J.D. Souther on How He Helped Write All Those Eagles Songs: The Lost Interview

At New York’s City Winery two years ago, both sides of the late J.D. Souther were on display. In a tidy dressing room backstage, Souther, looking like a dapper Old West ranch owner in his tailored suit and white hair and whiskers, was regaling a few visitors with stories. Among them were several women who were longtime fans of the songs he wrote with, or for, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt — and of the charismatic Souther himself. It wasn’t hard to see why: Adhering to his legend, Souther remained, at 76, an old-school charmer, a chiseled-faced gentleman with an alluring twinkle in his eye.

But as a reminder that he was more complicated than someone linked with mellow L.A. rock, Souther could also be prickly and a bit ornery. When he mentioned he was working on a book of vignettes about his songs, he was asked if it were a memoir. In an instant, his face grew gaunt, the eyes steely. “All anyone wants to know is who you slept with,” he sniped. “I don’t do that that.” The case was undeniably closed.

Born in Detroit but raised largely in Texas, Souther, who died on Sept. 17 at his home in New Mexico of undisclosed causes, didn’t adhere to many stereotypes. He was the son of a big-band singer, and thanks to the music store his father eventually ran, he became adept at drums and woodwinds as a kid. In the late Sixties, he met Glenn Frey — they were dating sisters, one of whom would become Souther’s first wife — and the two became roommates and partners in songwriting and potential stardom, eventually forming the short-lived, early country-rock duo Longbranch Pennywhistle.

The same year that Frey launched the Eagles, Souther started his own career, but his name would soon appear in the credits of the band’s albums as a co-writer of “New Kid in Town,” “The Best of My Love,” “The Sad Café,” “Victim of Love,” and a few more. Those songs and the records made by the Eagles and Ronstadt, Souther’s then-girlfriend, moved box-loads of LPs and came to define an era. “Henley was a blues singer from east Texas,” Souther told RS in 2016. “I was a jazz kid from the High Plains. Linda was from Tucson. Jackson was really the only L.A. guy. The fact that we get credit for creating a Southern California sound is a constant form of amusement to us.”
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Famous musicians can be both public and private, but few balanced the two like Souther. Everyone knew the songs he composed or had a hand in writing, which also included “Faithless Love” and “Simple Man, Simple Dream” for Ronstadt and his only hit on his own, the Roy Orbison-inspired “You’re Only Lovely.” Maybe they remembered his one begrudging shot at rock stardom, when he agreed with David Geffen’s plan to be part of an ersatz-Crosby, Stills & Nash combo with former Poco founder Richie Furay and ex-Byrd Chris Hillman, a band that only made two albums before crumbling. They might have also known him as an actor: as seductive environmentalist John Dunaway in thirtysomething or in Steven Spielberg’s Always or My Girl 2. Or, to his irritation, they might have known him for his past girlfriends, which included Ronstadt, Stevie Nicks, and the late Judee Sill, who called him “a bandit and a heartbreaker” in her song “Jesus Was a Crossmaker.”

But from his garb (no Nudie suits, he would say) to his penchant for jazz and standards, Souther often seemed removed from the crowd he was most associated with. He was part of an early rehearsal for the Eagles but opted not to join. As a writer for Crawdaddy observed during Souther-Hillman-Furay Band rehearsals, Souther stormed out of the room when Furay suggested a tweak in the arrangement of one of Souther’s songs. On the cover of You’re Only Lonely, he hid his face. He was both bemused and stunned when fans of thirtysomething or Nashville, the TV drama in which he had a recurring role as country-music wiseman Watty White, would approach him in supermarkets and treat him as if he were actually that character. To Rolling Stone in 2012, he recalled his experience on thirtysomething, when his Dunaway character was that close to having an affair with the married Hope. “At first the audience was rooting for us,” he said. “And as soon as we actually kissed, it was, ‘No, she’s pregnant! You can’t do that!’” People would approach him in public and accost him, as if he actually were Dunaway.
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Asked once why he went from being called John David to J.D., Souther said he was partly inspired by J.D. Salinger, and the allusion didn’t seem accidental. After 1979’s “You’re Only Lonely” finally gave him a Top 40 hit, he came to resent the attention and didn’t release another album for five years. After that, he was out of the spotlight for more than 20 years (helped, no doubt, by his Eagles royalty checks, the size of which he always joked), eventually moving from L.A. to Nashville and only resuming his recording career with 2008’s If the World Was You. That album, and 2015’s even more eclectic Tenderness, were more rooted in supper-club jazz and a new Great American Songbook than anything remotely close to the Eagles. But they added few more songs, like “I’ll Be Here at Closing Time,” to a repertoire that includes not just the hits everyone knew but “Go Ahead and Rain,” “Silver Blue,” “Prisoner in Disguise,” “Your Turn Now,” “The Last in Love,” and “If You Have Crying Eyes,” all of which deserve to be better known than they are.

