Beating a drum for the Dnvironment

Don Henley
First he preserued Walden Pond. I{ow in
his ffirt to saue Caddo Lake, Linden's fauorite
son is taking it to the limit orle more time.
by Robert Draper

FE!7 PEOPLE IN THIS IUORLD carry around as much anger as Don

Henley does while managing to submerge it beneath a persona of unaffected cool. I spent a day with the 48-year-old co-founder ofthe Eagles
this pastJune, driving from his residence in Dallas to his native land of
East Texas and back again, listening to him carry on about the world
that we in our ignorance seem bent on destroying-listening to him rant, in effect, but
who could call Don Henley a ranter? His manner of speech was agreeably calm, like his
singing voice, except that it was a great deal lower than his famous rasping tenor and betrayed, in slight curvatures of the vowels, the accenr of his birthplace. He wore a plain
white Tlshirt, black jeans, and shades with round lenses. His hair, wisped back behind
his ears, had probably aken him two minutes to sryle that morning.
On that day, Don Henley looked like someone who has everything he wants and absolutely nothing to prove to the rest of us. And yet here is what he told me as we made
our way east to Marshall, where we would meet up with those he has recruited for the
battle to save his beloved Caddo [ake: "The lake is silting up. It's in grave danger because it's becoming so full of sediment that it's getting shallower, and the sunlight is
penetrating to the bottom-growing too much algae and lily pads, which are sucking all
the oxygen out of the lake, which causes fish to die. There are a lot of problems in the
lake; there are chemical contaminants, heavy metals. But some of the businessmen there
don't want anyone messing around in their part of the country. They call me an outsider. They said, 'Go home.'Well, I amhome."
The rage in Henley's voice stayed at a low simmer beneath his mentholated disposition. t'The more you learn about the environment and what we are doing," he continued, "the more you realb.ethat this world is totally insane. It's hard to go on, knowing
that civilization, according to a lot of experts, only has about four hundred more years,
tops. Meanwhile, people go merrily along with their I-won't-be-here menality. I want to
ask them, 'Then what the hell are you having kids for?' Fake optimism and denial are
dangerous things. The other side of that coin, of course, is cynicism, which is also rampant. People ask, 'S7hat's your agenda here? Is this for more publicity?' Like I need
more publicity. I should be in the recording studio right now. I should be writing songs,
but I'm having rouble writing because I'm so involved in this. I have to go do something like gardening or whitewashing the fence-just something I coNTINUED oN eAGE r40 ]
Goming in lot a landing: Henley once spurned his Dast Texas roots, but now he's baclr horne.
loa

sI PT EMBER l ee

PHOTOGRAPH

8Y IAURA WIISON

Don Flenley
I coNTTNUED FRoM eAGE

roa

] kind of zen

and mindless to get this out of my system. Otherwise the anger and frustration
can be paralyzing. What I want to do is
focus people's attention on the rapidly
declining state of the world's ecosystem.
lJnfortunately, that requires bait, and the
bait is me."

Still, Henley is braced for even more was mecca. Jackson Browne was there
hostility as he develops the Caddo ["ake and Crosby and Nash, and there was
Instirute-which, he says, "is going to be Linda Ronstadt with her short little Daisy
ten times harder than lfalden, because at Mae dress, wearing no shoes and
scratching her ass."

about the environment." The institute

dropped Shiloh and partnered with

finances the teaching of state-of-the-art

ecological preservation techniques to students in East Texas schools. It also offers
scholarships to students and honoraria to
teachers, with the goal that the recipients
will educate other East Texans about the

Glenn Frey; together they formed the basis ofRonsadt's backup band. A year after that, in 1972, Henley and Frey took
off on their own and formed the Eagles,

This is the rudely awakened Don Hen- lake. So far, more than sixty "teacher-

ley, jarringly dissonant with the Don interns" have been through the program.
Henley who has accompanied us in cars
Henley has toned down his approach
and up and down elevators for the past from the confronational Walden lfoods
twenty years. The Eagle has crash- Project days. "\7e're in the educating
landed, a stranger now to a peaceful easy

business," he told me. "S(/'e're not there

feeling. Of course, the sharp teeth be-

to stop anyone's economic livelihood."

But the musician's activist repuation has

neath the songwriter's lyrical kisses have

always been evident. For that matter, the
wildly successful career of his Eagles has
been consistently accompanied by criticism-too slick, too jaded, too self-inter-

preceded him, and the aims of the Caddo

lake Institute have aroused suspicions in
his native region. In attempting to rescue

Caddo Lake, Don Henley has tried to

ested-and the historical record will prove that he could come home again.
reflect that Henley then, as now, didn't The problem is, home wasn't that welgive a damn what his detractors thought.

But Don Henley very much gives

coming for Henley the first time around.

