EAGLES PREPARING TO HIT THE ROAD AGAIN

EAGLES PREPARING TO HIT THE ROAD AGAIN
Henley defends deal with Wal-Mart
By GEOFF BOUCHER
Los Angeles Times
During the dusty Texas summers of his youth, Don Henley worked in his father's auto parts store and learned the vagaries of fan belts, batteries, spark plugs, tailpipes and mufflers.

His father taught the future rock star plenty, and, when the family business started to collapse, one of the lessons was to recognize who was to blame.

''My father was a small-business man after he got out of World War II,'' Henley said. ''He despised chains, the big guys, who eventually helped put him out of business.''

Now the son is in business with Wal-Mart. The Eagles, the rock band that claims the best-selling album in the history of American music, will soon release its first studio album since ''The Long Run'' in 1979, and, if you want to buy it, you'll have to get in line at Wal-Mart or wait 12 months to get it elsewhere.

''They will have an exclusive on it for the first year,'' Henley said, explaining for the first time a core part of the ''strategic partnership'' announced in late October.

The Eagles have taken plenty of heat through the years for cashing in -- their tours have some of the priciest tickets around, and the history of backstage bickering has added to the aura of mercenary priorities -- but the 59-year-old singer-songwriter always has been a maverick and rock's most cerebral grump. He explains that anyone who sees some sort of disconnect between his famed Walden Pond preservation efforts and this new corporate deal is simply not paying attention.

''A lot of the people who have criticized us are obviously unaware of what Wal-Mart is doing in overhauling their operation,'' he said, rattling off the company's well-publicized initiatives to open eco-friendly ''green stores,'' reduce packaging and use its market share to pressure vendors into pursuing environmentally conscious approaches.

And there's the fact that the Wal-Mart deal offered a promising escape route for Henley and his bandmates; they have no traditional record label deal, and, after watching the file-sharing Web sites rise to power, they were open to any path to keep their connection with fans.

''This is the world we live in,'' Henley said. Then, with a chuckle, he added: ''In the big picture, they can't be any more evil than a major record label.''

The singer-songwriter, sitting recently in an L.A. studio, was in a cheery mood, all things considered. The day had started with a major crisis: ''It blew up this morning,'' he said.

Surprisingly, he wasn't talking about the Eagles and their effort to make new music without killing each other.

''The water heater at the studio blew up this morning. Well, it didn't blow up, but it started leaking and it was going to blow up.''

Then his 11-year-old daughter called from Dallas to get help with her French homework (''I had two years of it,'' he groaned, ''but I'm useless.''), which competed with the singer's last-minute fundraising duties to secure $900,000 to scoop up a farm adjacent to the Thoreau Institute in his beloved Massachusetts forest. All of that, though, was a welcome distraction from his true enemy at the moment.

''Yeah, anything to stay away from those legal pads,'' he said, referring to the unfinished lyrics for ''Long Road Out of Eden,'' the title track to that new Eagles studio CD, which, come to think of it, will be the first Eagles studio CD given that ''The Long Run'' was released in the vinyl days of the Carter administration.

The album, he said, is due to Wal-Mart ''in the next 60 to 90 days,'' but the real deadline on Henley's mind is the tour that will follow.

''We're inching our way toward some kind of completion here on the album, and we hope to get it out in time to hit the road this summer. We believe we've got one more world tour in us, and then that'd be about it. We might just ride off into that old sunset.''

That was exciting news at the Concert Industry Consortium, which brought promoters from around the country to Hollywood earlier this month; an Eagles tour (along with reunions by Van Halen and the Police) means the Rolling Stones can take a year off as the beast of burden responsible for dragging baby boomers through arena turnstiles.

The prospect that this might be the last Eagles hurrah had Henley in a somewhat reflective mood. The band always has had sweet harmonies on stage, but that has always been a rich irony for anyone who watched their dressing room brawls. Henley said a detente has been reached.

''Incidents still happen on tour, but we don't let it get in the way of the performance. That's something you learn to do over a long span of years.'' Or, you don't -- ''The key to being on the road is to try to keep two things: Your sense of humor and your sense of gratitude.''

On that theme of thanks, Henley was honored Feb. 9 at a lavish banquet as the MusiCares ''person of the year.'' The admission fee and a silent auction benefited the Grammy MusiCares program, which helps aging, sick and indigent musicians.

There may be an unkind joke to be made there that the Eagles qualify in two of the three categories. Everybody in the band has some challenges to deal with on the road. For Henley, it's playing drums with his bad back and keeping his voice intact.

''We are approaching 60,'' he said. ''Tours used to be mentally challenging. Now they are mentally and physically challenging.

''The kind of partying we used to do, well that's been a thing of the past for some time,'' he said. ''Spare me the 'Behind the Music' stuff. You won't see that at our shows. It's like a morgue backstage.''

That doesn't mean the band is completely past its days as a study in volatile chemistry. Just six years ago, Henley and the other principal songwriter and singer, Glenn Frey, bounced Don Felder from the outfit, leading to a flurry of nasty lawsuits that is still being sorted out.

That led to cynical attacks on the band, but not nearly as many as they heard last year when they signed a deal with Wal-Mart, the world's second largest company, which has been steadily criticized as a massive engine of social and environmental harm.

''It's easy to sit outside on the sidelines and throw rocks when you don't know what's going on, but if you're going to change corporate America, then we have to get down in the dirt with them,'' Henley said.

Wal-Mart is happy with the deal, at least so far; David Porter, Wal-Mart's vice president of home entertainment, gushed back in October that the retailer was ''very pleased to be able to bring our customers an alliance with America's greatest rock icons.''

Still, in the bargain Wal-Mart gets a cranky star promising to keep an eye on the promises made (''I will be watchful'') and to make a stink if they don't come through (''You can always get a divorce'').

The album that Wal-Mart will be getting won't be the predictably neutral material it always got from its other corporate troubadour, Garth Brooks. Henley said the lyrics are laced with dark humor and war protest.

The title track is ''about the war in Iraq and the evolution of man.'' Listening to himself, he chuckled. ''It's not a fluffy little tune... there's a portion of a song you can dance to.'' He waited a beat and asked for a favor: ''Put a 'ha-ha' in there after that, OK?''

It's not that Henley isn't funny, it's just that people are so accustomed to his serious mode that the jokes can slip by. Henley seems torn at times between his impulses to provoke and preach and the entertainer's natural imperative to please a crowd; it's hard to dig in your heels and bow at the same time.