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Eleven years is a long time to go between records. When Don Henley released his last solo effort, The End of the Innocence, in June 1989, there was no grunge, the Internet was in its infancy and Britney Spears was six years old. "That was a troublesome prospect for me when I set out to make this album," Henley admits, referring to his new Warner Bros. release, Inside Job. "I thought, 'My God, I'm in my fifties. Perhaps nobody will care.' "
Henley - fifty-two, a founding member of the Eagles and a multiplatinum solo artist - has gotten over those jitters. "I'm encouraged by the success of Carlos Santana," he says. "And I can't but feel, given what's on the radio right now, that there's a big void in music. There are 78 million baby boomers out there who don't have any music that chronicles their lives."
Three years in the making and co-produced by Henley with former Tom Petty drummer Stan Lynch, Inside Job is really two articulate, meticulously textured records in one. Songs like "Nobody Else in the World but You," "Workin' It" and "Damn It, Rose" are dark lampoons of superheated capitalism and shallow morality. There are also naked confessions of romantic need and marital fulfillment: "Taking You Home," "Everything Is Different Now," "My Thanksgiving." In 1995, Henley, a veteran bachelor, married Sharon Summerhall; the couple now has three children and lives near Dallas. Asked why he postponed family life for so long, Henley laughs. "I applied the same criteria to that," he says, "as I do to making records. Didn't want to do a bad job, didn't want to screw it up."
Born July 22nd, 1947, Henley grew up in the small east-Texas town of Linden. His father owned an auto-parts store; his mother was a teacher. Together they instilled in their son a love of literature and a respect for honest labor. In four hours of conversation over two days at a Los Angeles soundstage, where he is rehearsing for a summer tour to promote Inside Job, Henley often quotes William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau.
Henley also makes it clear that he did not spend the last eleven years on vacation. Besides touring with the reunited Eagles in 1994 and '95, he spent the Nineties raising money and awareness for Walden Woods and the Thoreau Institute in Concord, Massachusetts - environmental-education projects inspired by Thoreau's writings - and has been active in the preservation of redwood trees in California and the passage of clean-water legislation there. Henley is now rounding up fellow artists to fight a congressional amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act that would deem sound recordings to be works for hire, a designation threatening the intellectual-property rights of musicians.
Henley, who speaks in a thoughtful, measured Texas drawl that has
survived his three decades of living in Southern California, does
not flinch when questioned about the contradictions inherent in an
affluent rock star's writing songs about amoral wealth and raging
corporatization. Last year, The Eagles: Their Greatest Hits
1971-1975 topped 26 million copies in sales, becoming the
biggest-selling album in American recording history. But in "Damn
It, Rose," Henley neatly skewers a pontificating pop god - and, by
extension, himself: "We're being treated to the wisdom/Of some
puffed-up little fart/Doing exactly what I used to do/Pretensions
to anarchy and art."
"I could have called any of my albums Memos to Myself," Henley cracks. "I'm including myself in all this. I'm not perfect. But if someone thinks I'm being self-righteous, I regret that. I believe deeply in what I'm saying."
When did you start working on "Inside Job"?
I'm always absorbing material for songs and storing it in the dark corners of my tiny little mind. That process goes on whether I'm aware of it or not. So you could say the invisible work has been going on since 1989. The visible work started in the fall of 1997.
My songwriting process is rather random. Sometimes it starts with a title; sometimes it starts with a concept. Stan [Lynch] and I will pace around the room with coffee or a beer and philosophize about the concept for the song. Sometimes we started with loops, put chords on top of that - and then the chords would tell me what to write.
Is that why you go so long between records - you wait for the music to tell you where to go?
I have to wait for some of it. What's that show where Vanna White turns the letters?
"Wheel of Fortune."
Once enough of the letters are turned, I can solve the puzzle. I can sit down like a regular songwriter with a legal pad and a tape recorder and hammer out the rest of it. But I really love to write in the car.
How much of "Inside Job" came from driving around?
Eighty percent of it, mostly on Pacific Coast Highway. My studio is located fifteen, twenty miles up the coast. I would drive to the studio every morning with the cassette in the cassette player, then I would drive back late at night. It's amazing - things just come.
