Peaceful, Uneasy Feeling

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Two hours before showtime at the 02, London's state-of-the-art big venue for music, Don Henley is answering e-mail in his dressing room on a laptop and watching political talk shows from America on his other computer, which is hooked up to a large HD television screen. Sweating off an attack of bronchitis, he is wearing a fat woolen hat pulled down to his eyebrows, a long woolen trench coat, sweatpants and battered work boots. His face is pink. His steel-blue eyes pierce all surrounding objects with consternation. And he works his jaw while he thinks, as if checking the words for taste and texture before his tongue is permitted to present them to other humans.

"When you hear a song on the radio, the singer doesn't get a performance royalty unless the singer also wrote it or owns the publishing," Henley says between spoonfuls of tomato soup. Encyclopedic on everything from global warming to high school textbooks, he can deliver opinions like a volcano delivers lava. "The United States is the only country in the free world where the performer gets nothing. And consequently, other countries don't pay American artists a performance royalty for radio either. They say, 'We're paying our citizens who are artists but not you. Why should we treat you fairly when your own country won't?' Which they get away with because the National Association of Broadcasters is so powerful in Washington. The NAB says, 'We're making you famous.' What they forget to mention is that multibillion-dollar empires have been built on the content that artists provide free so those stations can sell advertising."

In 1979, I had a discussion with Don Henley and Glenn Frey, the alpha Eagles, about reforming the music business. Launched with certain propellants that were popular in that era, our opinions flew from 11:00 one night until 3:00 the next afternoon, and we swore an oath to force the record companies to stop pressing albums with crappy vinyl. What was the point of working so hard recording songs when the consumer was getting blasts of surface noise for his money?

"Well," Henley says now, wincing at the memory, "every man has his dream."

I still have my notes from the predigital mists of yesteryear: at first on a legal pad and then on pages ripped from the Miami phone book. There are a lot of quotes floating around with no context (Frey: "I don't blame anyone! Success should be suspect in America!") and long lists of artists that the three of us vowed to contact. I even made a few phone calls after the propellants wore off, but my organizing went nowhere.

"You see?" Henley says. "People just don't wanna."

For Henley, though, the dream never died. In 2000, furious that the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for record companies, tried to sneak language into a congressional bill that would have prevented musicians from ever reclaiming their master recordings, he co-organized the Recording Artists' Coalition to lobby for the rights of musicians.

"All these laws get passed that affect how musicians get paid," he says. "But musicians for the most part don't want to deal with it. They're so independent that they don't want to join anything. Frank Sinatra tried to organize musicians into a trade group back in the Sixties, but he finally threw up his hands and said the hell with it. Now I understand why. It's like herding cats."