Don Henley's 'Inside Job' Ponders Love, Work, Copyrights & Wrongs
Exclusive: His Warner Debut Is Diary, Manifesto
Author: Timothy White
Publication: Billboard
Date: April 8, 2000
Abstract: Timothy White conducts a telephone interview with Henley where he engages him in a detailed discussion about the messages of the album Inside Job, his opinions of his previous work, and issues about the internet, among other things. You can tell White is a big fan. He lauds Henley throughout and sometimes his questions are longer than the answers.
In 1791, the framers of the U.S. Constitution made it a vital tenet of the Bill of Rights that "a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Some 200 years later, our former frontier culture is drastically altered, with a mammoth infestation of private and often illicit firearms being grossly unnecessary to the security of a free state. Indeed, contemporary lawmakers should be just as concerned with safeguarding an equally vital tenet of citizens' personal dignity: the right of the people to keep and bear intellectual property.
As Don Henley sings on the fierce title track of his forthcoming fifth solo album, "Inside Job" (Warner Bros. Records, due May 23), "While we are dreaming/This little island disappears/While you are looking the other way/They'll take your right to own your own ideas."
That Henley, a self-made man with savvy intellectual property-owning experience that parallels the freely acquired wealth of this nation's founders, is sounding an alarm about these issues is necessary and appropriate. As a former member of the Eagles, he's a key composer on "Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975" (Elektra), certified by the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA) as the best-selling album of all time.
Back in the 18th century, prominent American entrepreneur/leaders of post-Colonial America like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster, and Thomas Paine were acutely aware in matters of public policy and private commerce that land would be the primary source of wealth in their new nation, and they believed the right to acquire and defend it had to be vigorously enforced.
But in the 21st century, the primary source of wealth will not be the land, the Internet, the stock market, or the music industry, but rather intellectual property-the so-called "content" that lends all of the above any real substance.
We are entering an era in which the power of individuals (rather than multinational corporations) to acquire and control ownership of intellectual property is under threat from those who would like to control the new mono-market of Web-propagated entrepreneurism. Since slavery has only been outlawed since the mid-1800s and copyright laws have only existed in Western culture since 1710, the window of human dignity and property-holding personal empowerment on this planet has to date been disturbingly brief.
Meanwhile, human dignity itself is for sale as never before, with everything from personal spirituality, the institutions of marriage and the family, and the evils of racism and misogyny being exploited and/or excused in the relentless pursuit of profits. The merits of loyalty to ideals and lonely adherence to principles are being incessantly belittled and cynically undermined by "inside jobs" in government, in the workplace, in the arena of culture, and in the once-private province of our homes.
On "Inside Job," Henley is also addressing a matter that became a pivotal spark for the title song. It was the insertion of a four-line technical amendment in an omnibus appropriations bill last November at the request of corporate record industry lobbyists the RIAA-without a prior public announcement that would have allowed either withdrawal or formal congressional debate. The insertion amended the 1976 Copyright Act to add sound recordings to the limited list of legal categories of "works made for hire."
Thus, on Nov. 29, 1999, President Clinton signed into law a bill retroactive to July 1, 1999, that essentially makes "employers," i.e., record companies, the sole authors/owners of recordings where "works for hire" are concerned and not the artist who wrote or recorded them. Barring any specific individual contractual language to the contrary, this law could also theoretically affect prior contracts.
As Henley told Billboard in January, "This was inserted with no comment from the artistic community or artists. Not even Congress was involved; it was done by a congressional staffer [who was later hired as an executive by the RIAA].
"I can certainly understand where a film company would consider a film to be a work-for-hire; a film is a huge collaborative effort involving a great many people," he said. "But in the case of a record company, it's often only dealing with one artist, such as myself, who writes, performs, and produces his own record. For a record company to claim, simply because it gives an artist an advance and puts up a little marketing money, that it then owns that artist's work or that copyright in perpetuity is preposterous and outrageous."
Two months after the story of this quietly inserted but historically sweeping law broke (Billboard, Jan. 15), the RIAA acceded to public calls in Billboard by such artists as Henley, James Taylor, Deborah Harry, Coolio, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Jon Bon Jovi for hearings to discuss overturning the law, and it sent lawmakers a face-saving public statement urging such a hearing-given what it termed the "sincere and strongly held views" by artists that the provision "substantially changes the rights of artists under copyright law." Yet the RIAA continues to insist the supposedly "clarifying" provision "simply restates existing law."
The RIAA presses the "clarifying" point because the revised 1976 Copyright Act, which took effect in 1978, included a clause allowing artists to recapture rights for non-"work for hire"-stipulated recordings starting in the year 2013. Thus, even if acts as diverse as Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey, or the Roots had never owned their master recordings before, they could be assigned those rights under the Copyright Act's termination-act clause.
This is why there have also been public calls (Guest Commentary, Billboard, Jan. 22) to repeal the RIAA copyright amendment by such legal experts as former BMI president/CEO Edward W. Cramer, a member of the American Bar Assn.'s Copyright Legislation Committee who participated in the years of studies and hearings leading to the 1976 revision of the Copyright Act.