At the City Winery show, Souther was happy to sing the songs everyone knew and tell amusing stories about them, since he was also proud of the ones that made the radio. In 2016, when Rolling Stone was compiling a special issue devoted to the Eagles after Frey’s death that year, he talked about the creation of those songs. A portion of that conversation was included in the issue, but here, for the first time, are Souther’s complete comments on those legendary collaborations.

Let’s start with one of your earliest Eagles collaborations, “Doolin-Dalton,” co-written with Frey, Henley, and Jackson Browne on Desperado. What about an outlaw gang appealed to you all?
I don’t remember which song came first, though Don said recently that he had the idea of Desperado in his head for a while before he showed it to Glenn. A lot of the mythology about outlaws was and is still irresistible for young men of a certain mindset. What I do remember clearly was all four of us poring over the pictures in a big book about post-Civil War outlaws. As was the fashion then, the bodies of the shot or hanged outlaws were publicly displayed, either stood upright in coffins or just lined up, hands tied, lying in the street, presumably for the amusement and reassurance of the citizenry and the aggrandizement of those who caught them.

The audacity of Bill Doolan’s idea … or Jesse’s or Bob’s — the stories vary … to rob two “Yankee” banks in one day was an irresistible analogue for us ambitious young rounders and the story and picture of the gang stone cold and all trussed and on review was plenty of juice for the song, maybe the whole album… and also the picture on the album back cover. The musicians have all been vanquished by the establishment. Very broad strokes, but you get the idea.

You also co-wrote “James Dean” with them for On the Border.
James Dean was cool. Period. I don’t remember any personal nostalgia for the Fifties other than the fact that at one time or another Glenn, Jackson, and I all owned ’55 Chevys. Dean was a great actor whose career was cut short by dying in one of the coolest cars ever made — a Porsche Spyder on the way home from a racetrack in an accident that was not his fault. Another irresistible story that needed a song. Jackson started it and we all clambered aboard on first hearing. 

[In their early days in L.A] Jackson lived in the apartment downstairs from where Glenn and I lived. It was one room and one window you could open. I learned a lot about songwriting from Jackson. He had such a diligence about refining a single aspect of a song, working on the same lines over and over.  He’d play it so many times I would want to throttle him. But it worked. It always ended up being the very best version of that phrase or line. It was a real lesson in patience and application of a real work ethic.

Talk about your role in “The Best of My Love.”
As I recall, I was playing backgammon and gambling at [producer] Peter Asher’s house and either got a call or returned a message to Don, who just said: “Hey, man, can you come to London?”

         I said, “Sure, when?”

         “Now.”

         “Okay, see you tomorrow.”

Such were the times. Traveling was easier back then. I flew over the next day, heard the song as far as they had it, wrote the bridge, and, according to Don, whose memory is usually more acute than mine, tweaked the verse lyrics with the boys a little. After a day or two, I flew back to L.A. I didn’t hear it again until it was mixed, but I remember very distinctly the immense pleasure of watching radio station WKMI in Kalamazoo, Michigan — courtesy of Jim Higgs, then program director and later mayor of Kalamazoo! — make “The Best of My Love” a hit record by just playing it over and over from the album. People requested it, more spins, and there you go. Someone in promotion at Asylum — which may have been Elektra/Asylum by then — had told us it could never be a single: too long, too slow, steel guitar, not enough drums, blah-blah. It was the Eagles’ first Number One single. It’s a pretty song that feels true, has a beautiful chorus with those amazing harmonies, and Don, as always, nailed the vocal.

