Don Henley Record Interview

By Bud Scoppa

Photos by Dennis Keeley

YOU'RE DON HENLEY. YOU SPENT THE '70s behind a drum kit as a part of the Eagles, the quintessential American band of the era. Millions knew your voice, but you could walk down Sunset Boulevard at rush hour without being recognized. You took comfort in this low-profile celebrity, being a shy guy from a one red-light hamlet in the northeast comer of Texas. (You refer to the area as "the Twilight Zone of the South.") Things happened so fast, you sometimes feel as if a twister had just picked you up one day and deposited you in the rock In 9 roll version of Oz. where the lights were bright, the music was loud, and the women had legs for miles. Where any Federal Reserve note smaller than a hundred was considered chump change, and where thousands of tiny Bolivian soldiers marched frequently through the canyons of your mind. But things have changed for you, Don. You're no longer a wide-eyed 25-year-old desperado but. a seasoned 38-year-old artist, landowner and concerned citizen. What you once considered a normal good time now seems more like a nightmare -- especially the morning after. You see the truth of the maxim, "As above, so below"; a few hours of fun now require two or three days of recuperation. There are still instances in which you disregard that hard-earned knowledge, but they come fewer and farther between as time goes by. You're beginning to feel you finally have a handle on it all.

  When your band disintegrated, you wondered whether to keep doing the only thing you ever wanted to do or just chuck it all, count your money and head for the hills.

But you still had music in your head, you had something to say, and maybe even something to prove. You gathered your team together and cut an album, making it up with your confederates as you went along. The songs turned out bitter, message filled, and eloquent-maybe you surprised yourself, a little. The aptly titled I Can't Stand Still became a hit, but not an Eagles sized hit. Still, you knew you were on the right track.

Settling in with your missus, Maren, your vegetable garden, and assorted domestic animals on that piece of land above the ocean, you prepared yourself for the Big One. It took a couple years of hard work to put together, but the effort paid off. Building the Perfect Beast was a commercial breakthrough and an artistic coup.

The only problem was the videos-you were pleased with them, but now your face was all over MTV. People were beginning to recognize it; you could no longer make your rounds incognito, not with your face staring back at you from the covers of magazines at the 7-1 1. The small town boy who lives inside you still has some adjusting to do.

Now, you've retired your jeans and cowboy boots for Italian suits, and you're dancing the tango on stage with one of the girls from your handpicked band. You make pointed quips between songs. You take Maren to the theater to see a Pinter play civilized fun. By and large, you get up when it's light and go to sleep when it's dark, instead of the other way around. You speak out on the issues that concern you, play some benefits.

Ironically, it was after one such benefit against offshore drilling in Santa Barbara that you last succumbed to a little largesse in the nocturnal-fun area. The problem is, that experience took place just last night, and you have to do an interview this afternoon. Fortunately, you knew when it was time to go home, even if the realization struck an hour or two after the fact. But hey, that's life in the big city. After a ' double cheeseburger from the Sunset Grill, you shake off the cobwebs, stretch out on the couch, and ready yourself for some mental activity . . .

Record: Rather than relying on session players for your touring band, you gathered together a varied group of mostly young and little-known musicians. How did that come about?

Henley: I wanted some new, fresh people, so I just went out looking for them, I went to clubs all over town. The word-of-mouth got around and we started getting volunteers. I held auditions for three or four weeks; I must have gone through God knows how many guitar players-it was excruciating. I've only been in two bands in my life [Eagles and Shiloh], but this is the best group of people I've ever been on the road with in any capacity. We all got along great. Everybody had a great sense of humor, they were civilized-they didn't get on airplanes and start throwing ice and shit. Everybody really got into doing the New York Times crossword puzzles, and four of them play chess!

That's one thing that really got on my nerves in the Eagles. I'm not a priest or anything, but I don't believe in making public spectacles, especially if you're in a rock 'n' roll band in a public place. We have a bad enough reputation in rock 'n' roll as it is. I think when you get on an airplane or go to a hotel or go out to a restaurant, you should behave like a human being.

 The whole rock musician as outlaw thing seems pretty immature and hokey to me now. Maybe we were outlaws in the sense that we lived outside the laws of normality, and maybe we robbed a bank in our own metaphorical way, but it wasn't nearly the same. We were just playing cowboy, that's all we were doing, just a bunch of guys playing cowboy.