On this Mother's Day, May 14, there will be a Million Mother March on Washington to protest the proliferation of firearms that is putting our children at mortal risk, but there is another occasion, tentatively slated for mid-May, that merits support and attendance: the hearings on the RIAA-sponsored "work for hire" amendment that dares "clarify" that a recording artist cannot be the author of his or her manufactured creative efforts.
The time has come for fans and industry professionals alike to make plans to join Henley, colleagues Sheryl Crow and Billy Joel, and the rapidly expanding coalition of other performers and supporters assembling to protest this civil injustice. If you have ever admired a song, a record, a book, a play, or any other creative work and felt its authors had a right to control its destiny, and if you have ever created such a work yourself or wanted to, you should go to Washington to let your voice be heard. Don't wait to see if your neighbor is going-go alone, in the company of your own conscience, the way the democratic process is ideally meant to be.
And on May 23, do yourself another favor and buy a copy of "Inside Job," produced by Henley and Stan Lynch; it is a touching, disturbing, and galvanizing album by an artist whose success has not dulled his instincts as a firebrand. On a comparable front, Henley has repeatedly and effectively sounded the alarm to protect both the environmentally threatened Walden Pond area in Massachusetts that inspired naturalist/abolitionist/civil disobedience advocate Henry David Thoreau and the extensive writings Thoreau left behind.
History teaches us all that intellectual property can change the world, a notion not lost on President Jefferson, who was also the primary author of the 1793 Patent Act. Political theorist and pamphleteer Thomas Paine was the first important figure to advocate independence for the American colonies, and his hugely successful "Common Sense" and other writings ("The Crisis," "Rights Of Man," "Age Of Reason") were among the most widely disseminated and influential tracts in American history. But the 72-year-old Paine, a prime mover with dictionary lexicographer Noah Webster in the institutionalization of U.S. copyright, died destitute in 1809.
Paine's lifelong poverty was a direct consequence of his idealistic but personally calamitous decision in 1776 to donate the copyright and all royalties of his global best seller "Common Sense" to charities allied with the American cause of independence. His friend Webster took a dim view of such kindly but recklessly precedent-setting gestures, and Noah proved prescient, since over two centuries later, "Common Sense," like Webster's own dictionaries, remains a steady-selling work.
As Webster saw it, "The production of genius and the imagination are if possible more really and exclusively property than houses and lands and are equally entitled to legal security." For Paine, call it the 18th-century intellectual-property equivalent of the end of the innocence.
For this exclusive interview, Don Henley spoke from his home in Los Angeles as he began production meetings and rehearsals for an extensive tour, due to commence May 21 in Houston, in support of "Inside Job."
Let's start off by talking about the first track for radio from "Inside Job," meaning "Workin' It." The song is laugh-out-loud funny at times, but it's also a protest song. You told me weeks ago that you felt the album was something of a personal diary and manifesto. No one offers the public such honest, direct feelings anymore.
Songwriters have become like politicians; it's all rhetoric. They won't say anything substantive on the issues, except perhaps in rap music, and that's debatable.
I don't think artists are really willing to fix their positions on much of anything that doesn't have popular, commercial consensus anymore.
There's a lot of unfocused anger, but nobody will take a position; everybody's worried about offending some faction. Everybody's trying to be as edgy as they can be while still being politically correct-or vague.
I, on the other hand, am in a precarious position because I'm successful, wealthy, and I could certainly be accused of hypocrisy. And I'm sure I'll be accused of being a cynic and a pious fuck and a self-righteous prick, but I don't care.
On the other side of the coin, I think one could look at it as, "Gee, he's part of the system, but he's still bad-mouthing the system." I'm trying to bite the hand that feeds me as hard as I can! [Laughter]
Frankly, I've always liked your own records better than Eagles records-
... Me, too. [Laughs]
-because they have fewer compromises. The Eagles albums were great records, but I preferred the personal directness of your own stuff. The reason I like your solo work is because, from "I Can't Stand Still" onward, you've said that as an artist, a person, or as a citizen, you're not supposed to have a posse around you. The reason, for example, that "Johnny Can't Read" in your song of that name is Johnny takes no responsibility for himself. We could all do better, and we don't always try.
Well, I come out of the '60s tradition, even though my success began in the '70s. I still come out of the protest social movement of the '60s, and I was collecting folk music in the '50s, when there was a tradition there of bringing the news to people, however bad or ugly it may be. There has to be some room for thought in the music. And I hasten to add that my songs are diagnostic rather than prescriptive. [Laughs]
But they get people arguing and talking.
I would hope. That's my hope. Although there seems to be such complacency now; the stock market is doing great, people are comfy, the economy's great, and there doesn't seem to be anything to push against. But I maintain that while in the '60s we had very visible causes like the civil rights movement and very visible things to push against like the Vietnam War, the things that are corrupting our society now are much more insidious and invisible. They're below the surface. I think the Cold War has turned inward in the form of corporate greed and voraciousness-big fish eating little fish.
