Don Henley: The Serious Eagle Is Still Flying
Author: Diane Reischel
Publication: Toronto Star
Date: March 31, 1990
Abstract: Henley talks about topics such as his past, his current relationship with Glenn Frey, and his personal and professional development.
This isn't a man and his castle. More like the the cowboy-outlaw-rocker in his hilltop hacienda.
Don Henley, erstwhile Eagle and lonely Desperado, has this chunk of cliff all to himself, with a view of the smoggy L.A. glitz below, a vantage on the hazy values he's been railing against musically for 20 years.
It's not a bad setup for this middle-age man in jeans and leather, a man whose rocker powers remain intact. Henley still can aim a piercing blue gaze through the screen of his music videos. He tours internationally. And he recently won a Grammy award for his 1989 album The End Of The Innocence. A decade after California rock band the Eagles folded, Henley's newest music is being hailed as the work of an angry young man grown up.
Thin and reserved, in faded Levis and worn suede boots, Henley sits in his backyard breeze with shanks of dark hair falling from his ponytail. "My attempt to cope with 40," he says of the lengthy locks.
Actually, 42. He never imagined he'd be performing this late.
"The Rolling Stones are doing it, but I feel a little awkward about it now," Henley says quietly, in his native East Texas timbre. "I think by the time I'm 50, I'll feel incredibly awkward. I guess it all depends on how you look - and how you feel."
A decade ago, the feeling was abandonment. Eagle co-founder Glenn Frey had just quit to make a solo album. Henley, who'd always called himself "a group guy" and "happy with my pals," was lost.
"I had this other half all these years," says Henley, who regarded Frey as his mirror and sounding board. "I felt very alone. I was wondering how I was going to replace him in my creative life."
Fear led to carousing - "I put back a fair amount of Scotch." But, as time passed, Henley gave up on the idea that his collaborator would come back. He set out to make his own artistic mark.
The voice he developed through the 1980s was rawer and tougher than the harmonious Eagles sound. Henley made three solo albums: I Can't Stand Still in 1982, Building The Perfect Beast in 1985 (for which he won a Grammy as best rock performer on the single "The Boys Of Summer"), and the heavily nominated album of last fall, whose title track is a mood piece alluding to his roots in Linden, Texas, population 2,400.
Known as the serious, detail-minded Eagle, Henley let those tendencies grow full-blown on his own.
He's aligned himself even more tightly with the political and environmental causes once embraced by the Eagles, who performed on behalf of Jerry Brown for president. Henley frequently throws benefits at his house - he's pro-Amazon rain forest, pro Farm-Aid, anti-censorship. At the moment, he's trying to organize a concert to save Thoreau's Walden Woods.
"The only negative on Don is that he's sometimes a little curmudgeonly, a little too serious," says friend and music producer John Boylan. "He's the guy who will always write a letter to the editor complaining about something. He can't resist writing to someone who writes a bad review about him."
Henley the perfectionist also spent a couple of years around 1980 building his Mediterranean-Santa Fe-style house, which spurns right angles and any standard parts. Friends say the lengthy project drove acquaintance Stevie Nicks to write the lyrics, "When you build your house, call me."
Today, that sturdy stucco house is heaped with the mail of an info-obsessive. Political and conservationist literature covers a heavy dining room table. Papers sit on the wet bar. One fishing newsletter, on the floor near the couch, touts a new fly rod: "That's part of my dream of going fishing some day," says Henley, who fished as a child on Caddo Lake in East Texas.
As he progresses through his uncharted 40s, Henley talks of adding on to this bachelor abode: "If I'm going to have a family, this house is too small," he says noncommittally. He has remained single because "I just don't want to botch it." Of marriage, he says, "I approach it like I approach making records: We're going to do this until we get it right. I don't care how much it costs or how long it takes. And I've still got plenty of time."
The music is more immediate.
Henley is on a warming tack with his old friend Glenn Frey. The latter is a health-club poster boy these days who guested last season on TV's Wiseguy.
Consistent with industry rumors of an Eagle reunion, Henley says he raised the idea with Frey of co-writing a couple of songs for a new Eagles greatest hits compact disc and cassette due out in late 1990.
"He was over here just a few days ago. We had a little meeting, a talk. We're on pretty good terms," he says, explaining that Frey recently had surgery and isn't ready yet to write.
"This Eagles thing is a day at a time," says Henley. "He needs to recuperate some more and rest. I think he wants to write these two songs, but anything beyond that, I wouldn't venture to make any predictions."
