Henley Back at Work With Inside Job
Ex-Eagle's first solo album in 11 years shows new maturity and depth
Author: Joel Selvin
Publication: San Francisco Chronicle
Date: May 21, 2000
Abstract: Short interview touching on such topics and the theme of domesticity in Inside Job and the environment.
The burning of Atlanta in "Gone With the Wind" was filmed a few hundred yards from the soundstage where Don Henley is rehearsing for a summer tour. In a town where you're only as big as yesterday's grosses, where some people don't even remember Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland anymore, this is what passes for authenticity, a connection to roots, exploring the past. Henley is quite aware he is sitting in an old bungalow on what used to be the MGM lot, the center of all Hollywood. "I love history," he said.
Henley, who painted Southern California as vividly in song with "Hotel California" as Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler did in fiction, is readying the release of his first solo album in 11 years, although he has hardly been lying around eating bonbons in the meantime. He raised more than $22 million for the Walden Woods Project he formed 10 years ago and ensured the preservation of Henry David Thoreau's beloved forest.
He got married and had three children, the youngest just 6 weeks old ("Two daughters," Henley said. "God's revenge is complete"). After his Los Angeles home was destroyed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, he moved to Dallas, a city he finds culturally and spiritually insufficient but where he is surrounded by family and is closer to his East Texas roots.
He also participated in a reunion of his old band, the Eagles, whose greatest-hits album last year passed Michael Jackson's "Thriller" as the biggest-selling LP of all time. That was 24 years after it was first released. (The Eagles once promised we would find out who could go the distance in the long run.) The band's 1994 "Hell Freezes Over" tour played to enthusiastic, sold-out crowds all over the country despite historically high ticket prices. Even more surprising, the reunion appears to be lasting. The Eagles performed on New Year's Eve for a gala event at Los Angeles' new Staples Center. Henley said the band is talking about trying to record an album, but there seems to be some psychological barrier. "There are also control issues," he said.
But "Inside Job" is a different matter. As the only member of the Eagles to have established a credible solo career in music, Henley has a lot riding on the album, released in a musical climate he characterized as ranging between "bubble gum and unintelligible ranting." His most recent album, "The End of the Innocence," sold more than 6 million copies in the United States alone, but that was 11 years ago, and time in the music business is like dog years. At age 52, after looming over the pop landscape for three decades, Henley knows he is a veteran playing in a young man's game.
It probably doesn't help that "Inside Job" is an album of great depth and maturity, a tour de force of crisscrossing themes about lasting values. It is very much the voice of an older and wiser man.
"These songs ask the questions What is home?' and Where is home?' " he said. "What is community? What is love? What is commitment? What is family? What do these things mean?"
Henley is a thoughtful, deliberate man who picks his way carefully through sentences. He can flash a gleaming grin, but his basic seriousness makes him seem like someone who has probably spent considerable time brooding. He obviously has read a lot, thought about issues and formed viewpoints. He is one of the few rock stars still writing social criticism, starting with his acerbic 1982 take on the media, "Dirty Laundry," right up to "Workin' It," a chugging rocker on the new album in which he lacerates contemporary corporate culture. On the biting title track, he denounces "insect politics." (Insect politics? "You ever seen a nature documentary? It's ugly out there.")
At the same time, "Inside Job" is also shot through with songs of unvarnished love and romance. The only track on the album he didn't write ("I wish I wrote it," he said) is Larry John McNally's "For My Wedding," a frankly sentimental piece that could have been fatally saccharine save for Henley's obvi ous sincerity. To Henley, these themes are all connected.
"I think the album makes the point that love and family can be a refuge in an illogical world," he said.
But underneath it all are the gentle teachings of Thoreau, whose writings Henley first encountered as a 19-year-old English literature student at the University of North Texas, struggling to accept his father's fatal heart disease. "I was trying to understand how bad things happened to good people," he said. He ran across Thoreau and Thoreau's mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"I remember reading Emerson's self-reliance sermon and what a profound effect it had on me," said Henley, who grew up in the one-stoplight town of Linden, Texas (population 2,300), where his father had run an auto-parts store since World War II.
Flash forward 22 years, and Henley happened upon a TV show withtwo Thoreau scholars leading a CNN news crew through woods around Walden Pond that were targeted for a real estate development. He put together the Walden Woods Project and raised millions of dollars to save the historic property, including more than $3 million from the royalties of "Common Threads," the 1993 country superstar tribute to the Eagles that Henley masterminded. Two years ago, he brought together a small group of female singers -- Joni Mitchell, Bjork, Stevie Nicks, Natalie Cole, Sheryl Crow, Sandra Bernhard, Trisha Yearwood, Shawn Colvin, Paula Cole, Gwen Stefani -- for another big-time Walden fund-raiser, underwritten by AT&T. He thinks Thoreau's message has never been more vital.
"His motto, his admonition to society, was simplify, simplify' -- he used the word twice," Henley said. "I grew up that way, but I lost it. I am trying desperately to get back. But, as George Carlin says, you've got to have your stuff and you've got to have a place to keep your stuff. Thoreau said a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
"I think we're in danger of losing valuable parts of our culture, traditions, insights. We're losing the authentic experience. We are in danger of becoming the first society in history that was able to make its illusions so vivid, they could live in them. In other words, we're all in show business. The techniques of theater are applied to every part of modern society -- politics, news, war, law enforcement, medicine."
He quoted Thoreau:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if I could not learn what it had to teach me and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
The musician laments the state of mankind, the despoiling of nature, the hypocrisy of politicians, the fact that nobody can get a decent cheeseburger in Hollywood any longer. The original owner of Sunset Grill, celebrated in Henley's 1983 hit, sold the place. The new owner put up a copy of the record on the wall, something Henley is sure the original guy never would have done, and the cheeseburgers went to hell. He ponders his legal options. His face turns sour at the thought.
"It just makes me sick," he said.