As I say in the song "Inside Job," it's all "insect politics" now. And the Cold War has also taken the form of turning inward in our own political system, the members of Congress arguing like petty schoolboys, with all this rabid partisanship to the point of complete gridlock.
Those are the things that people ought to be concerned with now, I think, 'cause it's wrecking the world for our children.
Part of what I get from "Workin' It" is a critique of the pervasive mentality that money justifies everything.
Everything! Everything's for sale, and everything has a price. Yes, that's basically it. I'm reading a book right now titled "Everything For Sale: The Virtues And Limits Of Markets" by a guy named Robert Kuttner.
He writes, "Consumption is doubtless pleasurable, and no one minds a high standard of living," but the book talks about "the unfettered marketplace and trust in its ability to increase wealth and promote innovation... Dissenting voices have been drowned out by a stream of circular arguments and complex mathematical models that ignore real-world conditions and disregard values and pursuits that can't be easily turned into commodities."
Human dignity is also for sale. Any racial or social demonization or self-degradation is deemed OK if there's going to be a cash return on it. And that's supposed to be smart. It seems that there is nothing so virulently racist, self-hating, or bigoted toward black and poor people that can't be excused so long as the scenario ends with the artist shown being paid cash for doing it.
See, that's also an attempt to get under the critical radar, too, the thinking being that "if I'm nobody, then they can't knock me." In the '70s and '80s people tried very hard to be a rock star but also be like the common man. You try to cloak yourself in a blue collar, and you go, "I'm one of you." Springsteen has been successful to some degree at maintaining that even after he's become humongous, but I think it's another version of that: I'm a working man, I'm one of the people.
Being one of the people is having the courage to take an isolated position. Mark Twain said, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of it." You don't make believe you're not afraid of things.
Believe me, when I sit around writing these lyrics, I have fear. [Laughs]
On "Workin' It" you're speaking the truth to power: "We've got a whole new class of opiates/To blunt the stench of discontent/In these corporation nation-states/Where the loudest live to trample on the least." There are corporate nation-states now, and in the 21st century, social observers have said people may have to go to war against corporations rather than countries, and for good reasons.
I fucking hope so, because I'm sick of it, and that includes record companies and film studios, and the oil companies and chemical companies. Across the board, the song ostensibly seems to be about the entertainment business, but it's about all of them, as far as I'm concerned. Because I've spent half the money I've made in the past 25 years fighting those bastards, mostly on the environmental front.
On the song "Goodbye To A River," I say, "They're killing everything divine," and they are. And they're killing, as you said, human dignity. You can turn on daytime TV and see the most disgusting, squalid display of the lack-or disappearance-of human dignity I've ever seen in my life. The networks are exploiting people's flaws, exploiting human weakness. Like Jenny Jones, who ought to be in prison in my estimation.
The question asked every day in our culture, in capital letters 10 feet high, is, "WHAT WILL YOU GIVE UP FOR MONEY?"
Or for 15 minutes of fame-it's one or the other. These people, they must want to be on television really badly. I guess Andy Warhol was right-everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
But I think they also want to be paid for it. The time and money that went into that weird "wedding with a millionaire" stunt on network TV must have been considerable. What viewers are watching isn't a real human high point but rather a cynical public attempt at diving for the bottom.
As Stan Lynch said recently, "The barrel has no bottom." Some people just laugh about it; they go, "Oh, well, you should ignore that stuff," but it's affecting our culture. I don't want to sound like William Bennett, but even I agree with him about some things.
The problem with William Bennett is that he didn't walk it like he talked it. He waited until he could make money in the private sector as a moralist. Because when he was Reagan's secretary of education from 1985-1988, he attacked rising college costs and lowered academic standards-but then he defended every budget cutback on higher education spending! And when he was the "drug czar"-head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bush-Bennett advocated zero tolerance for recreational drug users and Pentagon involvement in drug interdiction, yet he was silent on Jan. 18, 1993, when Bush pardoned Aslam P. Adam, one of the biggest Pakistani drug dealers in modern history. Adam was a real drug czar, a known crook, and they let him go!
I'm really tired of people passing the buck, and you cannot find one person who's responsible for anything anymore. I was in a health food store in my neighborhood the other day and heard a guy say to a nice teenage man who asked where some product was, "It's not my job," and walk away. I've heard that line in clichs but I never actually saw it happen.
My parents used to say, "We'll always love you, but the point in life is that you're supposed to feel lonesome most of the time, because you have to be willing to be the last good person if that's what it takes to behave honorably." How did "Workin' It" come to be written? What got your goat that day?
[Laughs] That day-and every day! Well, we were over in a studio in North Hollywood called Royaltone a year and a half ago, and we wanted to do something echoing [Jimi] Hendrix. I kept saying to Stan, "I wanna do something like Hendrix on this record; I want to bring back that sound and feeling." So we got a couple of drummers in there, and we got my guitar player from my band, Frank Simes, and I said, "Frank, go out there and play some Hendrix riffs!"