Record: Your shows exhibited the rekindled spirit of social commentary in today's rock 'n' roll . One of the things that surprised me was that your quipping was so succinct, funny, and on the mark-you came off like a rock 'n' roll Mort Sahl.

Henley: Mort Sahl's a new one, but somebody called me "a modern-day Will Rogers." I'm basically a shy person-I'm not your Mr. Showbiz lead vocalist kinda guy. But I do have an acerbic sense of humor, sort of dark. It took a long time for people to even realize I had a sense of humor. Some days I don't. But I decided that I would have to say something, and it just developed out of the songs and things I would read in the paper or think about. The whole tour was a learning process for me. But I started to enjoy talking. I used to have these records by this guy Brother Dave Gardner, and I started drawing on that. He was a sort of southern Lenny Bruce-existentialist Southern humor. I saw Springsteen a couple of times, and that must have influenced me, too-his raps, although the gist of mine is a little different from his.

Record: Although you're known as a heavy vocal puncher [refers to the re-recording of short segments on an existing track to improve upon or eliminate undesirable passages] on record, you pulled off the vocals without a hitch live, and there are some demanding sections in some of those songs. Do you have to get in shape to be able to meet the demands of the songs you write for yourself?

Henley: Yeah, I do, 'cause I'm a believer in leaving the songs in the highest key possible. Some people like to lower the keys when they go on the road because they think their voice might go out. And mine did, but I still wouldn't lower the keys. Actually, in recording the album, most of the vocals I did were fine, at least to the normal ear. And Kootch (Danny Kortchmar, Henley's coproducer and frequent co-writer] would say, "What's wrong with that'?" But the reason I punched, or I used different vocals . . . it's like acting, it's like a different reading of each little nuance of each line. Also, when I do an album, my voice has to be warmed up a great deal. I have to beat it up and I have to sing for a week or two to get it in shape. I have one of those voices that the worse I treat it, the better it gets. I never do anything properly; I don't do vocal exercises, anything like that. I smoke a little bit, not much. When you go in to do an album, your voice is not happening, it's not in shape. I don't sing around the house or in the shower or anything, so it takes a good two or three weeks to get my voice going, period. So, in answer to your original question, yes, some songs were put together in pieces. Not like the Eagles; in the Eagles, we'd get into putting words and even syllables together. It was I like some kind of video game, punching the little buttons.

Record: You make it sound so effortless that when you do get near the top of your vocal range, it induces an element of stress that can be very dramatic.

Henley: Stress is the word. I learned in the Eagles, from way back, that putting a song in the right key is very important. You have to get it up high enough so that it has a sense of urgency, so that your voice cuts through. Some people don't bother to do that when they record, especially new bands; they don't think of changing the key or moving it around or anything.

When we did "Boys of Summer," we recorded the whole song in whatever key it was written in, and I did it, and I said, "This is not quite right. " And it was finished we'd done the whole thing and the album was late-and I said, "We've got to raise this up half a step." And they all looked at me like, "You're nuts! What's the matter with you?" And I said, "No, believe me, it'll be a lot better."

 So we did it all over again, and they went, "Geez, you're right!"

Record: The feeling I get from your post-Eagles work is one of diligent perfectionism.

Henley: I'm a perfectionist up to a point. I used to get accused of that in the Eagles for all the vocal punching and stuff. But that was done out of necessity, because in the Eagles there was so much grass and other illegal substances being ingested, and there was so much pressure and so little sleeping being done, that it was the only way we could get decent vocals going. There are flaws-I consider them to be flaws-all over both my solo records. Maybe other people can't hear them, but I hear them. And I don't mind. I've gotten a lot looser about that.

Record: I get the impression you attempt to be on the money in every possible way. Like those beautiful triangular light banks that you took on tour.

Henley: I hate people who are deliberately and calculatedly funky. This is the Eighties: you dress up now, you have lights. It's showbiz now. It's not the Seventies and the Sixties anymore; it's completely different. I went to a lot of concerts in the past couple of years. I went to see the Eurythmics several times, and Paul Young, Tina Turner, a bunch of concerts. You don't go out in blue jeans and loiter anymore. Some critic said that we used to go out on stage and loiter. It's different now. But the light show . . . I think the lights got more compliments than any part of the show. And I'm proud of that ,cause I helped design them, and they were much more advanced than anything the Eagles ever had.

