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Eagles · S1 E3
Don Henley
A drummer from a tiny town in northeast Texas. Shiloh fails, but the move to Los Angeles puts him in the right room at the right time
Linden, Texas, February 1964. A sixteen-year-old drummer sits in his parents' living room, watching four guys from Liverpool on the Ed Sullivan Show, and the only thought in his head is: I have to get out of this town.
Don Henley, The End of the Innocence (1989). A song about the loss of small-town certainty and the price of growing up. Bruce Hornsby plays the piano. Everything Don Henley carries from Linden, Texas, is in this song.
Linden, Texas
Population around 2,000. Deep in the piney woods of northeast Texas, closer to Arkansas than to Dallas. The tiny town where Don Henley grew up, and the kind of place you spend the rest of your life writing about after you leave.
The Piney Woods
Don Henley's father sells auto parts. His mother is a devoted reader who fills the house with books and makes her son one too. There is no music venue in Linden, no recording studio, and no obvious path out for a kid who plays drums and sings.
“When I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I turned to my parents and said, that's what I want to do. I think they thought it was a phase. It was not a phase.”
— Don Henley, History of the Eagles documentary, 2013
TAP TO REVEAL: What impossible coincidence connected Don Henley and Glenn Frey before they ever met?
Ol' 55
From Eagles (1972). A Tom Waits song, covered on the debut album. It captures the feeling of driving through the night after a late farewell, the highway pulling you forward, the AM radio glowing. It sounds like the drive Don Henley took from Linden, Texas, to Los Angeles: leaving everything familiar behind.
Shiloh
Henley forms a country-rock band called Shiloh and they get a break that should not happen to a group from northeast Texas: Kenny Rogers hears them and offers to produce their debut album. Rogers brings the band to Los Angeles and puts them on Amos Records. The album lands with barely a sound.
Which country music legend produced Shiloh's only album?
Glenn Frey has the songs. Don Henley has the voice. But a band needs more than two people. Next: Bernie Leadon from the Flying Burrito Brothers and Randy Meisner from Poco, two country-rock veterans who bring the skills and the scars of bands that almost made it.
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