So he started playing amorphous stuff like that, but with no shape or structure, and Stan just recorded it all. Later on he got on the computer and Pro Tool-ed it into a sequence and made a song out of it and gave me the track. So I went into a '60s mentality, when people were protesting.
But oddly enough, the song in the beginning had a different title. The editor of Harper's magazine, Lewis Lapham, wrote a book several years ago about Ross Perot and why people exalted him; the book was called "The Wish For Kings." Lapham is a pissed-off, angry guy, and it's a brilliant little book. So my song was originally called "The Wish For Kings," and it had the same spirit about it, and the chorus was "The wish for kings!," and we were shouting it. The song was about how we want a king, want to be led, but when we get a leader we end up hating him or her and burning them at the stake.
But I decided as time went by that that wasn't going to fly and was too obtuse, and I wanted something more accessible, and somehow it just morphed into "Workin' It." I wanted a hook that was universal, and that phrase is in the lexicon now. It has a little bit of a "Chain Gang" thing about it, subtly, to me, and part of it was influenced, I'm sure, by my utter dismay and loathing for what's happening in the record business: for all the giant octopuses that keep rising out of the sea and gobbling all the little creatures around them. Corporations were originally formed for expeditions, for explorers in ships.
They were meant to share risk and benefits for a specific expeditionary aim.
Yes, they would form a corporation, and the monarchy would bless it. But now they've turned into something they were never meant to be. And this echoes the same thing I was trying to get across in "Sunset Grill"-the demise of the little man and the mom-and-pop business. The theme is not new to me, but I guess I'm getting more blunt or blatant about it. The most telling moment for me is in the song "Inside Job" where I'm literally screaming, "Wake up!"
For instance, our entire culture is awash in guns, whose popular use is shoved down little kids' throats in every cartoon and video game. When the Constitution was being written, the right to keep and bear arms had a symbolic and an actual validity. Now it's a better defense of individual freedom to be able to keep and bear intellectual property rights. A gun isn't gonna protect you.
[Laughter] Exactly. But this culture has raised to the highest level in history the art of looking the other way.
This raises a good point. With all your themes on this new record, like talking about the responsibilities of marriage on "Taking You Home" or offering public thanks and not having a sense of entitlement on "My Thanksgiving" or quasi-religious expectations on "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming," I assume you mean for this stuff to have an effect on people, right?
Right. I repeat, the word is "hope."
But there are lobbyists in this business who have actually written in Billboard commentaries that "music cannot cause action." That means music cannot make people dance! So do you, Don Henley, think your music can have an impact on people, change their minds, move them to make a mid-course adjustment?
Yes, I think so. And not in great numbers, you know? I think I long ago gave up any theories that music was going to revolutionize the world in big broad strokes. But I know that it can change the lives of individuals, because I've got letters right here on my coffee table from fans of mine that I just received.
One here has written me about how the Walden Woods Project and my involvement with that brought him back from a wasted life, and how he's turned his entire life around, and he's married and has children and reads [Henry David] Thoreau now. It's an incredibly touching note.
And I feel music and art and literature can have the power to change other people's lives, too. I don't think it's going to change entire societies or cultures or the general direction in which this world is going, but I think it can have a life-changing effect on certain individuals, and they in turn can change other individuals. I suppose it's the ripple effect I'm hoping for.
I just don't want people to forget what music is about and what it was capable of doing at one time. I want them to try to remember how they were moved by it-in their youth, especially.
If music can do no wrong, then it can do no right. And if we can say a song like "We Shall Overcome" had no validating effect on the civil rights movement, then we're saying it and other such activist hymns had no effect on anything, didn't inspire anybody, didn't make anyone step off a sidewalk and join a march anywhere.
Yeah! So what's the point? To say music is meaningless? Are we just doing music to make a living now? Just for the money? That's not the reason I do it.
So when did music change your life? What particular thing would make you say that?
Oh, I think when my mother brought home "Hound Dog" in 1956. When I was 10 or 11 years old my mother made periodic trips to a larger town like Marshall or Texarkana [Texas], to the record stores to get me Looney Tunes records, cartoon-type records. One day she said, "I'm going to Marshall," which was 40 miles away. "Do you want me to get you anything from a record store?"
I said, "Yeah! I heard a record on the radio from Elvis Presley called 'Hound Dog,' and I'd like you to get that for me." She brought that home, and that was the beginning-it made me feel excited.
But the more profound change was when the Beatles came along in '64. I liked rock'n'roll, and I was interested in it, but hearing the Beatles was what solidified the direction of my life. That's when I decided I wanted to somehow live my life in connection with music and making records.
I used to listen to the Beatles every morning before I went to school. They used to give me the strength to get through a day in high school and all the cruelty that that entailed. And the music spoke to me of faraway places and other kinds of lives.
So I just hope. Because everything has been and continues to be brought down to the lowest common denominator now, and I just refuse to go there.
On "Inside Job" you sing your interpretation of Larry John McNally's "For My Wedding" and make the song your own. Meanwhile, there are people these days who are willing to give up that spiritual and personally committed side of themselves, with full presence of mind, for mere money and fame on TV. That's their life and career; this is yours. Which are we supposed to attach gravity to?