With the last song on the album, "My Thanksgiving," I had the first couple of lines: "A lot of things have happened/ Since the last time we spoke/Some of them are funny/Some of 'em ain't no joke." That's as far as I could get. That went on for a year and a half [laughs]. Then one night I was driving down Pacific Coast Highway, going home from the studio and, bam - "My Thanksgiving." I'd wanted to write a song called that for a long time.
Suddenly, my brain said, "Listen, moron, that works with this track. This is the song."
Pacific Coast Highway has been a magic spot for me for a long time. I wrote "Boys of Summer" there, up at Zuma Beach. Neil Young titled an album after it. I was there in the daytime, on the swings. I have very fond memories of my childhood: swinging in my backyard, looking out at my dad's cornfield, the dew sparkling on the corn. The swings on the beach are even better - you can face the ocean. And you can go right up to the sky - that weird feeling when you look up and your face goes up into the heavens.
There is an interesting duality to "Inside Job" - lushly textured songs about love and family mixed in with aggressively funny social commentary. The title of "Nobody Else in the World but You" suggests a song about fidelity. In fact, it's addressed to someone who is a selfish asshole.
We have reached an incredibly self-centered time in our history. One need only drive a few blocks in Los Angeles to witness acts of selfishness. And the way people behave in movie theaters - I can't go to the movies anymore. I get into fights. If there's one asshole in the entire theater, he sits directly behind me and yammers at the top of his lungs. I come from the South - I was raised to be polite, to say, "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am" to my elders. I was taught not to bump into people. But people will run over you in the supermarket and not even blink.
Selfishness is also manifest at the corporate level - this constant gobbling up of the competition, the rape and pillaging of natural resources for profit at a rate faster than the earth can replenish them. I worry about the kind of world my children will inherit. We have to get back to a balance between individual freedom and the concept of community.
How do you reconcile protesting the culture of greed in your songs with your own success and personal wealth? In a 1975 Eagles interview, you said, "Money was a much safer goal than adoration. They both drive you crazy, but if I'm going to blow my brains out for five years, I want something to show for it."
[Laughs] I remember that. I have done well. And I worked my ass off to get here. There are two things about wealth that are important: Did you come by it honestly? And what did you do with it after you got it? I have tried to give as good as I got. If I try to defend myself, I'll sound like I'm blowing my own horn. But I've made, and am still making, an effort to put something back. We all have an obligation to do that.
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But was acquisition more important to you, and the Eagles, in the 1970s?
Mainly we wanted to survive. We had seen so many of our predecessors end up with nothing — dead, drugaddicted or penniless. Most critics, let's face it, like their rock stars dead. We saw it differently. We saw music as a career, a calling, a job. The financial aspect did start to play a larger role after a while, because we looked upon the record companies as the enemy. I still do, to some degree. Any artist will tell you that it is a struggle to get paid by a record company. Nothing would make me happier than to see large record companies become obsolete. Because they've been screwing us from day one.
How do you feel about Napster and the idea that music should be available for free on the Internet?
The Internet is both a democratizing force and a force for undermining democracy. The concept that music should be free is some holdover from the Sixties, I guess. And I resent it when people imply that this is not a legitimate profession, that what I do for a living should be given away. Napster and MP3.com try to make people believe that they are some sort of Robin Hood organization, stealing from the record companies and giving music to the people. But they're stealing from the people who create that music.
How much time do you personally spend on the Internet?.
None. I have an assistant who has a computer, and if I want some information off the Internet, she finds it. I don't go on because I don't have time, and I have privacy concerns. E-mail is not a safe, private way to communicate with anybody. And I don't want to sit in front of a screen all day. I'd rather be active. I prefer to write the old-fashioned way.
As a songwriter, you often write about the lone worker — people who eke out their livelihoods in the shadows of a boom town, like the guy in "Sunset Grill." There is a kind of beautiful exhaustion about that song.
