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The debut album to an incredible solo career.Many of the great rock bands rise because together, they are more than just the sum of their individual members' talents. The Eagles have always been a perfect example of that proposition. Yet, when the infamous "Eagles pressure cooker" finally blew up in 1980 (although they took a full two years to officially announce what everybody had come to realize by then anyway), they couldn't have chosen more different paths than those followed by the five individuals emerging from the pieces. Don Felder discovered the real estate business, while also appearing (sometimes alongside other former Eagles members) on albums by Bob Seger, Stevie Nicks and other artists, penning contributions to movie soundtracks ("Heavy Metal" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High;" the latter album ironically reunited, individually, all members of the Eagles' last configuration, featuring one contribution by each of them), and eventually publishing his own, commercially not overly successful "Airborne." Timothy B. Schmit went on to cooperate with virtually every great musician and band of the second half of the 20th century, also making significant contributions to his former fellow band members' solo projects, and on the side, released four records of his own. Henley, Frey and Walsh pursued full-fledged solo careers.
Of all of them, Don Henley proved to be the most successful, and it was so right from the start. While Glenn Frey decided to take a break from the pressure cooker and released an album entitled, not coincidentally, "No Fun Aloud," and Walsh had, without much ado, already resumed his solo career a year earlier with "There Goes the Neighborhood," Henley hooked up with Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar and Greg Ladanyi to produce "I Can't Stand Still," and proceeded to take songwriting to a new level.
From the opening title track (by some accounts, a reflection of Henley's occasionally stormy relationship with then-girlfriend, "Battlestar Galactica" actress Maren Jensen, to whom the record is also dedicated and who supplies background vocals on "Johnny Can't Read") to the closing, spiritual/gospel-inflected "Unclouded Day," the album shows a side of Henley not obvious from his contributions to the Eagles' music, significant as they were. Sure, this was the guy who had (co-)written "The Last Resort," the Eagles' ode about Paradise Lost. Sure, "Talking to the Moon," Henley's reflections on the small-town Texas where he had grown up, could have been an Eagles song. But for one thing, most of the tracks on "I Can't Stand Still" are drum- and rhythm-driven in a way few Eagles songs ever were (Henley finally got to put his skills as a drummer center stage). The guitar work in the majority of the songs is harsh, grating and straightforward. And most importantly, Henley did no longer hold back on taking a stance politically. Where the Eagles had shied away from endorsing specific politicians or parties, Henley's lyrics, beginning with those on his first solo album, were now laced with acid social commentary. Wanna go to nuclear war (remember Cold War, anyone)? Go on – "get ready boys, third time's a charm" and "if things go from bad to worse we can still kill them if they kill us first" ("Them And Us"). Think the school system works just fine and kids are happily learning away? Well, this teacher's son is here to tell you that Johnny Can't Read, and although that's nobody's fault (not Teacher's, not Mommy's, not Society's, not the President's, and most certainly not Johnny's own), "coupla years later Johnny's on the run – Johnny got confused and he bought himself a gun." And think press coverage is just what it ought to be and the media are setting any standards for themselves at all? Then listen to that news crew on location, looking for ever more Dirty Laundry: "Can we film the operation? Is the head dead yet? You know, the boys in the news room got a running bet. Get the widow on the set!" The lyrics of that last song, in particular, have never rung truer than today; and not surprisingly, it was still the opening piece of Henley's "Inside Job" tour which concluded this past March.
Don Henley brought back for the production of "I Can't Stand Still" those of his former band members with whom he had stayed in touch after the breakup, Timothy B. Schmit and Joe Walsh. But he also enlisted the help of other musicians; among them, Warren Zevon, J.D. Souther, Steve Lukather and the Porcaros from Toto, Heartbreaker Benmont Tench, guitarrist Waddy Wachtel and, most importantly, Bob Seger (who co-wrote "Nobody's Business," a song that could have come right off his own "The Distance" in all except lead vocals) and the Chieftains, more particularly, Paddy Moloney and Derek Bell, for the sad and beautiful "Lilah" and its prologue "La Eile" (Gaelic for "Another Day"). It may have taken Henley's follow-up album "Building the Perfect Beast" for him to produce more than one top-ten single again (an achievement which he then topped with the overwhelming success of 1989's "End of the Innocence"), but "I Can't Stand Still" did go gold, and "Dirty Laundry," its biggest single hit, made it to No. 3 on the charts. Don Henley's first solo release effectively made the point that even if the Eagles' career was over (and would, as he prophesized, only resume if hell ever froze over), he himself was far from passé and there was a lot he had yet to tell the world.