Good point. Is no moment sacred anymore? Does everybody have to do everything on television? Does everybody have to have an audience for their private, most spiritual moments? And I guess the answer is yes. Normally, we get married in front of our friends, people who mean something to you. We don't usually do it in front of the entire fucking nation.
And we're not supposed to be auditioning! These things are supposed to have lasting value and responsibilities attached to them.
I will say that given my track record with women, some could say these things I sing may have a ring of disingenuousness to them.
But knowing many women you've dated for a long time, I'm aware that you're very loyal to them and that they speak well of you.
I know what you mean. I am good friends with most of my exes. And sometimes it took several years to get back to that point with those people, but if you love somebody they become part of your life. Especially in [actress] Maren's [Jensen] case. We went through a lot together, and we're still very close friends, and she's about to have a baby any day now, and my wife and I are gonna have one any day now, too. [Julia Sophia Henley, Don and the former Sharon Summerall's third child, was born two days after this interview.] She and her husband are doing very well, and I helped her get her business off the ground, and now they've just sold it to Estee Lauder, and she's fixed for the rest of her life.
But my life has changed, too. I finally woke up one day and took a look around and said to myself, "I don't want to be the last guy at the party. It's too sad." The guy with the lampshade on after the party is not me, and I snapped out of it. And the universe responded in kind and sent me Sharon. [The couple was married in 1995.] And then the kids came [including a son, Will, born in 1998], and that really changed everything.
So these songs are heartfelt, although some may scoff. But that's OK.
Tell me about the decision to write or record "Taking You Home," "For My Wedding," and "Everything Is Different Now."
Right, and it's a trilogy [laughs], OK. They provide the balance to things like "Workin' It."
While I didn't write "For My Wedding," I wish I had, and when I heard it, I knew I had to do it. And "Everything Is Different Now" is of course about my wife and my marriage, and there are chants on that song that sound sort of monklike-you can almost see guys in hoods walking through a dark corridor. But it is about walking through a dark corridor and coming out into the light. The atmosphere is chilling, in a way, until it breaks into the gospel thing, with a little nod to Al Green on the bridge; I put on my best Al Green voice there.
"Taking You Home" ironically enough was written for a movie, but the movie had a theme in it that dovetailed into my life. I don't know if you saw "Double Jeopardy"-it was an OK movie that starred Ashley Judd, a very competent actress, and Tommy Lee Jones-but the gist of the movie is that she marries somebody and has a kid, but her husband is not what he appeared to be.
At the end of the movie she's reunited with her kid, and they walk across an open field together, and my song was supposed to play into that, and I saw the song as being about unconditional love and the strength of a parent's love for a child. And the Ashley Judd character did superhuman feats to get her kid back. As a parent, I related to that, and as a parent I know you always have fear for your children to be protected. So I used the image of taking Annabelle, my first daughter, home from the hospital and the emotional impact of that.
I've written songs for movies before, but this was the first time I was able to write a song for a movie that I was emotionally involved in. And the director loved it, the head of the music department loved it, the independent music supervisor they hired loved it, the producer, who was Leonard Goldberg, loved it. And then the all-powerful marketing department heard it and shot it down. They said, "We can't market the movie, we can't make the right video with this song, because this is an action/adventure picture, and this is a love song."
Which was the most absurd thing I ever heard, because that movie "Armageddon" had that huge love song by Aerosmith, and then Whitney Houston, for "The Bodyguard," had "I Will Always Love You." There are numerous examples of pictures that could be called action/adventures that were marketed with love songs.
It was a pretty big picture anyway and did over $100 million worth of business, but [the song] would have helped the picture, and it certainly would have given me promotional value, so I sued them. We're still battling that out; depositions are being taken. We're coming close to a settlement, but I don't know if we're gonna get there.
The point is, I did the work and they accepted the song, they accepted delivery of the master. They jilted me at the altar. You can't do that to people. And I can't tell you how many phone calls [manager] Irving [Azoff] got at his office from other musicians, saying, "Good for you! They fucking did that to me, too."
I just decided once again to stand my ground. But Bob Dylan put it best, and the older I get, the more I understand it when he said, "You have to serve somebody."
But service to somebody, to the community, to your family, to your friends-if you don't have that element in your life, you're a miserable fuck, and you should be.
But you're also saying there are responsibilities on both sides that come along with service. Those on one side have to understand the power they hold, and those on the other have to understand they're not just there to be a mouthpiece. One has to show a little isolated courage at times. That brings us to the song "Inside Job."
Which goes back to "Sunset Grill" again. The germ of that idea was that this guy owns his own business, and though it's just making hamburgers, it's honest work, and he owns it.
The "Inside Job" song came at the last minute, and it came in part due to this intellectual property battle we're in right now. It was fueled by that whole RIAA thing [with the "work for hire" clause inserted without debate in Section 1101(e) of Title 1 of the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, which was part of the appropriations bill H.R. 3194, Public Law No. 106-113 as Section 101 of Title 17, United States Code, paragraph two]. That, and all the articles I've read that the Internet is going to completely destroy privacy and that they know everything about you already. So it's kind of a combo song.
