Free Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles by Wendy Holden, Don Felder

remember sitting on the bed, trying to protect myself with my hands while he started beating me on the back with the strap of his belt. I’d put up with that goddamn belt my whole life, but for some reason, I suddenly decided I wasn’t going to take it anymore.
     
    Jumping up, I clenched my fist and struck Dad as hard as I could across the chin. He staggered back with the force of the blow, hands and belt flailing, and crashed to the floor, landing awkwardly against a bookshelf and a pile of long-playing records. I’ll never forget the look on his face. I think he was more stunned than anything. I literally ran out of the bedroom, jumped into my car, and took off before he could grab me. I could hear him all the way through the house as I fled, but I don’t know if he was yelling at me or screaming for Mom to help him get to his feet. I left home, vowing never to speak to him again. It was six years before I did.
     
     
     
     
    I moved in with Barry Scurran, the bass player with the Maundy Quintet, who was a sophomore at the university with an apartment in an off-campus housing area. He put me up on his couch for a few days but eventually gave me his spare bedroom, for which I began paying rent. I went back to my parents’ house a couple of times when they were at work to retrieve some clothes and some LPs I simply couldn’t live without. I didn’t leave a note and they had no idea where I was staying.
     
    I finally picked up the phone and called Mom to let her know I was all right.
     
    “Please come home, Don,” she pleaded. “I’m . . . , we’re . . . , worried about you.”
     
    “No, Mom,” I replied, flatly. “I’m just not going to come back and do that anymore.”
     
    My father made no direct contact but told me, through my mother, that if I wasn’t going to live in his house, I was to bring back the car he’d helped me buy. Furious, I drove the Volkswagen home and parked it outside, leaving the keys in the ignition. He knew how much being without a car would cramp my lifestyle. Even more gallingly, he took to driving it himself. I’d see it around town and curse him under my breath.
     
    At least I still had Susan, and the Maundy Quintet was doing well. Bernie, Tom, and I continued to write songs together, although our repertoire mainly featured covers of popular numbers to keep the kids happy. There was never any conflict between us. We got along fine and were guided by what Tom was able to sing. Bernie and Tom were pretty much the driving force, musically, and they wrote the bulk of our original numbers, although I have to admit now that they weren’t very good. We thought they were at the time, but they weren’t classics. Still, you have to start somewhere.
     
    What I’d always most admired about Bernie was his single-minded determination. If he decided that he was going to learn pedal steel guitar, he’d go and buy one, sit down and learn it so that, within a month or so, he could play it to his satisfaction. He taught me such flexibility and adaptability, to rise to the musical challenge of taking on a completely new instrument and genre. I never mastered pedal steel or mandolin like he did, but I was OK, and without him I’d never even have tried.
     
    Bernie was seriously into the Beatles and English music. George Harrison was his hero. He even wore a Beatles wig at one time and adopted a kind of English accent. He dressed “English” and tried straightening his impossibly curly hair. Then he bought a brown Gretsch Tennessean guitar, the same model Harrison played. Man, he loved that instrument. I admired the Beatles enormously and appreciated how gifted they were, but for me, rhythm and blues had so much more soul. There was a big difference between women crying over B.B. King and girls screaming hysterically at the Beatles at Shea Stadium. I was also smart enough to realize that what the Beatles lacked in emotional drive, they made up for in cool.
     
    When the Hollies came to