The Long Run
For Don Felder, the bomb went off during the second weekend of August 1969. He and 500,000-odd other freaks, dropouts and rock’n’rollers had descended on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival, the point where the burgeoning counter-culture reached critical mass. They say if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there. But Felder remembers the 60s, and he especially remembers Woodstock.
“I was there,” he says. “I saw Jimi, I saw Janis, Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Hundreds of thousands of people just having a great time. It was the biggest explosion in the history of American music. The debris was cast up into the atmosphere and around the world. Woodstock infected the entire planet. Everything that came after it was a result of that contamination.”
If he sounds like an evangelist for rock’n’roll, that’s because he is. And one who hauled himself out of poverty to play his own significant part in this ongoing revolution at that. He’s part of an astonishing yet unsung cluster of musicians from Southern Florida who emerged at the same time and went on to alter the course of music in their own unique ways. He was the guitarist brought into the Eagles to give them a rock’n’roll edge, and the man who sparked off the song that would assure them of immortality, before not one but two bitter splits left him out in the cold.
Today, 50 years after the Woodstock Big Bang, Felder remains a true believer. His new album, , celebrates what he sees as one of the great modern art forms. The cast of A-list guests
