Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles Read Online Free PDF Page A

Saturday nights. Despite the poor quality of the set, we had the best reception in the neighborhood, because Dad rigged up a sophisticated rotating antenna so that, when the channel changed, a motor pointed it in the right direction. I thought that was pretty cool.
     
    I remember seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show one Sunday night in 1957 and going wild. He sang “Hound Dog,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Love Me Tender,” and I was completely blown away. Even though he was only shown from the waist up because of complaints about the sexual nature of the way “Elvis the Pelvis” danced, I’d never seen anybody move like that before. Soon afterward, there came a flood of music called rock and roll, and I knew right away that this was for me. Something about it really made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
     
    My first introduction to the technical side of music also came through my father. One day, he called me over to his tape recorder, which consisted of two boxes, one with a reel-to-reel and a tiny six-by-nine speaker, the other with a small amplifier and a second speaker. Without explaining anything, he set up a microphone, put it in front of me, and instructed, “Okay now, Doc, I want you to count every odd number aloud.”
     
    I duly counted, one, three, five, seven, and so on. After rewinding the tape, he played it back and said, “Now, when you hear one, start counting even numbers.”
     
    Within minutes, he played the finished result back to me. Via the stereo’s sound-on-sound capability, I heard my voice on the left channel saying “one,” then on the right channel saying “two.” It was the first stereo overdub I’d ever heard, and I thought, “My God, this is incredible!” I was hooked.
     
    First and foremost, I needed a guitar. The Elvis explosion had hit America, and a guitar was suddenly the coolest instrument to play. I’d been raised on a diet of Nashville guitar and banjo music, and there was no other instrument I was remotely interested in. By the time I was eleven years old, everybody on the block seemed to be playing guitar but me. Trouble was, I didn’t have the money to buy one. Utterly despondent, I suddenly realized I might have something valuable to trade—cherry bombs. Jerry and I would buy them when we visited Uncle W. L. in Carolina, then bring them home to Florida, where they were illegal. If you threw one into the concrete culvert in the ditch outside our home, it would make such a bang that all the kids in the street would come running, long before the cordite had dispersed.
     
    The boy directly across the street from us owned an acoustic guitar I badly wanted, so one day Jerry and I got going with the firecrackers. As planned, the kid came right out. “Hey, can I have some of those?” he asked, his eyes bright.
     
    “Sure,” I said, with youthful cunning, “but it’ll cost you that old guitar on the top of your closet.” It was a horrible instrument with three strings missing and full of holes, but it was my first true love. I took it to the drugstore and bought new strings with the last of my savings. A neighbor across the street taught me how to tune my new toy and work my way through those agonizing first D and G chords. I’d monopolize the sliding glider seat on my parents’ front porch, strumming away for hours. I nearly wore it out.
     
    Later, with a little extra from Dad, I saved up what seemed like a fortune and sent twenty-eight dollars off to Sears, Roebuck for a Silvertone archtop, which seemed to me like the height of musical sophistication. Every morning for a week, I was late for school, waiting for the mailman to deliver it. I can still remember the pungent whiff of fresh varnish when I first opened the case. I’d never had anything so glossy and shiny and new. I took unbelievably good care of that guitar. Everything else had been a hand-me-down from Jerry; his clothes, his shoes, even his old bike. This was the first