DON FELDER was 28 when he wrote Hotel California, sitting on a couch of his Malibu beach house, still wet from the ocean, strumming dreamily on his 12-string guitar, looking, as was once remarked, like Jesus Christ after a month in Palm Springs. He is 60 now, and still hears the song quite often - on the radio and during TV shows, floating from speakers in cars, bars and stores: "On a dark desert highway "

That famous opening takes Felder back to his years as guitarist in The Eagles - the ecstasy and agony that came with being a member of the most successful group America has ever produced, and one of the most turbulent. He remembers the drugs and women, the fights and late nights, and would prefer to forget those days when he woke with brandy on his breath and sex on his conscience.

"If I had to do it all over again," he muses, "I would probably try to show a great deal more restraint."

We are talking in Felder's bedroom in The Old Course Hotel, St Andrews. A regular on the pro-celebrity golf scene, he is in Scotland for the Dunhill championship. He discovered golf back in the 1970s as a way of escaping temporarily from the drugs, egos and creative tensions that went with making Eagles records. Back then, Felder regarded hotels as prisons-cum-playrooms; it wasn't unknown for one of his bandmates to come through the wall with a chainsaw. Now, however, he apologises for the mess, even though his room is really tidy, and slips off his golf shoes with a small grunt of delight. "Please excuse the informality."

Making tea, he recalls the time in 1977 - the year the single Hotel California reached No 1 in the US Billboard chart - when The Eagles played the Glasgow Apollo and stayed at the Turnberry Hotel. He had a grand piano in his room, and none of the other Eagles had anything so flash. That was the kind of one-upmanship they enjoyed during their 1970s pomp - teasing with an undercurrent of real antagonism.

On the inside cover of the Hotel California album, Felder looks like a louche lion in a Panama hat. Now, wearing a black flat cap over short grey curls, he seems courteous, earnest, articulate and confident. In other words, a typical rich middle-aged American on holiday in Yoorp. Indeed, it's hard to believe that he was ever a rock star. It's almost as if the real Don Felder, the one who played guitar with coke round his nostrils and bedded sexually adventurous young Texans, has sent some vacationing business exec to answer questions on his behalf. I half expect him to illustrate his carnal and narcotic anecdotes using PowerPoint.

Yet Felder is the living embodiment of the American dream and knows it. "My story," he says, "is how a kid that's born into really destitute poverty on a little dirt road in Florida winds up in one of the largest bands in history. It was a very long hard struggle from the streets of Gainesville to the streets of Hollywood."

He joined The Eagles in 1974 at the age of 27. They'd had a few hits by that point, but their second album Desperado hadn't performed well and it seemed they might have run out of steam. Three years later, they were selling a million LPs each month, winning over the world with smooth, melodic Americana.

Glenn Frey of The Eagles once summed up their life on the road as "got crazy, got drunk, got high, had girls, played music and made money". In his memoir, Heaven And Hell, and during our conversation, Felder goes into more detail. Drugs, he says, helped the band at first, "taking down a lot of personal defences and walls between each other" and bringing them together to party and write songs. But later, he says, cocaine-fuelled paranoia, soured relationships and caused the music to become "inhumanly flawless" and sterile.

Heaven And Hell is the first time a member of The Eagles has given such a raw and detailed account of life with the band. It is already a controversial book. Due out in America this month, it has been pulped by the publisher Hyperion for unspecified "legal reasons". Felder himself seems unwilling to say what happened but is confident that his book will find another US distributor.

There has been speculation in the media and on the internet that members of The Eagles were unhappy with the book, which would not be surprising given his eyewitness account of their excesses. He is especially candid about the groupie scene around The Eagles - "the barrage of pussy", to use his unpleasant phrase, that they enjoyed on tour. The after-show party was known as The Third Encore, and the road crew handed out special 3E buttons to women judged attractive enough to come back to the hotel. Once there, Quaaludes were available for whoever wanted them. Sometimes a suite was set aside for group sex. Afterwards, the women were taken home by limo.

This whole scenario seems so controlled and ritualised that it surely can't just have been about meeting the sexual needs of the band. On some level was it also about a bunch of rich young men expressing their power?

Felder mulls this over. "Being on the road has about two-and-a-half hours a day that are really great, and that's when you're on stage," he replies. "The other 21-and-a-half hours are very boring - sitting in a hotel room by yourself, or in a car, a plane, backstage somewhere. It becomes like a void, and we chose to fill it with all the wrong things. And also part of it is that image you have in your mind of what a huge rock'n'roll band is supposed to do. Drinking, drugging and chasing women were what we were supposed to do."

Was he ever concerned, though, that promiscuity on such an epic scale was degrading both for the women and himself? "Well, I have a lot of guilt about that," he says. "I am torn between feelings of guilt and embarrassment looking back at what I did in my foolish youth, and on the other side of the fence knowing that the women are delighted to have been part of a historic scene. I have never heard any complaints from any of the women who were around the band that they were mistreated or in any way degraded. It was the time and the moment - a hold-over from the flower-power and love-child 1960s mentality."

Felder had been married since 1971. By the mid-1970s he and his wife Susan had a couple of small children. He says that every time he slept with a groupie he was left feeling cold, empty and guilty. So why keep doing it? "Like I said, the void. And it's just part of the lifestyle. As much as I didn't like it, and feel embarrassed that I did it, I kept getting drawn back into it. It was hard. I was the only married guy in the band." He pauses and, chuckling, corrects himself. "Well, Randy was married "

It's impossible to overstate just how rich and successful The Eagles were. The greatest hits album issued in 1976 is apparently the biggest-selling record of the 20th century. The album Hotel California, released that same year - at a time when the band were earning $1.50 for every LP sold - has since shifted 17 million copies.