He was a beautiful, exhausted man. He reminded me of my father. My father was always exhausted because he worked too hard. He had an auto-parts store and did pretty well for a guy with an eight-grade education. And I revere that — the small-businessman, the mom-and-pop operation. The character of the American landscape has been destroyed by the franchises.
The Sunset Grill is gone now. It was on Sunset Boulevard, at Gardner. He had to retire because he couldn't stand up anymore. He sold it to some guy who tore the original place down, built a new place with a big neon sign, got a promotional copy of the single, had it framed, stuck it on the wall and put something on the menu about my song. The original owner, who I wrote the song about, had enough dignity and pride that he didn't want to exploit that. The new guy, who I don't even know, is workin' it.
I noticed that "For My Wedding," the most direct song about love and marriage on the new record, was actually written by another songwriter, Larry John McNally.
It comes under the heading of songs I wish I'd written. Somebody sent it to me. It was either a female writer named Jude Johnston, or somebody sent it to Bonnie Raitt and her office passed it on to me. I'm not sure which one of those things happened.
But it was a great song. I know that in this cooler-than-thou age, sentiment of that kind is frowned upon. I don't care. The song expresses the way I feel. Hopefully it will replace "We've Only Just Begun" as the big wedding song.
Now that you have a wife and family, do you wonder why you took so long to settle down and stop cattin' around?
Even if I'd wanted to a bit earlier, the circumstances weren't right. I've been engaged twice before — to very fine women, with whom I am still friends. But events conspired against us. And I'm glad, in retrospect, that I waited this long. Because having children, getting married, is much too important to screw up. I think I'm a better father now. I'm a more patient person, a wiser person.
The Eagles were often accused of being sexist. How do you look back on the harshness toward women in songs like "Lyin' Eyes" and "Witchy Woman"?
The Eagles being singled out for that was absurd. Rock & roll is sexist and always has been. Let's talk about the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. I don't think we were any more sexist than anybody else. We were frustrated little boys.
Why did you get particularly hammered for it?
Because we were from California? We were perceived as the embodiment of the hedonistic lifestyle out here — when, in fact, we all came from other parts of the country. I must take issue with the categorization of us as a Southern California band. We were an American band — from Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Florida. We came from all points east and brought our musical traditions with us. But once they slap these labels on you, it's impossible to undo that.
And the label of country rock — there was also folk music, rhythm & blues, bluegrass. Our music was an amalgam of everything.
Where was the R&B in the Eagles' music?
"One of These Nights," Witchy Woman," "Long Run." Glenn and I would listen to Al Green records and cop the drum parts.
A curious thing about the Eagles' 1975 greatest-hits album — the biggest-selling LP in American recording history — is that the songs are all pre-"Hotel California." There is a brightness and an innocence to the music that's missing on "Hotel California" and "Long Run."
That was before our innocence was destroyed.
What killed it?
The record business. Drugs. The more superficial aspects of life in this city. Coming of age, getting older, having a sense of mortality, not only in terms of our physical lives but in terms of our career. Knowing that what goes up must come down. Although we were flying high, it was going to come to a screeching halt in not too many years.
When we got to The Long Run in '78, '79, those were the darkest years. Not totally dark. I've never been so down that I couldn't get up. But the drugs did erode our objectivity. They brought out the worst in our personalities. While I don't believe things would have been a great deal different if we hadn't been doing drugs, the drugs had the effect of speeding up and exacerbating the separation process.
But we were fairly typical of our generation. We were reveling in the darkness. We weren't afraid of it. I'm still not afraid of it. I love Robert Frost's poem "Acquainted With the Night." Dark and light, yin and yang, peaks and valleys: Without one, the other is meaningless.
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Were you and Glenn Frey a yin-yang combination?
Yes, we were.
Who was which?
Each of us embodied both things ?and we would rotate roles. Glenn and I always struggled to achieve balance on those albums, to accommodate everybody in the band. That wore us both down, trying to make everybody happy while trying to achieve a certain level of quality and maintain a certain level of success.
Glenn's always been very sports minded. He thought of the group in terms of sports teams. He believed, and I believed with him, that each member should play his strongest card. We each had a position to play.
What did you do best?