What's going to happen from your standpoint in terms of countermanding these things, whether it's issues regarding the Internet or with the RIAA?
I'm going to keep writing songs about it! And I'm refining a letter I'm going to send to all the artists alerting them to the need for congressional hearings to overturn the "work for hire" amendment. Other artists like Sheryl Crow are signing on with me and have given me lists of connections with other managers and artists, and I'm building this coalition.
I'm doing it slowly and cautiously, and hearings are going to be held, from the way I understand it, in the middle of May, and I'm gonna be there. People like Billy Joel and Sheryl Crow say they're ready and willing to come, and we're gonna make a big stink about this.
I'm more determined than ever to try to walk the talk. Otherwise, these songs ring hollow. If I don't fight back at the corporate structure even though I'm a part of it, even though I'm signed to Warner Bros. Records, if I don't give them shit, then these songs don't mean a thing. I have to live this.
Meanwhile, the revised copyright laws as enacted in 1978 were still weighted so heavily against the artists and creators of intellectual property that Congress put a clause in them that artists could make a written request and get their intellectual property-such as master recordings-reverted to them in 2013, even if a Joni Mitchell or an Eagles had never owned those master recordings before. Creative people have a right to own these things-particularly after they've had a long run of making money for somebody else.
You bet your ass. In the '70s, maybe there was a lot of guilt there or maybe everybody was high, but then they woke up 20 years later and went, "Whoops!" Here in the age of incredible corporate greed, I think they're waking up and saying, "Well, maybe we were a little bit hasty."
We gave away the store back then. I don't think we should have done that. And even Congress isn't a good tempering structure anymore. They're beholden to both sides on these things and turn around and kowtow to the studios. So you've got to keep an eye on them every minute. I mean, I'm also disappointed in network news and how they've sensationalized it. Just to be No. 1 in the ratings. That's how they justify it.
Meanwhile, you also had your own fight over "cyber-squatting" and somebody trying to take your name and possibly trying to sell it back to you.
There's going to be two Web sites, donhenley.com, and then Warner Bros. will have their own [wbr.com/donhenley], but I had to get lawyers and fight to get these domain names back because somebody had bought them. In some instances, people did the right thing and gave them back to me free of charge-I mean I paid them a small fee, which was what they had paid to register the name. In other cases, people tried to hold me up and tried to extort large sums of money out of me.
And that's going to be a whole issue, too. This whole cyber-squatting thing. Congress has passed some legislation, but I'm not sure it has enough teeth in it. And there're going to be issues not easily resolved even by legislation. For example, there's a guy in San Antonio whose name is Don Henley, and he registered the name, and he's a Vietnam vet who's a fundamentalist Christian, and he's registered his Web site, and it's all about that.
So people went there expecting it to be me. And he decided, "as a favor to them," to list a discography of mine and some information about me, thereby muddying the waters even more over whether it was me or not. And some people came away totally confused. He finally put on a very small disclaimer, tiny, that you had to hunt for to find. But he refuses to give up that name, and there's nothing I can do. It's not so easily remedied.
And I'm conflicted about my own site. I've put my own guts on the records, and I don't want to feel there's nothing left that's my own. I'll put tour information on it and digital downloads of on-the-road updates and Kerouac-ian camera work. But it's all new to me. I don't go online much or use E-mail, and I'll let the record company promote my catalog on their site.
Speaking of catalog, how do you feel about your other four solo records, starting in 1982 with "I Can't Stand Still," which you made with Danny Kortchmar and Greg Ladanyi?
You know, I feel really good about that song I wrote with Kootch, "Lilah." I got to work with the Chieftains on that, and they hadn't yet become a really well-known entity in the pop music world at that point, 'cause we actually recorded the song in '81. I'm proud of that song.
And I still stand by "Dirty Laundry," of course. Even though I'm a little weary of it, it still has resonance and truth in it, I think.
And I stand by "Johnny Can't Read" as well. I'm so frustrated these days with [George W.] Bush taking credit for reforming the education system in Texas. First of all, it hasn't been reformed; they just lowered the test criteria. Secondly, to the extent that it has been reformed, it was done by two of the members of the state legislature-Paul Sadler, who's a Democrat, and Bill Ratliff, who's a Republican. They're the guys who greatly improved-I wouldn't say "fixed"-the Texas education system. Bush let them have pretty much of a free hand, and now he's taking credit for it. But Johnny still can't read.
And "The Unclouded Day"-my grandmother, Eula McWhorter, used to sing that song, my mother's mother. It's a Protestant spiritual, written [by J.K. Alwood and J.F. Kinsey] in the late 1800s.
How about "Building The Perfect Beast" in 1984?
Let's see. I still like "The Boys Of Summer"; I don't get tired of that song, and we've rearranged it for the upcoming tour. And "You Can't Make Love" is an interesting song about truth and semantics.