The central songwriting team of Don Henley and Glenn Frey became known to associated band and crew as "The Gods", and indeed there was something omnipotent about the way The Eagles conducted themselves; Henley would pay for a private jet to pick up his girlfriend Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, but would also concern himself with making sure the toilet roll in the recording studio bathroom was positioned correctly on the holder.

Felder had grown up dirt poor in the deep south and didn't feel he deserved this sudden wealth. "Y'know," he says, "I remember my father telling me that he had worked during the depression, all day long, laying bricks in the street around Gainesville's court house. He would make 10 cents a day on his hands and knees, and you could buy a loaf of bread for five cents. So when this money started coming to me it was a miracle. But at the same time I had a great deal of reservation and caution about how that was managed."

He knew that The Eagles could split up at any time. In some ways they were the archetypal Californian band, not least because they were riven by an internal fracture to rival the San Andreas fault. On Felder's first day in the studio he could already see the cracks. The problem, he says, was that The Eagles had begun as a democracy in which every member contributed two songs to the albums, but gradually became a duumvirate led by Henley and Frey. This angered the other musicians, who felt they were being squeezed out of the creative process.

Bernie Leadon, responsible for the country sound of the first two records, quit in 1975 after a band meeting got out of hand and he poured a beer over Glenn Frey's head. Bassist Randy Meisner was the next to leave; Felder says that Meisner and Frey began brawling during the intermission of a show in 1977. Felder had his own run-ins with Frey, whom he says had a need to humiliate others in order to make himself feel superior. One day, feeling pushed too far, Felder followed Frey into the bathroom, threw him up against the wall and threatened to break his nose.

The real crunch came on July 31, 1980, when The Eagles performed at Long Beach Arena, a benefit concert for the re-election of Senator Alan Cranston. Felder says he wasn't comfortable with aligning himself with a politician, and that when he met the senator's wife before the show, his mystification about who she was, was perceived by Frey to be hostility. He says that Frey started yelling at him and just before they went on stage he, in turn, cursed at the singer.

During the performance, says Felder, Frey started threatening him - "F*** you. I'm gonna kick your ass when we get off-stage" - and counting down how many songs were left until their fight. Felder, drunk and angry, did not back down. "I really wish we could have handled it differently," he says now, "but we were at a point where we started going back and forth and drinking on stage, and it just escalated."

The relationships between band members had deteriorated to the point where they couldn't stand to be around each other any longer. This was the last concert The Eagles played together until 1994, tempted by the $300 million they stood to earn from a reunion tour.

Felder is interesting when talking about his relationship with Frey and Henley. A couple of times in the book he compares himself to a battered wife - financially and emotionally dependent. He sees his relationship with the songwriters as being essentially abusive.

"Well, it goes back to me being abused as a child," he says. "Not sexually abused. But my father believed that a great lashing with the belt was the best way to teach a child the best way between right and wrong. I was whipped with the belt and always felt guilty about what I had done, and so, growing up, that sort of abuse was part of my life. I didn't realise it until my father and I came to blows. He came home one day, I think when I was about 17 or 18, and tried to whip me. I knocked him down and refused to move back into the house. I wasn't going to stand for that any more.

"So I think there's a part of me that can tolerate a certain amount of abuse in the hope of it being good for the overall picture. Good for the family or good for the band. Somebody can take a shot at me and that's OK. I'll just take it and keep going."

Felder's father died in 1974 before he had a chance to really prove that he could have a successful career as a musician. Does he think that on some level Henley and Frey became father figures? After all, he was as anxious to impress them with his skills as he was his father, and both relationships were stormy. "Yeah," he says, "you may have something there. I think my whole life, having an older brother that was so superior at so many things to me, I probably look to everyone for approval. It's one of my character flaws to try to please people."

In early 2001, following a period during which he had been asking "too many awkward business questions", Felder was fired from the band. It hit him like a bereavement. "Why did it hurt me? Because it came so unexpected. There was no call from anybody in the band to discuss any of the things that had been a problem or what I had done wrong. It was just out of the blue." He claps his hands together. "It was shocking that after 27 years I would be cut off so abruptly without the courtesy of a lunch meeting to discuss anything. It was very cold and heartless."

In February 2001, Felder filed a lawsuit against Eagles Ltd and earlier this year an out-of-court settlement was reached for an undisclosed amount. The Eagles, meanwhile, will release their first new studio album since 1979, Long Road Out Of Eden, later this month.

How does Felder feel towards Frey and Henley now? "Y'know, I wish I could reach out to these people that were such a big part of my life," he says. "We were together a lot of years. I wish I could reach out to them like I have my ex-wife. We've been divorced almost eight years and we are best friends. There's no reason to harbour all the anger and hatred and ill-feeling towards each other just because something didn't work out. But with the band it feels like there's this stone wall there, and I've been walled out of any kind of communication except through attorneys."

Felder blinks his sad eyes and says it's about time he took a shower. After more than quarter of a century as an Eagle, and even after being booted out of the nest, he still, on some level, feels connected to those other men. If the circumstances were right, he would rejoin the band.

Isn't it arguable, though, that getting fired was the best thing that could have happened to him? "Well, I don't know," he smiles. "Yes and no. I must say that my life is a great deal easier and far less stressful. But I really miss playing music at the level The Eagles were performing at."

While in St Andrews he's planning to get together with some of the other music stars who are here for the golf and put on a small show. I ask what he plans to play, and he smiles resignedly before answering.

"Hotel California."

As the song says, and as Don Felder knows better than anyone, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.