The cover of Bernie Leadon’s new solo album is a vivid echo from his esteemed country-rock past. In the picture, the singer-guitarist — and co-founding member of the Eagles — stands with his guitar in profile on a hill overlooking the glowing lights of nighttime Los Angeles.
It’s a misty, romantic view Leadon got to know well during his many years in the city, where he helped create a genre while a member of the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Linda Ronstadt’s band and other rock combos with a weakness for music of melancholy and twang. The picture was taken by photographer Henry Diltz for a never-completed Leadon solo project 45 years earlier.
Using it now on his just-released album, “Too Late To Be Cool,” isn’t intended as a big statement, he says. The musician simply always loved the picture, but it does reflect his lingering affection for a scene that took him around the world and to the top of the music charts.
“It’s an homage to that period of time and what was occurring here creatively,” says Leadon, during a recent visit to L.A. from his home in Nashville. “Around that time, in the late ’60s, early ’70s … many of those artists were like the Pied Pipers and doing what artists are supposed to do — making social commentary, but also driving and steering the culture. That was a singular moment and a pretty amazing thing that happened.”
Right now, Leadon, 78, is visiting the offices of Warner Chappell Music in downtown L.A., where he recently signed a publishing deal that will help spread his new music through licensing and recordings by other artists. Back in the Eagles days, Leadon was recognizable for a tangle of curly hair and a handlebar mustache. Now, his head is shaved and the mustache has been gone since 1986.
“Too Late to Be Cool,” released independently by Straight Wire Records, is his first solo music in 20 years, and it reflects the traditions he was a central part of with the original Eagles foursome: singer-drummer Don Henley, singer-guitarist Glenn Frey, singer-bassist Randy Meisner and himself.
Though not one of the Eagles’ primary songwriters, Leadon co-authored the hit “Witchy Woman,” a song he initiated while still in the Flying Burrito Brothers. Henley helped finish it, and the song reached No. 9 on the Billboard singles chart, the band’s first Top 10 hit.
The Eagles were hitmakers from its 1971 debut, then struck a deep commercial nerve with the compilation “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975,” which now stands as the bestselling album in the U.S. of all time, with sales of 38 million copies. (Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is now No. 2.) The record collected songs from the band’s first four albums, the years Leadon was a member.
During his years in L.A., he lived in Topanga Canyon, then moved with his young family to Pacific Palisades. The day before this stop at Warner Chappell, Leadon visited the location of his former home, now a ruin from this year’s apocalyptic wildfires. “It’s just a hole in the ground,” he says grimly. “The hedges are still there, but the hedges are burned. The eucalyptus tree is there, but it’s all scarred. But then down below you can still see the ocean and the surf coming in.”
A few months earlier, he wrote a song for his old neighborhood called “Requiem for a Village.” The unreleased song is not only a sign of his grief over the remnants of his old neighborhood, but shows Leadon once again inspired to express himself through songwriting.
On “Too Late to Be Cool,” the title song is a gently driving track, blending familiar textures from the early Eagles with a bit of Creedence Clearwater Revival, as Leadon sings of renewed spirit and purpose. “The first verse is about maybe reconsidering some of my assumptions and making a decision to stop following the crowd,” he explains. “Then it just talks about getting in motion.”
Other tracks include “Just a Little,” strutting to a Rolling Stones-ish riff, and the bluesy, moody “Go on Down to Mobile,” with a brief but searing guitar solo that is recognizably his.
The album was recorded in Leadon’s personal analog studio in Nashville, using classic gear and 2-inch tape, with producer Glyn Johns, who produced the first two Eagles albums, and part of the third. Completing the studio was a five-year project.
“I went from writing maybe two or three songs a year that I wanted to keep to maybe 12 or more,” Leadon says. “When Glyn Johns got involved, I pared it down to 30, and then helped pare it down to 15. We recorded 14, 15 and pared that down to 11. So it’s a culling process. That was all a lot of fun. I love being in the studio, and I love writing.”
The new album was recorded with a group of Nashville players: keyboardist Tony Harrell, drummer Greg Morrow and bassist Glenn Worf.
“Nashville has really spectacular musicians, who are very empathetic, incredibly skilled,” Leadon says. “We get the sounds fast. First, second, third take usually is it. So it’s fresh, and four guys sitting in a room looking at each other, like it used to be when I first did sessions in L.A.”
Songs were recorded with all musicians together in the studio. “That’s how all the great records that we all love from the ’60s, ’70s and after were usually made — everybody in the room looking at each other. And each take would be different because that guy did something different, so, ‘Oh, I’m gonna react to that.’ That results in a freshness to the recording. People can feel it.”
At Warner Chappell, Greg Sowders, senior vice president of A&R, says Leadon has a special history and sound that remains relevant across multiple music genres.
