Don Henley: Building The Perfect Beast : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When The Eagles left their gilded nest, America didn't lose its favorite band, it gained a plethora of solo artists. Among them, only drummer Don Henley is making consistently compelling music, and his second solo effort manages to maintain the highest standards of studio professionalism and lyrical acuity set by that high-flying band. Spontaneity has never been Henley's strong suit, so he looks to score points with craft and tosses in a few topical curves for good measure.

Henley is currently riding high with "The Boys of Summer," a wistful look over the shoulder at a faded summer romance. Guitarist Mike Campbell frames the song with his piquant single-note picking, while Henley offers up an aching vocal that'll tug at the heartstrings of anyone who ever bid a soulful sayonara to a bikinied baby. "The Boys of Summer" sets a mood of romantic dolor that prevails, though is not equaled, throughout the first side. Even the titles abound in weary negatives: "You Can't Make Love," "You're Not Drinking Enough," "Not Enough Love in the World" – all of the songs draggy ballads in the mold of the Eagles hit "Take It to the Limit."

Side two is another animal altogether, wherein Henley and pals – guitarist-sidekick Danny Kortchmar, various members of the Heartbreakers and Toto, plus other guests and sessionmen – really spring to life. On this side, Henley moves from the personal to the political, mapping out with black humor a modern world barely hanging on its hinges.

"Building the Perfect Beast" builds up steamrolling momentum as Henley nervously ponders the madness being loosed in laboratories in the name of science: "The secrets of eternity/We've found the lock and turned the key/We've shakin' up those building blocks/Going deeper into that box." That's Pandora's box, friends. Here, and throughout the side, synthesizers are used not as sentimental embellishment but to sound an air-raid siren on the impending apocalypse. "Beast" sounds something like big-band jazz, driven by a bank of brassy synths and a register-scraping vocal from Henley.

After the abstract horror of the title track, "Sunset Grill" zeroes in on its protagonist's tangible sense of entrapment in a dead-end hangout in a big city. Hunkered over his beer while whores and bums promenade outside, Henley sings, "You see a lot more meanness in the city/It's the kind that eats you up inside." "Sunset Grill" ends in a long, jazzy instrumental fade as evocative of darkened streets and unraveled dreams as "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue."

"All She Wants to Do Is Dance" is a caustic, dry-witted look at Americans abroad, partying obliviously in dangerous places. It's Henley's own "Undercover of the Night," full of images of violence and heat: Club Med à go-go in the bloody Third World. And it rocks with words and music as pointed as punji sticks, as does "Drivin' with Your Eyes Closed," a cryptic attack on the reckless, violent road the U.S. is traveling ("You're gonna hit somethin'/But that's the way it goes"). Kortchmar slashes out some nasty, Zeppelin-ish chords and overdubs a tinkly "96 Tears"-style keyboard, while Henley spits out his most derisive vocal and slams at the drums – not bad for a two-man band.

After the stark panorama of life in the ruins laid out in the preceding songs, the LP ends on a positive note with "Land of the Living." No solutions are proffered, just a bit of shelter from the storm in the arms of one who "Came and pulled me through." It's sung almost as a gospel confessional with an Al Green-type lilt – an encouraging personal testimonial that closes a brave, near-great side of music from Don Henley.