About the Fastlane 4
The Wasted Times
So let's back up a little. When Glenn got sick in the middle of the Hell Freezes Over tour, we were all concerned for him. We even had our students send him get well cards. We were also a bit concerned about our community. Without the band, would our little online group fall apart? What would we have to talk about? We were a pretty tight knit group in those early days. We had a bunch of inside jokes and thought we were pretty funny. There are probably some people reading this today that might still remember "wumpf my teef" and "SCUM!" and "Badfan!" And if you don't, I don't know that we could explain them to you at this point in a way that would make sense.
The inspiration for the Fastlane
Lisa had been a long time subscriber to Beatles and McCartney fanzines....the kind that were meticulously typed out and photocopied. We thought we could do something similar with the Eagles. We weren't thinking at that time that we'd report on Eagles news (remember, we didn't know if there would ever be Eagles news again. There seems to have been some band tension during that down time, probably just due to miscommunication, but things were tense. Since that's water under the bridge, that's all we'll say here at this point). We just thought we could be silly and clever and have fun with our inside jokes. So...we figured out how to make a fanzine. In case a hipster is reading this and wants to go old-school, here's what you do....
1. Get an inkjet printer and/or photo copy machine
2. Cut out photo-copied pictures and write short articles and humor pieces. Print those out too.
3. Attach them with rubber cement to 11 x 17 paper that you've folded in half to make a book.
5. Take your mock-up to Kinkos (that would be FedEx Office for you youngsters) and make about 40 or 50 copies.
6. Take about an hour to stack and fold the copies. Write out addresses and put stamps on them and stick them in the mail to your friends.
We got better over the years. If you look at the old copies, you'll see that we learned to word process (some nice person who I think was named Hank gave us a copy of Microsoft Publisher and a clip art collection). As technology improved, so did we. We got a scanner and a Snappy (something you could hook up to the tv to take photo stills). As word got around, we realized we couldn't continue to publish this for free, so we sold subscriptions. At it's peak, we had about 300 subscribers (some of them band family members). We started out doing monthly issues and then went to one every other month.
This was the old apartment in McAllen , Texas. where many of the first WTs were produced. The posters are covering gang grafitti that is bleeding through the paint on the wall. Remember, we were struggling teachers and didn't have a lot of money.
Making the WT was fun. It was hard work and it was frustrating at times, but we love how it brought everyone together. People would send us articles and photos. We raised money for Walden Woods and Grass Roots Aspen and Caddo Lake. We still have some original artwork made by professional cartoonists and people's kids. It was a total labor of love.
Flipping back through those pages now, there's so much history in them.....Awards the band got in the 90s (like the time, Timothy just decided on his own that he was going to go to the American Music Awards), the birth of Eagle children, the destruction of Don's home from the Northridge Earthquake, comments the band made about getting back together and breaking up, tons of concert reviews and even recipes. It's all in there. We hope that we made people happy with it.
People always want to know if the band knew what we were doing. As I said, there were a few band family members who actually subscribed. After our aquaintance who worked with the band told us he was hurt that we had never sent him a copy, we started sending one regularly to his office. It think at one point he said it was "cute and clever" or something like that. After we met Irving Azoff in Lafayette, LA, in 1995, we started sending copies to his office as well. We also gave a stack of them to Don Henley the first time that we met him. It was at a Walden Woods print signing at a Deck the Walls in Houston. We didn't have any money, so a friend purchased a print and we got to go pick it up for her (She lived in Memphis). We inched up to the front of the line and as Don was signing the print, we thrust an envelope of them into his hands. We told him it was a little something...something he could read when he had some free time, like in the bathroom. Mortified, we left when his assistant / body man Tony thanked us for coming and ushered us towards the door.
There are two things that we didn't share with the band, though. One was our Christmas issues. These were audio. I'm sure the idea came from the Beatles community as well. We'd put together a "set-list" of bootleg recordings and then spend hours duplicating them ON CASSETTE. The ultimate mix-tape, if you will. I think some of those still exist around here. That was probably a better gift than the time we cut apart plaid fabric and glued it inside issues to tell subscribers they were getting pieces of Henley's shirt. (So many people thought it was real!). The other thing that we didn't share was the Wedding Issue. This went out to only a few select friends. Remember...we were twenty and a whole group of us were feeling a little down that Henley was being taken off the market. So we vented and wrote some poems and created a commemorative issue. Hopefully those never see the light of day because we feel really bad about it now. I guess we also feel a little bad for joking about Glenn's health problems (hindsight being 20/20). At the time, though, he was joking about it too. He talked about things like needing more fiber in his diet and stuff like that so we just went with it. We'd give everything now to be able to apologize, or take it back, or keep joking right along with him.
Anyway...the WT eventually had to come to an end. As the Internet got better, it became impossible to keep up with the news. By the time we could put it in a fanzine and mail it out, information was no longer news. People were posting their own reviews and pictures, so we figured we'd have to change with the times.
That's when the Fastlane was born....
In case you weren't a subscriber, you might want to check out the issues of the Wasted Times. We're in the process of archiving them.