There's a song that was on the cassette and CD but not on the original vinyl record because there wasn't room-"A Month Of Sundays." I think it's one of my best songs, and it was written back during the time when the American farmers were speaking out about their plight. And small farmers were losing their farms, and they had all those terrible, sad land auctions, and everything was going on the block-farms that had been in families for generations were being sold.
And that's when Farm Aid began, around that time. I went to Washington and marched with the farmers. It was a rainy day, and we all gathered at the Lincoln Memorial.
As an environmentalist, I have to say I have some conflicts with farming practices. I have a deep love and empathy for that lifestyle, because my father grew up on a farm, and he taught me how to grow things in the soil. On the other hand, farming pollutes the shit out of the planet with fertilizers, pesticides, and chemicals of all sorts. And certain modern methods of farming cause erosion so that we're losing an enormous amount of topsoil. Organic farming is my method of choice, and that's a growing movement in this country.
"A Month Of Sundays" is also about the passing of the torch and the changes in the American landscape-and the malling of America.
And there were two rhythm-and-blues songs of mine that got overlooked; both were on "Building The Perfect Beast." One is "Land Of The Living" [by Henley and Kortchmar], and the other is "Not Enough Love In The World" [by Henley, Kortchmar, and Ben Tench], which I thought and even David Geffen thought would be a big hit, but it wasn't. I thought that we could have done better on the production of that song, but it was a tip of the hat to Motown and well-written. Jackson [Browne] thought it was a great song, but people don't accept that part of my work.
Too much diversity, I've found, confuses record companies and confuses radio; they're used to monochromatic records and monolithic artists.
What do you think of "The End Of The Innocence" from 1989?
I still love the song "New York Minute," and "The Last Worthless Evening" is just straight-ahead pop, but it's good. And of course, "The End Of The Innocence"; that song is very fixed in time. I think it has enough universality that it could still apply to today, but it was about the whole Reagan era.
I've heard people say "The Heart Of The Matter" was their favorite song-period.
I have a collection of the most amazing letters about that song from all over the world that I treasure. I'm gonna keep them forever.
Again, such things show popular music does have an impact and creates a dialogue.
True-not a revolution, maybe, but a damned good dialogue.
Any thoughts on the "Actual Miles: Henley's Greatest Hits" collection?
It was a bridge from one period of my musical life and career to another. I think it's a good record with good additional songs on it. I still stand by "The Garden Of Allah," but radio didn't want it, like it, play it. And "You Don't Know Me At All" was a good pop song, but I just wanted to get that stage of my life over and get on with the next stage-as the cover of the album depicted.
The used-car salesman image was a jab at corporate culture, but one critic put down my appearance as if I had always dressed that way. He didn't even get the joke on that. Some people don't understand the used-car lot experience.
As with "Inside Job," there's food for thought in all your solo records.
Well, that's the best thing anybody could ever say about these records. The highest compliment anybody could pay me. I appreciate that.
And I thought about it now, and thought, "Well, I've been away 11 years, I really need some hit singles." But there's room on an album; this one's got 13 fucking songs on it. And just because something's a single doesn't mean it has to be pablum; it can still be heartfelt emotion.
My beliefs and the things I stand for are becoming stronger. If I tried to make a nice, light, fluffy, hooky little record, I don't think I'm capable of doing it, because there's part of me that always wins out. [Laughs]
It's like a hand on a Ouija board-it just goes where it's gonna go. And it's something I'm grateful for. But Stan Lynch also did an amazing job on the new record; he's become a great producer. A lot of the musical textures and the playing on the album were done by him: everything from drums and a lot of guitar to percussion and sampling. I've got a great team in him and Rob Jacobs, my engineer, and the assistant engineer and keyboard player, Stuart Brawley. We've got some guests, too: Randy Newman, Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, and also Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers, who plays on stuff like "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming."
I think "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming" is a potential single that's not pablum and could be a huge hit. The music is thrilling, and the lyric needs to be heard, because it says we're not entitled to a big event from the skies-whether it be flying saucers or supernovas-to entertain or redeem us. We don't deserve it.
You've just articulated that song better than I could, and I've been trying for weeks. We're always expecting to be saved from above. Something or somebody is going to come down from the heavens and make everything all right. When, in fact, we have to make everything all right.
And Mike Campbell was brilliant intuitively on that track; he realized the song was about spirituality and he gave me an Indian raga guitar solo-and that nails the spiritual side of it. It's like an updated sitar thing.
And I did research on that song; the incident at Roswell [N.M.] happened in 1947, which is the year that I was born, and there's a survey that about 50% of the American people believe that aliens have visited us and walk among us. That's frightening! There's cults that go out to Sedona, Ariz., and sit there waiting. I subscribe to this magazine called Skeptical Inquirer, which does investigative reporting in every issue on paranormal phenomena.
Is there any place in any of your houses to sit down, or are they all covered with books?
[Giggles] There are no clear horizontal surfaces at all. There's no place to eat. It's true.
