“I figured out a long time ago, when my father got sick and died, that life wasn’t fair,” he said, “but I got mad about it. C J Henley’s death was pivotal to Don’s world view. He was a hard-working man who saved 25 cents a week for Henley’s college fund, and ultimately Henley did not complete his education. Don always felt he had to prove something to him.” And his father would have to come down on him.
“Not that he didn’t respect her, he just always did what he wanted. “Mrs Henley was a real fine lady, but she never had any control over Don,” Bowden told Rolling Stone magazine when they profiled the band in 1976. Henley and Bowden had grown up together in a town in Texas called Linden, which had a population of just over 2,000. When he solves one problem, he just moves on to something else to worry about’.” His oldest friend, a musician called Richard Bowden, who was better known as Balloon Dick, remembered: “Joe Walsh came up to me just after he’d joined The Eagles and said: ‘You’ve known him the longest.
Even when the band were making millions of dollars and he’d shared a house in the Hollywood Hills (that used to belong to film star Dorothy Lamour) with Glenn Frey, and they’d sit and look at the whole of Los Angeles spread out before them and think: ‘It really doesn’t get much better than this’, he would be worrying about something or other.