Record: In a sense, you're striking out in such a way as to make a distinction between what you were doing before and what you want to be doing. It's almost like the Eagles thing is a sub-theme in terms of its negation in your solo work.

Henley: The thing about the Eagles is sort of a two-edged sword. I'm not trying to divorce myself completely. I'm not going to deny my past; as you saw, I did three or four Eagles tunes in the set. I'm not ashamed of having been in the Eagles. I think we accomplished a great deal and added some pretty good music to the annals of rock In' roll. Some of it was crap, and I hated some of it, but when you're in a group, you can't get everything you want. The songs I'm writing now are simply extensions of songs I wrote then. They're more mature, succinct versions of those songs. I still am basically the same guy and I feel the same way about certain things; I've matured a great deal about other things, such as male/female relationships. When you're in a group, you subordinate your particular personality in order for the whole to emerge. Every opinion that was expressed in Eagles songs was not necessarily exactly the way I wanted it to be or what I believed. But I'm proud of having been in that band, whether people liked it or not.

Record: Well, people did like it. If the band didn't get its due at the time of its existence, it certainly has in retrospect.

Henley: I have learned, and I'm still learning, no to take all this quite so seriously, I mean the Eagles and rock 'n' roll in general and what it means in the scheme of things. It's what I do and I love it, but it's not my entire world anymore. I'm very thankful and thrilled about my new solo career, and I take my work deadly serious sometimes, and I do try really hard, I'm an overachiever. And then there's part of me that would like to just go away and disappear tomorrow and never come back. I'd like to go get a fishing boat somewhere and just take a hike, but I know that that probably wouldn't last very long. So having been in the Eagles gives me a certain amount of comfort now, because I've done it once, so I don't have quite as much to prove, especially after this album. I'm not quite as much of an angry young man, and I don't have that "I'll show you" attitude quite as much anymore. It helps, actually, it frees me, it opens my mind up to be more creative and not get bogged down in all the clutter and hoopla and crap that surrounds any rock In' roll career.

Record: You're 38 years old, and you have a different perspective than you did when you were 25. It's a completely different world now, and you have 13 years of relative ease in terms of being able to have what you wanted, even if it wasn't easy, right?

Henley: It wasn't-I can't tell you. It was not easy to keep that group together. We expended so much energy that could have been channeled into creative energy, just keeping personal relationships together and keeping that group together.

Record: Much longer than it would have naturally-

Henley: Oh yeah. It would have been gone in a year or two. People don't know what we went through to keep that group together. It was just a nightmare.

Record: Who was it that was trying to keep it together?

Henley: Well, Glenn and I were trying to keep it together.

Record: So you were allies, for the most part?

Henley: Yes, we were, yeah.

 Record: Your audience is mostly adults, people who have been following you for 12 or 13 years. It's not like there's just one rock In' roll anymore. It's been around for 30 years and there are at least two distinct generations. There are kids now 15 years old who are listening to Motley Crue, pissing off their parents, who are listening to you. Kids have to have something to rebel against, and there's only rock In' roll, but now you can break it down into these certain antagonistic idioms.

Henley: But us folks in our 30s, we're still rebelling too, only we're rebelling against the people who are older, the Reagan people, that generation, who are still running the country even though us baby-boomers are more numerous than anybody else. We're still not in charge. The old folks are still running this place, so there's plenty of rebellion in our music too, just not the adolescent kind that the younger kids are listening to. But as far as opinions in music, I don't even pretend to have any answers and I don't want to tell anybody how to live their lives. I don't want to set myself up as some kind of a godhead, some kind of a seer or guru or anything like that. I have opinions, and they do slip into my music. But I want to make people aware of certain issues, and I want to make 'em think a little bit, and I want 'em to know what's going on, because a lot of people these days are just burying their heads in the sand. I'm glad to see activism happening like in the Sixties. This time around I think it's much more pragmatic and action-oriented than it was in the Sixties. The Sixties was more fashion show. It was a parade of weirdness and it didn't really accomplish a whole lot, I don't think. People were there for sex and drugs. Now, I think we're actually getting some things done, although I hope we don't overdo it. I think there could be a backlash, people could get tired of all this stuff if it's not tempered a bit.