(Jntil recently, there was no reason to
believe that Don Henley gave much of a
damn about Texas. To the media, he de-

damn about cerain things. From his own

pocket, he has poured several hundred
thousand dollars into environmental scribed his life in Linden, thirty miles
causes-ranging from the Santa Monica north of Caddo [ake, the way one would

Mountains Conservancy, which has

fought to protect wildlife corridors in
Southern California, to the Save Our
Springs Coalition in Austin, where Barton Springs has been jeopardized. Henley's notoriety as an environmentalist
peaked in 1990, when he founded the
Walden !7oods Project and took it upon
himself to save Henry David Thoreau's

mythologized pond outside of Boston

from corporate development. Largely
through the staging of music benefits,
Henley succeeded in raising the f8 million necessary to purchase the nineteen
acres so it could remain in public use.
The dollar figures personally committed or raised by Henley barely hint at the

depths of his devotion. He has never

been one to merely drop checks in the
mailbox. Over the years, Henley has be-

least New England is fairly enlightened

talk about boot camp: It toughened him,

taught him a few life lessons, and otherwise he was glad as hell to be shut of it.
His is the familiar story of the ridiculed
Gxas kid liberal, circa 1965. Henley remembers vividly the high school football
coach who hounded him into quitting the

team-which, as 6te would have it, compelled him to join the high school band,
choosing trombone first, but abandoning
that insrument when classmates pointed
out to him his tendency to drum on his
textbooks. He remembers the rednecks
at Stephen F. Austin State College who
aunted him for having hair that touched
his ears. ("I had to defend myself practically every day from people who wanted
to beat the crap out of me," he says.) He
remembers the gun he and his various
Texas bandmates kept in their road vehi-

come a master of the 6x communiqu6,

the well-saged press conference, and the

year later, Henley

It Easy."
Henley's band would go on to earn four
Grammy awards, sell 90 million records,
and during the seventies, snort enough
cocaine and avail themselves of enough
cutting the instant hit "Take

groupies to make I*dZeppelin look like

the Carpenters. To Don Henley, balladeer of life in the fast lane, East Texas
could not have been more than a {lyspeck
in his rearview mirror-assuming he
bothered to look back.

But he did, now and again. Even before his move to California, an epiphany
took hold of Henley when he spent much
of 1969 in Linden helping to care for his
father, who was dying of heart disease.
Angered by his father's suffering, the
young musician took refuge in the writings of Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emer-

son. He also revisited Caddo Lake,

where his father had aken him fishing as

a young boy. He returned to Potters

Point on the lake, where he had caught
his first bass, using a pearl shad underwa-

ter lure. Among the cypress and the

Spanish moss and the duckweed enrobing that most exotic of Texas lakes, Don
Henley's bitterness toward God and East
Texas dissipated. As he would later tell
me, "I found some intimations of immortality in nature. I don't experience God
listening to a guy yell while I'm sitting in
a pew. I see God in Caddo [ake."

In turn, Henley could identify with

the

moody character of the lake in a way that

he could never relate to his fellow East
Texans. For beneath the rock star's effortless sheen, there was always a murky

quality to the man. Though by East

Texas standards he must have seemed an

iconoclast, the working-class background

of his parents-his father an auto parts
dealer, his mother a schoolteacher-bred

cle to ward off the tire-chain-wielding

thugs who followed them out of the into Henley a work ethic uncommon
protracted cat-and-mouse litigation en- dance halls; he remembers as well the among musicians, not to mention a disdemic to development wars. That is to night the police pulled his band over for dain for elitists that persisted even as he
say, he has become a presence, and in so speeding, found the gun in the glove later fell into their ranks. His lyrics were
doing, he has tweaked America's long- compartment, and whisked them off to self-mocking, excoriating the decadence
standing ambivalence toward politically jail, where they were treated to a night's of tawdry romance ("Hotel California")
active celebrities. Though Henley has worth of "You got 'em in the wrong jail, and glittery drugs ("Life in the Fast
picked his spots, confining his activism to

a subject in which he is well schooled,

there are an awfi.rl lot of people who wish
he would keep his mouth shut when he's
not using it to sing. Henley doesn't think
this is altogether fair. "Why can't rock
and roll musicians be citizens too?" he
told me. "Thoreau loved music! rVhat's
the problem here?"
I4O

sEPTEMBER I 99

'

Bob! I7omen's jail is down the street!"