Much more than just another '80s record.Songwriting is no trifle matter to Don Henley. And although in the early 1970s the magic duo of Henley/Frey churned out hits with enough speed to allow for the production of four albums in four years, followed by an all-time best-selling Greatest Hits (Vol. 1) album even before the release of the Eagles' classic "Hotel California," he started to take things considerably slower in his post-Eagles solo career. The two years he took to follow up 1982's "I Can't Stand Still" with "Building the Perfect Beast" were actually the shortest time between any two of his solo albums; in part due to the fact that, as Henley explained, his collaboration with Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar worked along lines different from those he had established with Glenn Frey in the Eagles. These were no longer two guys sitting down together in a room with a guitar and a drum kit: For Don Henley's second solo release, bowing to the musical developments of the 1980s, they relied heavily on synthesized sounds (Henley's tour promoting the album even featured an elaborate light show, something that would have been inconceivable for any of the Eagles' tours). And while making most of the songs on the album easily "listenable" and producing several top-selling singles ("All She Wants to Do Is Dance," "Sunset Grill," "Boys of Summer" and "Not Enough Love in the World"), that choice of instrumentation also seemed to render "Building the Perfect Beast" the most easily dateable of all of Henley's solo releases.
Lyrically, however, Henley had lost nothing of his bite; the album's very name is indicative of that fact. "We're the ones who can kill the things we don't eat," he warned in the title track, musically the edgiest song on the album (synthesizers or not) – "we have met the enemy, and he is us ... the secrets of eternity; we've found the lock and turned the key ... all the way to Malibu from the Land of the Talking Drum, just look how far we've come." "Sunset Grill" and "A Month of Sundays" lament the death of small mom-and-pop farms and businesses and their takeover by large corporations; a criticism of Reaganomics Henley would take up even more forcefully in 1989's "The End of the Innocence." (Ironically, his beloved Sunset Grill in L.A. later went down that very same path, too – "Don't Go There," he therefore quipped during the closing appearance of his recent "Inside Job" tour, "it ain't there anymore. Even though it still has the same name. Even though the guy has my name on the menu. Don't go there!") "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" has a similar theme, focusing on corporate and political greed in general. "The Boys of Summer," musically based on a guitar riff supplied by Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, is a warning not to look back and romanticize the past but rather, to look toward the future – just keep your eyes open whatever you do, though, because if you're Driving With Your Eyes Closed "you're gonna hit somethin' ... but that's the way it goes."
As on all of his solo releases, Henley was able to secure the collaboration of a virtual all-star cast of musicians, from Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench to Randy Newman, Patty Smyth, Belinda Carlisle, Richard and Waddy Wachtel, Toto's Steve Porcaro and David Paich, "inofficial Eagle" J.D. Souther, and many, many more. And despite the seeming bow to the 1980s' musical tastes in the instrumentation of many of the album's tracks, their lasting quality becomes apparent like on no other occasion when Henley performs them live, as he did on his 2000-2001 tour. Stripped of some of their fancy effects, they stand up even more visibly to the class of his other work, both with the Eagles and solo – and you just have to have heard that stunning, several minutes' long drum/percussion intro (not even performed by Henley himself) to "All She Wants to Do Is Dance," the closing song of the tour's regular program.
"Building the Perfect Beast" cemented Don Henley's standing as a solo artist, and it paved the way for his biggest release to date, "End of the Innocence." As he had done with his bandmates a decade earlier, Henley again proved that he was able to create something lasting, in whatever format he chose. Maturity added more focus to his work (lyrically if nowhere else); and vocally, many of the tracks on this album are among the most demanding he has ever written. Unlike the output of the era's countless hair bands, disco kings and queens and punk bands, all of Don Henley's first three solo releases still have a large enough audience to warrant their inclusion in the catalogue of every major record store – including the seemingly so 1980s-sounding "Building the Perfect Beast."
