs crossed. He gave one piece of wisdom that Henley would always remember: “Frankly, if it takes you your whole fucking 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.”