Lyrics and vocals. I've never been a particularly good drummer. I'm a good drummer for singers, because I stay out of the way.
And Glenn's strengths?
He is an excellent arranger and a very good songwriter. He brings a lot of enthusiasm to the table. When I would pull out all of my book learning, he would help me put it into the vernacular. He had a wonderful sense of street language. In "Hotel California," for example, I sang, "Welcome to the Hotel California," and he said, "Such a lovely place/Such a lovely face." Then when I said, "Welcome to the Hotel California," he said, "Don't sing that again. Sing, 'They're livin' it up at the Hotel California.'"
In "Desperado," I had the title and some of the melody. He sat down at the plano and finished working it out. Because he loved Ray Charles, and we were trying to emulate Ray Charles via Stephen Foster. He was great at connecting the dots.
According to a 1972 profile of the Eagles in Rolling Stone, your first manager, David Geffen, sent the band to Aspen, Colorado, to hone your act by playing four sets a night in a bar. It's hard to imagine the Eagles as a bar band.
David Geffen is credited with all sorts of things. I'm not sure whose idea it was to go to Colorado. But never mind going to Aspen. I did four sets a night in Texas from '63 to '70, playing in absolute dives. Guns would be whipped out; there were knifings. We paid our dues. Everybody in the Eagles came up that way.
The first time we went [to Aspen], we didn't have an album out. We were doing some of the things we had written, and we were covering tunes — Chuck Berry, a couple of Bob Seger songs. Glenn was basically setting the repertoire. We'd do some country stuff with Bernie [Leadon] on banjo. I have fond memories of those times — the snow coming down and these wild people dancing, some of them on acid till they dropped; then everybody staggering home. And we'd come back the next night and do it all again.
We drove across the Southwest in a van. We spent the night in a commune in New Mexico. They had an underground hogan with a dirt floor. They ran an extension cord about a mile down the road to get power for our amps, and we played on that dirt floor with a fire in the middle. I remember shadows on the wall as people were dancing around the fire like Indians.
I have fond memories of going out into the desert and taking peyote and stumbling around, giggling and throwing up. And seeing eagles and hawks overhead and taking it as a sign. I think we were all blasted on peyote in that photograph on our first album cover.
Did that early camaraderie last long?
It started to deteriorate almost immediately [laughs]. But there were still moments of great joy and happiness and creativity. And there's not as much emphasis placed on those as there is on the negative times. Being in the Rockies, being young and optimistic, was a wonderful thing. Our entire lives lay ahead of us, and we had a great sense of possibility. And there were girls, free beer and a little skiing.
You tend to work with collaborators — Glenn Frey in the Eagles, then Danny Kortchmar on your first few solo albums and now Stan Lynch. What do you need in a partner?
I'm first and foremost a drummer and singer. I need others to supply the musical palette. And I like it that way. One of the curses of being a solo artist is that after a while, everything starts to sound the same. You're one guy, playing the same instrument, writing in one style. I'm fortunate to have a rotating cast of characters to keep me refreshed.
I have final cut. I'm a benevolent dictator. But I'm also open to compromise. When I think somebody else knows best, I will acquiesce.
Example?
In "Everything Is Different Now," the original first verse went, "You're not the kind to smile and bow out gracefully/You only feel good when other people fall." Stan and a few others said, "That's too mean-spirited. You're undermining the spiritual quality of the rest of the song." I said, "No, it makes perfect sense." They shut up for a couple of months, then came back to me. I said, "I'll think about it." Three or four months later, I went, "They're absolutely right." And so I changed it.
You have a reputation for perfectionism.
I don't think there is any such thing as perfectionism. I'm meticulous. Communication is important to me — respecting the language. I know that's the antithesis of theories in certain quarters in the music business. That's fine. There's a place for the raw and the ragged and the purposely unfinished. But that's not the way I want to do it.
I hear so many songs these days where the lyrics are so awkward. You can tell that the band gave the lead singer a track, he sat down and cranked it out in a couple of hours — the way they put the em-pha-sis on the wrong syl-aaa-ble. [Laughs] It's some incredibly bad stuff.
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Didn't you do the same thing when you were twenty-two?
