Henley: Farewell to a Good Day in "Hell"
Author: Timothy White
Publication: Billboard
Date: November 19, 1994
Abstract: This interview, done while Frey was recuperating, must have been given after a bit of a tiff with Henley and another Eagle(s). He complains about the old problems resurfacing and says he's looking forward to going "separate ways" again.
"Hell Freezes Over" (Geffen), the Eagles' first album of new recordings in 14 years, entered stores this week with a flourish amply justified by its 15 thoughtfully burnished and often bittersweet tracks. But for Don Henley, who has just moved back to his native Texas, this is the end of the iterance.
"I feel pretty good about the record," says Henley, who recently relocated from Los Angeles to Dallas with his fiancee and plans to marry next May. "But I doubt, in all candor, that there'll be another one. I think [first single] 'Get Over It' is good, and I really like 'Learn To Be Still.' I also like the way we broke down the live things [from the April 1994 MTV concert sessions] on arrangements like 'Hotel California,' 'cause I don't think people ever realized that song is a reggae song, with Spanish influences, about the state of America. Talk about multicultural -- it really was.
"But I think that after this tour [set to resume in January after an abrupt hiatus occasioned by Eagle Glenn Frey's emergency stomach surgery], that'll be it. At times, it's been very satisfying," Henley notes with a heavy sigh. "And there's been pain involved, as there always is in any endeavor of this magnitude. Some of the things that broke us apart years ago have not gone away, evidently. I thought maybe they had. But somebody said to me the other night, 'You know, all that stuff is still there; just 'cause 14 years went by doesn't mean it's gone.'"
Henley chooses his words with care, sounding older and wiser than the only child who exited the piney woods of East Texas in 1970 in search of musical self-definition in the wilds of Los Angeles. Leaving home in his late adolescence with a combo called Shiloh, and achieving success two years later with a new group that first coalesced over beers at the Troubadour as Linda Ronstadt's backing band, the literate Henley helped the Eagles create a crisp rock compound of regional roots music that perfectly embodied the mood of displacement in the twilight of the American Century.
Pulling away from an enervating past, hurrying toward a receding horizon, the Eagles' commanding music was the often-aggrieved oratorio of a generation gulled by instant gratification and thus immune to greater contentment. The crackling tension and acute yearning in the band's songs was a direct consequence of the personalities intent on creating them. As with the original versions, the emotional coloration of new live limnings of "Take It Easy," "Tequila Sunrise," "Life In The Fast Lane," "In The City" (with its droll coda of the Beatles" "Day Tripper"), and the cante fiamenco-overtured "Hotel California" each displays in anxious strokes the essence of a cruel dilemma. And the new songs on "Hell Freezes Over," including "Love Will Keep Us Alive," "The Girl From Yesterday," and the seemingly auspicious "Learn To Be Still," all update/delineate the Eagles' problematic outlook with stunning grace. Yet no description, however unerring, can ever be as satisfying as a solution.
"I think that's the history of a lot of bands," says Henley, whose last solo album was "The End Of The Innocence" (1989). "Everything is a matter of timing, and that was our time in the '70s. But I had a really rough time when the Eagles got successful; I got really confused for a while. I always go back to that song by Paul Simon called 'Fakin' It.' Everybody in the rock'n'roll business or the movies has that fear of being found out. Deep down inside, they think or know they're not really as good as everybody thinks they are, because there's no logic to the star-making machinery in this country; even when you get a body of work, it's not as respected as it might have been once.
"Songs like 'Get Over It' and 'Learn To Be Still' are opposite sides of the same coin," he says. "One is talking about the whiners who have an overblown sense of entitlement -- and, of course, we realize there are people who are genuinely victimized in the world -- while 'Learn To Be Still' is about those who aren't introspective enough. Sometimes, in order to see yourself as a part of something, you need to go into the wilderness alone.
"As for the Eagles" -- whose reconstituted ranks also include Don Felder, Joe Walsh, and Timothy B. Schmit -- "we've grown in different directions now, as people should, and so we'll finish our obligations and go our separate ways again. And frankly," he says, chuckling, "I'm looking forward to that. It's been very difficult, especially for me, to develop a sense of self-worth that is not attached to one's career, because we're taught we are what we do. But it must be done at some point, and it generally comes later in life. My dad was a role model for me, but he suffered from the same malady: all his life was tied up in his work."
Born July 22, 1947, in Gilmer, Texas, and reared 40 miles to the northeast in the Cass County hamlet of Linden, Donald Hugh Henley was the solitary son of NAPA auto-parts dealer Con Junell Henley and the former Hughlene McWhorter. "My dad -- who hated his name; just plain C. J. was fine with him -- sold parts out of his shop from World War II until 1968, six days a week, 6 in the morning until 6 at night. But you have to see it through his eyes: He grew up during the Depression in a town called Como, where his father was a farmer, growing cotton, corn, and various other vegetables. My dad had to quit school in the eighth grade and go to work in the fields with his brother and sister to support the family. It was very hard for him to take a break, give it a rest.
"I started a song about him once," Henley says. "But I never finished it, and I'll give you two lines: "He took the orders and he tried to fill 'em/Daddy had a little business and the customers killed him.'"
Henley says he is enjoying life in Dallas, the East Texas hub that is a hilly vector nearly equidistant from Shreveport, La., and the fabled border town of Texarkana. However, his curiosity with these Southwestern crossroads is more than casual.
"Two great black artists were born in my hometown of Linden: [blues guitar great] T-Bone Walker and [seminal ragtime composer] Scott Joplin. Texarkana and a lot of places in the area are claiming Joplin, but old-timers toll me he was born just outside my town. And Shreveport is where Huddle Ledbettor [aka Leadbelly] was born.
"There's great history in Dallas in the Deep Ellum area, too; I'm not the first person in Texas who's interestod in the blues, but I'm gonna record down here, with the songs tied musically, at least, to my explorations. Thematically, I don't know where they're going."
After his fast lane redux, it sounds like Henley is, well, eager to get over it and learn to be still. "That's what I've always wished for fervently," he says, laughing. "Now I'll finally see what happens."