Frey's manager, Irving Azoff, says his client declines to comment. "Glenn wants to conduct his on-again off-again relationship with Henley in private. But on Glenn's behalf, I would say, Don and he are speaking."
Azoff says Frey on the Florida coast with Jimmy Buffett working on a potential Broadway play.
Henley says any Eagles rumors only upset his old colleague, who may have taken longer than him to recover from the fast-lane stresses of the Eagles.
"To cope with success you have to realize how important you're not," says Henley, who claims an innate sense of how to put celebrity in its place.
"I was anti-celebrity when I got here."
Boylan remembers hiring Don Henley for $250 a week to play with Frey in Linda Ronstadt's road band. Henley still had Texas plates on his Chevy Chevelle.
Boylan added musicians Randy Meisner and Bernie Leadon to the band. These four future Eagles backed up Ronstadt at Disneyland.
"The first time they played, it became clear this was something worth doing," says Boylan, describing the sound as a fusion of tough rock 'n' roll with three-part-harmony Western music.
On the group's first album, Eagles, Henley co-wrote just one song, and sang twice. That soon changed.
The afternoon chill is rattling Henley. So he heads inside to the big butcher block table in the kitchen. He puts out deli platters of shrimp, lox, brie, Camembert and fruit, then noshes pensively over what the Eagles all meant.
"Glenn is worried about our place in history. I don't think we really have a place in history - compared to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
"We were just doing the same thing that had already been done, only doing it a little differently."
Henley never wanted to work alone. Once he realized the Eagles were finished, he had jam sessions at home.
"He rounded up the usual suspects - anybody who could write or play," remembers Danny Kortchmar, Henley's co-writer and co-producer since 1982.
Kortchmar believed Henley needed an artistic change: "I thought he could get a lot funkier and meaner. The Eagles were always very controlled. It was a stretch for Don, and he was ready for it by that time."
Kortchmar creates music tracks. Henley writes his songs over them. "Either it hits him, or it doesn't hit him," says Kortchmar. "He flies by the seat of his pants, like we all do."
Henley sees The End Of The Innocence as "just a progression from the last album," but a "little more mature." The album mulls his familiar themes of false gods and corruption, and his title song is a classic Henley paean to preserving what's good about the past, while minding the future.
The closing song, though, is a departure. Heart Of The Matter acknowledges love and youth lost, and talks of the need for forgiveness. The breakup of a long relationship inspired the song. Or, as Henley says, "I was humbled by something."
He says he's getting braver about revealing himself in music.
He'll start writing more later this year.
Henley starts a U.S. tour in April (that might bring him to Toronto later in the year). Meantime, he's working on a video for "Heart Of The Matter," insisting, that he's "terribly self-conscious and uncomfortable" with performing in general.
"I'm someone who's struggling to learn how to cope with being out from behind the drums."
Struggle or not, Henley has the trappings of an idyllic life. Besides his L.A. spread, he has a plot up the coast for farming and a home outside Aspen. When he makes chili for the Super Bowl, the crowd includes names such as "Springsteen and Patti."
But Henley can't dwell on the light side. "There's always some new crisis or some new thing that needs saving," he says, just this side of dour.
He is, for example, galled at the abuse he sees taken by the music world. "I'm really tired of people trying to blame rock 'n' roll for their failure as parents and role models, and for the failure of the educational system in his country," he says.
"We do more than our share of good work for the human community and the planet."
Increasingly, Henley sees music as a vehicle for his environmental work. "This entire country is going to have to wake up to the fact that we have severely fouled our own nest. It has to stop somewhere," he says adamantly.
Yet he hasn't figured out how to commit the subject to rock 'n' roll. "I'm going to try to write some kind of environmental song next time, without getting sappy about it," he says. "You have to really watch out about sappy."
Many of Henley's links to Texas are based on his environmental work. He belongs to the Texas chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He's battled against construction of a toxic waste incinerator near his hometown, and to preserve the state's only significant natural lake, Caddo.
His other Texas links are nostalgic. He's never lost his teenage fascination with cars and guns - though he no longer hunts. He says he misses, in part, the sky, open spaces, thunderstorms, lightning, the food, work ethic and politeness of his home state. No longer the Baptist of his childhood, he allows, "Some of that old-timey stuff, I don't miss."
Never given to easy feelings or short replies, he can endorse, without contingency, one recent trend. He's glad rock no longer is just "a young man's game." He thinks the best music today comes from artists in their late 30s and 40s.
"It's because we have experience and hindsight, a different set of values, and probably a better education overall."
