Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles by Wendy Holden, Don Felder Read Free Book Online Page B

afford what I wanted. The first album I ever bought was Live at the Regal , by B.B. King. I bought it mail-order from Randy’s Record Shop in Gal-latin, Tennessee, advertised on WLAC in Nashville as “the world’s largest phonographic record shop.” The album cost $2.98, which I painstakingly saved and sent off in the mail. It was one of the greatest blues recordings ever made. I learned every note.
     
     
     
     
    World events largely seemed to pass Gainesville by, but some, like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy, were unavoidable. I was in high school when JFK and Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev faced off over nuclear warheads being located in Cuba in the fall of 1962. The name Castro became as synonymous with evil as Osama bin Laden is today. There was a small speaker on the wall in the corner of each classroom, through which we’d hear the latest news reports on the radio. During daily air raid drills, we’d hide under our desks when a siren went off. The announcement would say, “This is a test. This is just a test. In case of a real emergency, go to your designated area,” and it would be followed by a series of loud blasts on a horn.
     
    The teacher would say, “OK now, children, remember the procedure. Hats on, heads down, eyes shut.” As if our plywood desks and tin hats would have saved us from a nuclear holocaust. I remember wondering how long it would take me to run home if a missile hit Florida. It was a time of national fear, and the first casualty was logic. Some people in our neighborhood tried to build bomb shelters, but with the water table just three feet under the soil, they quickly realized they’d drown before they’d be nuked. The threat of war seemed unreal and almost fun, as though we were being involved in something fantastical, not about to disappear under a giant mushroom cloud.
     
    The following year, JFK was shot. That felt entirely different. The news was so unbelievable and earth-shattering, I remember our teacher broke down as she told us in the schoolyard. Everyone seemed suddenly afraid, paranoid even. Adults cried openly on the street, something I’d never seen before. It was as if the whole of Gainesville had suddenly been jerked awake from its rose-tinted dream by the firing of that bullet. Nothing felt safe or sure any more. The apple-pie sweetness had gone sour.
     
    We were given the day off from school to watch the funeral on television with our families, and I remember sitting on the floor in front of our black-and-white set and watching little John John standing silently by his mother’s side at Arlington National Cemetery, while my own mother sat sniffling on the couch. Even my father looked wild-eyed. Man, that was strange.
     
    Everyone remembers where he was when he heard that JFK was shot. I know I always will. Nineteen sixty-three is indelibly marked in the American psyche. But it was momentous for another reason for me. It was the year I met the man who was to become one of the most pivotal to my whole life. His name was Bernie Leadon.
     

FOUR
     
    Bernie was kinda different. He came from the West Coast—San Diego, California, to be precise—and had this cool-dude air about him. With impossibly curly sandy blond hair, and bell-bottom jeans covered in patches, he looked as if he’d just stepped off a surfboard. The first time I met him, I’d just stepped off a Greyhound bus from Palatka in a button-down shirt, my straight hair slicked to one side, after playing some small gig at a women’s club in the swampy flats of eastern Florida. I wasn’t yet sixteen years old.
     
    “Are you Don?” he asked, strolling toward me. “Don Felder?”
     
    “Yeah,” I replied, a little warily, holding my guitar case to my chest. I’d been expecting my mother to pick me up from the bus station.
     
    “I’m Bernie Leadon,” he said with a smile that lit up his whole face. “Your mom said I’d find you here. Do you need a