Perhaps — although I've always been aware of that. That comes from my background in English literature and poetry. But there are some instances in my own work, or in the Eagles' work, that are a tad awkward.
For instance?
There's one in "Desperado": "It's hard to tell the nighttime/From the day." No, maybe it was [Linda] Ronstadt who did it that way [laughs]. There was some point when the emphasis was on the. Now I put it on from. It's a matter of marrying the right note to the right word.
You're right — I've become more aware of that as I've gotten older. I don't want to be too hard on young kids learning to write.
In your current show, you do some good-humored mocking of two Eagles hits: a skaflavored "Hotel California" with trombones and a rap-funk "Life in the Fast Lane." Do you have a love-hate thing going with your Eagles history?
I just want to stay interested. There is no mocking in the "Hotel California" arrangement. There were reggae elements in there from the beginning. "Life in the Fast Lane" seems anachronistic to me now. It was about the excesses of that time. My life is so different now that I feel the need to spoof it.
Was it hard for you to go back to the Eagles catalog on the reunion tour?
There was a certain comfort in it. It was like being in college. I know my place, I know exactly what I'm supposed to do.
Did it seem redundant?
At times. On the other hand, it was gratifying to know that a huge number of people were interested in coming to see us. I never got to see the Beatles, and I've always regretted it. Some of those songs are thirty years old, but when 30,000 people stand up and scream, believe me, you can get into it just as if it was the first time. When I do get weary or bored, I stop and remind myself how lucky I am to have this life.
Let's talk about those Eagles ticket prices.
I remember getting bad-mouthed by Keith Richards, who said, "How much do you want to pay for nostalgia?" What are their ticket prices now, $300?
But you first broke the $100 mark on the reunion tour, and then you had a top ticket price of $1,000 last New Year's Eve.
We were well within the parameters of New Year's Eve ticket prices. We checked.
Is there a moral parameter?
If you want to talk about unbridled greed, start with the corporations — the oil companies, the timber companies, the mining companies — then work your way down to rock & roll.
Eagles ticket prices were a decision by committee. I was one person on that committee. I felt badly about it. I still feel badly about it. Ticket prices on my solo tour will be well within the parameters of my peers out there. One could argue that the market was undervalued and we simply made, as they say in the stock market, a correction. I don't care to make that argument.
I'm not going to defend the Eagles. I took the brunt of it because no one else would talk to the press about it. I will say that we set aside a lot of money for charity in every city we played in. That's not a justification, but we did spread the wealth around to a great degree.
It's a no-win situation for me. If I try to justify the ticket prices, I sound defensive. If I apologize, I sound guilty — and I don't feel particularly guilty. If I tell you how much of my income, not only from that tour but from the beginning of my career, that I've put back into society in one way or another, then I sound pompous and self-aggrandizing. So I can't win.
Do you have an official position and day-to-day responsibilities at Walden Woods and the Thoreau Institute?
They asked me if I wanted to be called chairman or founder. I said founder would be fine. My role is to raise money. I'm involved in day-today decisions. But I leave certain things to the experts. My primary role now is to raise a $15 million endowment so the institute can be self-sustaining in the future. Because making this yearly nut — it's approaching $1 million now — is killing me.
I was surprised to find that there is a Henley Library at Walden Woods. That is usually an honor reserved for dead scholars and for nineteenth-century railroad magnates.
They practically had to force me. I didn't want to do it. But it's a modest library, and there's a sign above the door that you can barely see. It's in the dark, carved into a wood panel. That was the only concession I made to being identified. Some of the developers, when we bought the land from them, stipulated that we name trails after members of their family. Look at all the baseball parks; everything is named after a corporation. They won't do anything just for the act of doing it.
If you go there, you will find [the panel] is a very modest thing. I did it as much in honor of my mother and father as anything. I've certainly had my time in the limelight. But I have devoted a great deal of the last ten years of my life to this project. It's been rough going. There's a lot of competition for the charitable dollar. I'll probably spend the rest of my life keeping this thing afloat. I want to die knowing that it's going to be all right, that it's going to be here from now on.