Award-winning ballads and Reagonomics – a Henley must-have."Remember when the days were long and rolled beneath a deep blue sky" ... remember Paradise Lost and the Last Resort? At the end of the 1980s, his awareness of society and what's wrong with it more acute than ever, on his third solo album Don Henley took up the theme of the closing song of the Eagles' classic "Hotel California" even more forcefully than on his two prior releases. Now, however, it was no longer just "somebody" who "laid the mountains low while the town got high." Now the enemy had a face; he was "the tired old man that we elected king;" that cowboy whose name was Jingo, and who "heard that there was trouble, so in a blaze of glory he rode out of the west – nobody was ever certain what it was that he was sayin' but they loved it when he told them they were better than the rest." ("Little Tin God.")
By the time he published "The End of the Innocence," Don Henley's name was as firmly established as that of a successful solo artist as it had previously come to be known as one of the driving forces behind the Eagles' almost decade-long success. Commercially his most successful album and critically his most acclaimed, his third solo release garnered a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocalist (for the title track) and produced several more hit singles besides "The End of the Innocence:" "The Heart of the Matter," "New York Minute," "How Bad Do You Want It?" and "Last Worthless Evening." Stylistically, the album ranges from ballads like the piano-driven title song (co-written by Bruce Hornsby, whose fingerprints are all over its instrumentation; not just in the keyboards but also in the saxophone solo, performed by Wayne Shorter, and in the song's main theme), "The Last Worthless Evening," and Don Henley's variation on the theme of forgiveness, "The Heart of the Matter" (a song that took him "42 years to write," as he explained during the opening show of the Eagles' "Hell Freezes Over" tour) – all the way to hard-rocking tunes like "I Will Not Go Quietly," featuring background vocals by Axl Rose. In between are the jazzy, introspective "New York Minute," yet another (percussion- and rhythm-driven) warning that the world "ain't no Shangri-La," the deceptively light-footed "Little Tin God," and no less than three hard, edgy songs rounding up Henley's damning verdict on Reaganomics ("How Bad Do You Want It?," "Gimme What You Got" and "If Dirt Were Dollars").
As were his previous solo albums, "The End of the Innocence" was co-produced and largely co-written by Danny Kortchmar, and likewise as on the previous albums, Henley enlisted the cooperation of a number of other outstanding musicians – in addition to Kortchmar, Hornsby, Shorter and Rose, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, Julia and Maxine Waters, Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Stan Lynch, Toto's David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, "inofficial Eagle" J.D. Souther, and many others. Except for his greatest hits album, 1995's "Actual Miles," this was also to be the last record Don Henley would publish on Geffen; a label he did not leave without a fight (which alongside the Eagles' reunion, his marriage and his preoccupation with the Walden Woods Project, he would later list as one of the reasons why he did not produce another new album in all of eleven years).
Henley is well-known to be a perfectionist and is sometimes criticized for allegedly overly "slick" productions; a statement usually going hand in hand with accusations of superficiality and occasionally even hypocrisy (his records did, after all, earn him millions; so how serious can he be about his social criticism?). But it doesn't even take a look at his efforts to preserve the environment (in the Walden Woods Project and elsewhere), his recently formed coalition for artists' rights, and his testimony before Congress on a variety of related topics to doubt the accuracy of that assessment. This guy means every word he writes; just listen to his lyrics – and as long as "we got the bully pulpit and the poisoned pen" and "this brave new world [is] gone bad again" ("If Dirt Were Dollars [we'd all be in the black]"), he'll be around to hold up a mirror before our eyes.
He's back, as good as ever, even if some things have changed."I hate to tell you this, but I'm very, very happy; and I know that's not what you'd expect from me at all" ... There you have it! The opening lines of "Everything Is Different Now," Henley's love song to wife Sharon (née Summerall) sum up everything that is, indeed, "different" about this album, and unexpected from the guy we all came to love (or hate?) as Reaganomics's fiercest critic, and as one of the driving forces behind one of the supergroups of the 1970s.
There is still plenty of the Don Henley we know here, from the opening funky diatribe on egocentricism, "Nobody Else in the World But You" (featuring Stevie Wonder and flat-out addictive when performed live), to the first single release "Workin' It" (revisiting the mainstay of Henley's socio-economic criticism, corporate and personal greed), to "Goodbye to a River" (the singer/environmentalist's swan song on the preservation of nature) and "Damn It, Rose" (inspired by a friend's suicide). The album's title track is directed against Henley's own industry, whose representatives he accuses in no uncertain terms – not only here but also in congressional testimony and initiatives taken by his own Coalition for Artists' Rights – of sneaking in, through the back door, legislation which would have virtually denied a recording artist control over their own work. In fact, reportedly the album was originally supposed to be called "Otherwise" ... until Henley learned of that legislation, which caused the spontaneous change of title.
