"Everybody's so busy and caught up in their careers and stuff that we all don't hang out much anymore," confirms Don. "The old gang's kind of split up. It's not the same. I guess it had to happen."

"I kinda felt that part of the Eagles feeling has always been one of being self-reliant," adds Glenn. "You do have to strike a balance, like Don says." "We had a backlash in the seventies, too much the other way," continues Don. "Everything always swings to these extremes, and now we're just kind of waiting for it to get in the middle somewhere. We all felt like it was time to get serious. We'd hung out in front of the Troubadour and got drunk on tequila long enough, and if we were gonna do this trip, we'd better get serious about it. So we got real serious about it!"

Glenn lowers his voice and talks quietly, intently: "Southern California looks like nowhere else that I've been. . . . the desert, the sea, the mountains. It's what Carlos Castenada calls a power spot. And this has been one of our power spots. Joshua Tree National Monument is another one of our power spots." Don Henley explained: "Well, we all came from the midwest and places like that, so when I got here, I felt a tremendous sense of freedom. Nobody hassled me about my hair, what I dressed like or anything. This city is not like a city to me, it's more a bunch of suburbs jammed together. We definitely felt a lot of energy here because all the people that we looked up to were out here making music and stuff. All the managers were out here. It was the hub of the music industry. Just like Hollywood's the hub of the movie industry. If you wanted to do that, this is the place you came to."

In the old days there was a close consciousness between other songwriters— Jackson Browne, Ned Doheny, John David Souther. Glenn feels: "I think that had a lot to do with pre-success, the fact that we were able to be conspirators because we had the luxury of time. I mean, we didn't have anything happening career-wise, so we spent all of our waking hours and all of our time together trying to figure out how we were gonna break out of this, how we were gonna engineer our conspiracy and burst upon the scene. Then of course as soon as that happened, we were able to stay in touch up until about the middle of On The Border, and then it was just to the point where J.D. had joined the SHF band, Jackson had put out three albums, this was our third, and our careers took over. So we lost, in some ways, our sense of conspiracy. Then I think the Eagles became the center of our conspiracy."

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