One of your new songs, "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming," suggests that no alien in his right mind would come here, because the planet is in such a mess. Isn't that a bit harsh?
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No. There are parts of the world, of society, that are evolved, that are beautiful. But there is an incredible amount of junk. I don't mean drugs. I mean just junk. We're not as evolved as we think we are. In some respects, we're no more evolved than the wild animals in the forest. They don't kill each other just for the hell of it. They don't pollute the planet for their own gain. We're supposed to be the thinking, reasoning animal. I'm not so sure.
Do you worry about the world, and the country, that your children will inherit?
Yes. We have no respect for our institutions any more. Government isn't necessarily a bad thing; it is just full of bad people. I don't want my children to march in lock step with the status quo or be slaves to any institution. I want them to have questioning minds, to question authority. But there is a balance to be struck between that and participation in institutions and traditions. It's a question of living in both worlds with a healthy skepticism.
As a parent, are you prepared for the time when you will hate the kind of music your kids are listening to?
No, I'm not prepared for that. Because I don't want to prejudge. I know they will listen to things I don't like. And I'm sure they'll grow out of it.
The only thing that will irritate me is if they are more enamored of a trend or fad than of the actual music. But kids go through that stage. It's their version of community, their version of self-image. It's tough being a kid. So I'll be OK with that.
My parents were totally cool with me. They didn't object to anything I wanted to listen to, as long as I went to the other end of the house. They never gave me a hard time about my hair, never told me I shouldn't be a musician.
Was that unusual for Linden, Texas?
Yeah, but we had an unusual little town. My friend Richard Bowden, one of the trombonists [in my band now] — his house was a haven for musicians. Richard's mom and dad would stay up until one in the morning, just hanging out with us and playing music in the living room. They let us practice in the living room. In fact, Richard's dad was in a band with us for a while.
It was an extraordinary situation. We would hold dances at the American Legion Hall, and the parents of the guys in the band would take the tickets and sell the soft drinks. My mom and dad would dance when there was a slow number. My dad was a pretty good dancer.
Do you go back to Linden much?
My mother is still there. She lives alone — well, not alone. She has thirteen dogs. She takes homeless dogs off the street. She's almost eighty-four and still drives. So I go back and see people, do a little fishing. I have some pasture-land that I look after. I have a wetlands science institute in east Texas that I started in '93, the Caddo Lake Institute. There's the most beautiful lake there, where I grew up fishing with my dad. Some of the poorest counties in Texas are there. We have instituted environmental-education programs, both in public schools and in the colleges. It's been rough going, but there have been some positive results.
As a native Texan, how do you feel about the prospect of President George W. Bush Jr.?
Horrified. I don't think the man's qualified in any way to be president. He hasn't done anything in Texas. Texas is one of the most polluted states in the union. We have one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the nation. We have more than a million hungry children in Texas. Our public-school system is a shambles.
It's a joke. I wish the American people would snap out of it — do their homework, look at the record. It's not that hard to find.
What is your opinion of Al Gore?
There are some flaws there. It's never a perfect choice, is it? But given the two candidates, I much prefer Gore, not only because of his environmental concerns but because he has been at the center of things for the past eight years. With Bush, there is no there there. The emperor has no clothes. I don't think he's an evil person. I think his interests lie in special interests, as was the pattern with his old man.
You were in the studio with the Eagles last summer. Are you working together on a new album?
We recorded a few tunes — most of them songs written by other people, as a warm-up. We did a Richard Thompson song, "Dry My Tears and Move On." And we started writing some tunes of our own, but nothing got finished.
The prospects of bringing that to fruition are fifty-fifty. There were some differences of opinion — about methodology, who to work with, where to work. I don't want to go into great detail. I felt the way we were going wasn't very forward looking. We were falling back into old patterns.
But it seems the Eagles are never really over for you.
There's always a possibility that on some bright, sunny morning, we'll all wake up, be of like mind and proceed in the same direction together. [Pauses, then smiles] For at least five minutes. If we can string enough of those five-minute segments together, we'll have something [laughs]. That could take another century.
[From Issue 843 — June 22, 2000]