“Most people never write any hits, let alone songs that change popular music, which certainly defines him as a player and a writer,” says Sowders. “From Dillard & Clark to the Burritos, to the Eagles, he actually helped invent a genre.”
Leadon was part of a country-rock movement that began years before the Eagles, with connections to the folk revival in the late 1950s, early 1960s that flourished before the arrival of the Beatles. And as the ’60s rolled on, pioneering acts like Rick Nelson & the Stone Canyon Band and former Monkees member Mike Nesmith’s First National Band moved into a new country-rock sound.
The Byrds, with the addition of country-rock icon Gram Parsons, made a lasting mark in 1968 with “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.” Though now considered a classic, the album began as a commercial failure. When Parsons and the Byrds turned up at the Grand Ole Opry, they were not well-received.
“Because they had long hair,” suggests Leadon with a knowing smile. “Gram was very reverential about the Opry stars, but the audience wasn’t ready for it. Of course, a few years later, everybody had long hair, and then you had Southern rock.”
At about the same time, Leadon joined Dillard & Clark, a band led by former Byrds singer Gene Clark and bluegrass banjo player Doug Dillard (of the Dillards).
Leadon was soon in the Flying Burrito Brothers, working alongside Parsons, who stayed around long enough for one album, 1970’s “Burrito Deluxe.” The band also played at Altamont, the Stones-led free festival outside San Francisco infamously marred by violence. He remembers it as “the antithesis of Woodstock.”
After a year in the Flying Burritos, Parsons left the U.S. to join the Rolling Stones in the South of France, where the band was recording “Exile on Main St.” He invited Leadon to come along. Leadon recalls with a grin, “I said, ‘Well, Gram, it’s interesting, but I don’t have a trust fund like you do, so I’m not self-funded like you are. I gotta keep working, buddy. So see you later.’”
The last time Leadon saw the singer-songwriter was when he played a session for a Parsons solo album. A few days later, Leadon and the Eagles left for London to record again with Johns. “When we got to England to start the third album, Gram Parsons had just died, but I didn’t know until I landed,” he says. “It hit me hard.”
Leadon wrote a tribute to his late friend, “My Man,” for the 1974 album “On the Border.” The song is a wistful ballad, with the added warmth of some classic Eagles vocal harmonies, as Leadon sang: “He’d sing for the people and people would cry / They knew that his song came from deep down inside / You could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes.”
Leadon’s generation of country-rock artists ended up influencing not only rockers but also mainstream country artists. Long after the Eagles breakup, a 1993 tribute album, “Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles,” included covers of the group’s best-loved songs as recorded by the likes of country stars Travis Tritt, Brooks & Dunn, Trisha Yearwood and Vince Gill (later a touring member of the Eagles).
As the band soared in popularity during the first half of the decade, the touring schedule grew more demanding, and new tensions emerged. Leadon finally left the Eagles after a falling out with Frey during a band meeting, though his exit wasn’t immediate.
“He was just pontificating about his plans — ‘We’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that,’” Leadon recalls of that gathering, “and I felt non-consulted. I was in a bad mood, impulsive. I poured a beer on his head. Of course, he took exception to that. Then maybe a month or two later, we had a heart-to-heart and I said, ‘Yeah, I think I should go.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I agree.’”
After the Eagles, Leadon kept working, and recorded a 1977 album, “Natural Progressions,” with guitarist-singer Michael Georgiades. He also played on other artists’ albums, recruited for session work by producer Johns for records by Ronstadt, John Hiatt, Emmylou Harris and others.
The Eagles broke up in 1980, and Leadon remained mostly estranged from Frey, though he and Meisner rejoined the band for its 1998 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He wasn’t part of the reunion tours that began in 1994, but he was invited to join the two-year “History of the Eagles” juggernaut that began in 2013.
It came about as a result of reconnecting with Frey, which Leadon now credits to a letter he wrote to the band co-leader.
“I opened the door and apologized,” Leadon says, calling the 25 months of touring, plus two months of rehearsals, as a time of reconnecting with their shared past. “At the last show, he gave me a big hug at the end and said, ‘It’s been great having you out here. This is not the end.’ But it was for him, unfortunately.”
Frey died at age 67 from multiple ailments, including rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis.
As for the Eagles, he’s kept in touch, and calls his current relationship with the band “very good.” A few days ago, he texted with Henley, and spoke with their manager weeks before that. Whether Leadon is seen again onstage with the band he co-founded, he only says, “Never say never.”
Regardless, the lasting impact of reuniting with the band continues to propel him now with new music. For the moment, Leadon is back in action.
“I’ve been retired a bunch of different times,” says Leadon, who is married with kids and grandkids. “I actually have found that it’s very beneficial to take time away from it because it can get to be a grind, and who wants to burn out on the thing that you chose because you loved it? As an artist, you’ve got to go do more living before you have anything else to say.”
The post After wildfires destroy his Pacific Palisades home, Bernie Leadon finds creative renewal appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