What or who inspired “New Kid in Town”?
I’ve heard it was supposed to be about Bruce [Springsteen], but that was bullshit. I had the chorus to “New Kid in Town” for maybe a year, had even been jamming it in my band with a more Cuban feel. I had a feeling the bridge should go to the five chord, as in “Save the Last Dance for Me” by Doc Pomus and Mort Schuman, but had no idea how to begin the story. When they were gathering material for the Hotel California album, I took it over to Glenn’s house and played it for him and Don and said something like, “So … what now?” I think Glenn said, “That could be our first single, John David. Let’s do it.” We were approaching 30 and could see that the rear-view mirror was full of newcomers as hungry as we had been. The gunfighter analogy works here too. Don, as ever, detailed it to the nines and it’s an amazing vocal by Glenn.

I’ve read that the phrase “Victim of Love” started with you.  
I have heard this title credited to me before, but so many phrases, titles, and notions that ended up in our songs were part of our conversations and observations that I have to say here that all these songs are a group effort. The whole was always greater than the sum of the parts. I didn’t hear the guys cut the track but remember being upstairs in the studio working on lyrics while Bill Szymczyk was mixing something downstairs at the board.  

“How Long,” a song from your first album that was much later recut by the Eagles, was an anti-war song?
War is a poison that our species to date has not been able to inoculate against. I heard a story in 1969 about a soldier who was drafted, went to the horror show of Vietnam, and served honorably, but near the end of his tour got drunk and was AWOL for a few hours before he stumbled back onto base. As the story went, there was a fight with MPs who detained him and one was killed. He was sentenced to life in military prison (or so the story went) and his girlfriend at home had been counting down the days until he returned. He never did. How long?

Nearly 40 years later Cindy [Frey’s wife] was watching an Eagles performance of the song on YouTube. She said, “Glenn, what’s this?” And he said, “J.D. wrote that and we used to do it.” And she said, “Did you ever record it?” And he said, “No. In those days we’d write songs together and if one person put it on an album, the other person didn’t.” She said, “It sounds like a classic Eagles hit.” Thank you, Cindy. I can’t tell you how much I miss Glenn. 

What was your contribution to “Heartache Tonight,” given it had four writers: yourself, Henley, Frey, and Bob Seger?
We all seem to remember something slightly different about the process of this little song, but that’s because we are all involved but not always at the same time and place. Here’s what happened. Glenn and I were listening to Sam Cooke records at my house above Sunset Plaza in the hills. It had a magnificent view and we stopped to make coffee, have a smoke, walk around the pool … something. We were talking about those great Sam Cooke shuffles and Glenn started clapping his hands and singing and I joined in. We walked around looking out over Hollywood as the evening lit up, clapping or finger snapping on two and four and trying things until the first verse felt right.

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Glenn showed it to Don and they polished the verses until it had everything we needed except … a chorus! Glenn played it for Seger, and he wrote the chorus. Joe Walsh brought that intro and brilliant slide guitar of his. Writing songs with those dear friends was fun, competitive, frustrating, illuminating, edgy, satisfying, but never dull. The only thing predictable was that we would stay at it until it was right.  

Was there a particular event in “The Sad Café,” from The Long Run, that inspired such a melancholy song about the L.A. scene?  
“The Sad Café” is, more than anything else, about losing your innocence, our innocence. It’s a real place and still favorite restaurant, Dan Tana’s, where for years we huddled in the back booth and schemed, dreamed, laughed more than seems possible, and bore witness to each other the loss of comrades along the way. The era wasn’t changing any more than the brutish ticking of every clock allows. We were just growing up and there is a melancholy that accompanies aging. I love this song and still get a lump in my throat when I sing it.