But I love Carl Sagan, bless his pot-smoking heart, who said it's virtually impossible in books like "Contact" and "The Demon-Haunted World" for other human life to make it to this planet unless they have figured out a way to transcend time and space. You just can't live long enough to do it.
So again, "They're Not Here" is a song about taking responsibility for your life-and the life of your country and the life of your family and the life of your culture. And it's about doing it yourself.
There are other songs on the new album that could create commentary. One is "Damn It, Rose," which bubbled up from my subconscious, but it's about suicide, and specifically a suicide of someone I knew, and I almost took it off the album when I realized what I'd done. Yet it's important to point out that suicide is an incredibly hostile, selfish act.
But I decided the song has more universal meaning than that. It's about empty rebellion and the authenticity of our rebellion. That's another theme that runs through this album: trying to find an authentic experience. They won't play George [Jones] and Merle [Haggard] on the radio anymore, because most of these other artists on country radio are not authentic country people-they're posing as country people.
There's also the issue of revenge in the song and how revenge doesn't really change anything. There are always unintentional victims, like innocent children, when it comes to revenge-it's the Law of Unintended Consequences. In a moment of high emotion when you think you're going to get back at someone, you invariably end up hurting other people.
People have no concept anymore of ordinary heroism. Take some kid who had a father who beat him every day with an ax handle, and his mother was worse. If that kid grows up and gets himself a TV show where he does the same thing to others-live, for money-then he's treated like a hero, instead of the pandering coward he really is.
Meanwhile, we need to celebrate a true hero like Frederick Douglass, a former slave who never had a nice day, yet grew up to be a far better person than anyone who ever wronged him.
See, we love to scapegoat these days and hang on to our past and attach blame to it and make that the reason for why we are the way we are in the present.
A real hero understands that there may be reasons, but there are never any excuses.
Right! But rather than drawing a line in the sand and saying, "I'm going to change my life," we'd rather wallow in all this dysfunction! We have the opportunity to start anew every day when we get up. That's what the Eagles song "Get Over It" was about.
We've all had sorrow in our lives, and we've all had hardship, but compared to our ancestors, we've never had a bad day! While we were writing this album at his house, Stan came home with tears in his eyes one night after he ran into this old man who had been in a concentration camp during World War II.
Stan said, "You know what? After talking with that guy, I just realized that, even though my parents divorced when I was 14, or I've had my own ups and downs, and I experienced the career pain of leaving Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, and so on, compared to that old man, I've never had a bad day."
Another night I was grumbling about something. Stan went quietly into another room and came back with an urn that held the ashes of his Uncle Bernie from Cleveland, who had recently died. Stan plopped it in my lap and said, "Here! This is what it all comes down to!" And I said, "Ohh. I see." And my mood brightened considerably. [Laughs]
We're so spoiled in our culture, and some of my songs are aimed at my generation and how we all dropped the ball.
Our parents and grandparents cut us so much slack. They had been through the aftermath of slavery, wars, and holocausts; there's nothing they wouldn't do for us. We got too entitled about it. But it's not too late to knock it off and show more leadership.
You're right. I've lost friends over this kind of stuff. One friend was an environmental lawyer who espoused one ideal and yet was representing these developers killing the wetlands. After hearing her give all kinds of convoluted lawyerly justifications for it, I finally just stopped talking to her.
I still do a lot of conservation work in Texas, California, some in Colorado, and in Massachusetts for the Walden Woods Project, which people can now check out anytime at walden.org.
I still need to raise $12 million or $15 million for Walden Woods to endow the Thoreau Institute, so we've hired someone to help us raise foundation money. I'll have to work on that for the next 10 or 20 years, but that's OK.
These themes of acknowledging flaws, and offering admission of public responsibility and of public gratitude, are also in the new song "My Thanksgiving."
Which would also make a great single.
I think so, too. To release it later in the year when Thanksgiving is actually coming would be a good thing, but it's about how spoiled we are in comparison to other cultures and countries. We're definitely headed to a fall-of-Rome type of time here.
Meanwhile, our tour starts at the end of May in Houston, and hopefully I'd like to do the whole planet! I'm up for it, with my new band-Will Hollis on keyboards; Mike Thompson on piano, accordion, and trombone; Lance Morrison on bass; Rob Ladd on drums; Peter Stroud and Frank Simes on guitars; and Danny Reyes on percussion. They're fresh faces, new energy.
I want to give consumers good value, and my ticket prices will reflect that. And I debated putting 13 songs on the record, since my contract states that the record company only has to pay me for 12, but what the hell. We used up all the space on the record.
I have a 14th song, "Human Condition," left over that has an R&B overtone and funny, wacky lyrics that I'll use somewhere, sometime, in some way. But we started "Inside Job" in the fall of '97, and now it's done!
Meanwhile, my new daughter is going to be named Julia Sophia after my other grandmother, my father's mother, and we'll call her Sophie. And I've just discovered that I have some North Italian or Swiss Italian blood somewhere in my Irish-English-Texan family tree! Can you imagine? Things just get more interesting all of the time.