But it's been eleven years since Henley released "End of the Innocence," and even if he did not publish another album (except for "Actual Miles," his last hurray on Geffen Records; a "greatest hits plus three new tracks" compilation), he was certainly not idle. He founded the Walden Woods Project, to save as much as possible of Henry David Thoreau's treasured lands from commercial development. He agreed with his former fellow band members to bring their "14-year vacation" to an end, release an Eagles reunion album and go on what turned out to be a two-year world tour. And perhaps most significantly, he married and had kids – the song "Annabel" is dedicated to his daughter. Did all this make him more mellow? Maybe. Did it make him more mature? Definitely. The man who had realized that the "Heart of the Matter" in overcoming a failed relationship is forgiveness now found himself confronting the fact that after all those "nights of running" with "the old crowd," "you wake up one morning and half your life is gone" ... and since you always only "get the love that you allow," you first have to allow love back into your life if you want a fulfilling relationship ("Everything Is Different Now.") And he learned to say his "Thanksgiving" for a life that he "still loves," because of the expectations it holds, because of family and friends, and because of the satisfaction found in work. (And who would ever have expected Don Henley, of all people, to come up with the insight that "an angry man can only get so far until he reconciles the way he thinks things ought to be with the way things are?")
5So yes, this album is different from Henley's prior releases; but then, no two of them have ever been entirely alike; and ballads have always been his forte, too, from 1982's sad and beautiful "Lilah" to the award-winning title track of "End of the Innocence." Musically, "Inside Job" is perhaps more diverse than any of its predecessors, featuring everything from funk ("Nobody in the World But You") to straightforward rock ("Workin' It," "Inside Job," "The Genie") to blues ("Miss Ghost" ... with Jimmie Vaughan on lead guitar!) to gospel ("Everything Is Different Now" – you just *have* to have seen him and his background choir perform this one live, particularly the ending) and of course, ballads ("Goodbye to a River," "Damn It, Rose," "Annabel"); the made-for-Hollywood "Taking You Home" even garnered him a Grammy nomination in the pop category. (Hmm. Don Henley – pop??? That DID give me pause I'll admit.) Maybe what shines more here than ever before, though, is a side of Henley's not always apparent from his prior releases, nor from his often razor-sharp language in interviews and when speaking publicly – namely, his sense of humor. A stand-out in this category is "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming," skillfully using irony and a longing for the days of Rocky the Flying Squirrel to simultaneously blast the shortcomings of the "cold, cold, cold (...) postmodern world" and the belief of, according to recent statistics, 47% of the U.S. population in the existence of visitors from outer space. And maybe the album's biggest hidden gem is "Miss Ghost," a Cajun blues tale about confronting the ghosts of your past, told from the perspective of a man returning from a night of drinking to find, to his surprise, a long-forgotten "ghost" (woman? sin? mistake?) waiting for him, but overcoming the temptation she represents and instead shooing her out of the door with a toast: "Here's to seeing through you – Miss Ghost." (Henley even nails the tone and accent to a tee here; I'd have loved to hear him perform it live ... unfortunately, he never did during his 2000-2001 tour.)
In all its diversity, the album nevertheless comes as one piece, thanks in no small part to the continuity of production provided by Henley's trusted friend Stan Lynch. It features the "all star" cast of supporting artists we have long come to expect – (ex-)Eagles Frey and Felder, Henley friends Danny Kortchmar and Frank Simes, Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, and many others. More than anything, however, it proves that Don Henley is still on top of his game when it comes to music – a welcome affirmation after an eleven year wait.
Don Henley's official website and the website of his Walden Woods Project
Themis-Athena's Glenn Frey page
Themis-Athena's Joe Walsh page
Themis-Athena's Timothy B. Schmit page
Themis-Athena's select annotated discography of Eagles member solo albums
Themis-Athena's select annotated Eagles discography
Themis-Athena's Classic Rock guides: Part 1 and Part 2
Copyright 2001-2007: Themis-Athena, all rights reserved.