After Kenny Rogers discovered Henley's band Shiloh playing in a Dallas bar
on McKinney Avenue in 1970, Henley
told Gxas to eat his dust and moved to
lns Angeles. That year he stepped into
L.A.'s storied coffeehouse, the Tfoubadour, for the first time. For the 23-yearold East Texas boy, he remembers, "it

Lane") that had become his home away

from home. Fittinglg as the Eagles' lead
singer and drummer, Henley was metaphorically both front man and common
man, unable to reconcile the two.
Nature would become Henley's spiritual balm over the years, yet not in the
obvious ways. He was hardly the classic
outdoorsman: He never hunted, never

learned to fy-fish, and didn't climb

mountains. His ttcountryt' residences
were not in Montana or Idaho but in
Malibu and Woody Creek, Colorado,
a few miles outside Aspen. Though
Caddo Lake shimmered in his consciousness throughout the seventies and eighties, Henley was not a frequent visitor.

But when he did return, the environs

helped him come to terms with its people. Gradually he stopped bad-mouthing
Linden to the press. Eventually he donated money to his old high school. The
Linden townsfolk showed their appreciation by moving to put a sign reading
"Hometown of Don Henley" on the
courthouse square. Henley persuaded
them not to do so. The place was beautiful by itself, he argued. Why sully it with
human vanity?

It

just

as well: Henley hadn't yet

mellowed enough to achieve favorite-son
was

status. True, he would move back to

Texas in 1994, and in 1995 he would
marry Sharon Summerall , the 32-yearold retired model from Dallas the lifelong bachelor had met two years earlier
at the arrangement of a mutual friend,
music agent Angus Wynne. Tiue, he
brought health-food chefs and exercise
trainers with him on a recent concert
tour. But to a few East Texans, Don
Henley looked like the rabble-rouser of
old. After the Jefferson Independent
School District board of trustees learned
that Henley had pressed then-governor
Ann Richards to award Caddo lake protection from development under the Outsanding Natural Resource'Waters provisions, the board's president, local oil
driller David McKnight, persuaded the
trustees to toss the Caddo Lake Institute's program out ofJefferson's public
schools. McKnight says Henley's appeal
to Richards made him suspect that "there
was more to this program of Henley's
than met the eye"-meaning that beneath

the institute's educational trappings

lurked an anti-development agenda.
But, says McKnight, "I'm not knocking Henley's program. It has got its
good points. !Ue'd be willing to recon-

everyone in the Terrell restaurant lined

up to get Henley's autograPh.) fater we
took a turn through Tool, a little town

where his wife's 99-year-old grandmother still resides. In Daingerfield,

Henley showed me the site of his dad's
auto Pafts store.
\7hen we arrived in Marshall, Henley
met with a dozen or so Caddo lake Institute teacher-interns who had made

films of their lake research that would

later be presented at the international
wetlands seminar in Hungary and the
Czech Republic. The homemade films,

to put it kindly, were not ready for

MTV, but the participants were earnest,
and they were clearly in awe of their
benefactor. Their lifestyles were a world

apart from his, but out here in East

Texas, they shared with him the same
quiet struggle for meaning. And now
they were at work saving a lake, taking
and examining water samples, applying
geographic information studies and remote infrared sensing and other technology previously unknown to them. Now
they were part of something bigger than
whatever had once preoccupied them.

Henley sensed all of this. He sat

through the two-hour presentation with
the same patient expression, proclaiming when the classroom lights at last
came back on, ttYoutre further along

I could have hoped."

He promised
them some help in video editing. The
teacher-interns thanked him profusely.
A woman near tears told Henley, "I
can't tell you what this program has
meant to my students-and," she added
unabashedly, "to my life."
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Henley nodded, replying graciously,

"S7ell, I appreciate the work you've
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His cheeks reddened somewhat, and he

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looked down at his hands folded on the

conference table. Don Henley seemed
humbled. Maybe he couldn't save Caddo
lake, and maybe, as some said, it didn't
need saving anryay But he was, perhaps
to his embarrassment, saving some of his
people. And when we departed Marshall

sider bringing it into our schools if that afternoon, Henley took the long
he wants to visit with us about it." Mc- way back-through Linden, past the old
Knight's message is obvious: To win the shack where his first rock band had
Jefferson school district's support for the practiced; past the roller-skating rink by
Caddo lake Institute's program, Henley a pond where the kids skated at night,
the residue of firefies aglow on their
will have to check his rage at the door.
Henley has kept his cool-which is not skatesl the spot on the road where his
to say (to paraphrase yet another of his trumpet-playing bandmate was run over
songs) that he will go quietly. That this by a car while Henley and the other
is his home, and thus an area to which
he stakes a rightful claim, was evident
every minute of the day I spent with him.
He knows the roads of East Gxas like
his own lyrics. We stopped in TLrrell at
a barbecue joint he favors. (Yes, Henley
draws the ecological line in the sand at
the barbecue pit. And, yes, practically

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band members looked on in horrorl past

the American Legion hall where hundreds of country teenagers had focked
to hear young Don Henley sing; and

finally, past the modest little house

where the boy had spent his days drumming restlessly on the furniture, imagining a way out of town. I
T E X A s M o N T H I- Y

I.3