But I'm glad to see rock In' roll taking a little more of a stand on social issues, although there's still a lot of naivete. Everybody's jumping on the apartheid bandwagon now. That's all well and good, but I don't think we have the right to point any fingers at South Africa. The other day I got a letter from a guy from this organization called the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. They're having a trial down there: the Ku Klux Klan hanged a 19-yearold black kid. It's still going on.in this country. We haven't straightened out our own crap yet. So I don't think we should go raving at South Africa until we clean up our own backyard. The Klan is very active in this country, all over the place. It's still going on. All this bandwa on hopping, it's good intentions, everybody has good intentions. I'm just afraid that there's gonna be a backlash against it. I think people are going to get benefited to death. I hope it doesn't turn into a fad, that it stays serious and sincere so that we can get something done.

Record: The one that seemed to mean the most internally in this country was Farm Aid. At the same time, it's said that the small farmer is dead. It's too bad, but nothing anybody does is going to change the movement of history.

Henley: Perhaps. It's just the way the country's going. We're going, and have been going, from a rural, agrarian society to an urban society, and that's maybe inevitable, I don't know. I was at Farm Aid, and I looked out there, and I just wondered, how many of these people are actually going to go away from here and do something, or try to do something, about this? How much impact is this really gonna have? They only raised nine-and-a-half million bucks, which is a lot less than even they expected to raise. Sure, it raised awareness for a while, but I don't think it swayed Washington that much, especially not the President. I'm a little cynical about these sorts of things. But I really loved Farm Aid because we were out in this great little midwestern college town. I love shit like that. They bad the tent set up behind the stage and it was like a fair. They had hay on the ground and food and watermelons.

Record: Some writers are very assertive in the scenes they're describing, but you're more of an observer, aren't you?

Henley: What I try to do is chronicle complex events with vernacular, which is difficult. The songwriting process still mystifies me. When I finish a song, I really don't know how I've gotten from the beginning to the end of it. This has been said before and it sounds a little cosmic, but it comes literally out of the air somewhere, it comes through me, and it comes from my subconscious a lot. I have to open myself up so that it can flow. My life and my mind get very cluttered sometimes with all the stuff that's going on around me, and it's difficult to shut off what they call the "monkey-mind" in Zen. I have a lot of monkey-mind and brain chatter. I read a lot of things, I file them away back there, and things come out years later that I don't remember where they come from. I'm very grateful when I finish a song. Some writer said once, "I hate writing, but I love having written."

"Boys of Summer" was one of those great, rare moments where I got so inspired by the track that Mike Campbell had given me that it just sort of wrote itself. It came just screamin' out of me. And I was jumping up and down in the car 'cause I knew I had something there. I said, "This is good and I know it's good, it's great." I like writing that way sometimes. Maybe it's sort of impersonal; I suppose people have this vision of two guys sitting down with guitars in a room with a little light bulb and some cigarettes and beer. And sometimes we used to do it that way, Glenn and I would sit down and bang 'em out that way. But sometimes I like to be alone with the material, because the actual process of writing and recording with all the equipment and the people around gets in the way of dreaming, gets in the way of the creative process. I like to write with people who don't mind giving me a cassette and leaving me alone. On the other hand, I'm not opposed to sitting down with somebody and writing with them.

Record: The way you described what you were going for, I thought of Randy Newman. You were talking about using simplicity of -expression and humor to describe the complexity of human emotion.

Henley: He's influenced me a lot; I think he's probably the best songwriter in America right now, except he's probably too good for his own good. He goes right over peoples' heads, usually. He's been a big influence on me. I had a lot of help on this album too from guys like him and David Paitch, who are so musical. Kootch calls me " C-man, " for "concept man." I listen to a track and it gives me an idea of what it sounds like, what it's gonna be about. It dictates to me certain subjects that I can put with it that will work.

Record: Are you still writing on the run, in the midst of the recording process?

Henley: I don't usually finish anything before I go in the studio, because the music becomes such an important part in the production now, it's part of songwriting. What I usually do in the studio gives me these colors and images in my mind. We do it at Kootcb's house, too. He's got a little studio over there that we do demos on. It helps me to write if I can hear all the parts. It's hard to sit down anymore and just write a song with an acoustic guitar. It comes out like an acoustic guitar song. So you have to incorporate the technology into the songwriting process. It's a very grey area. Where does songwriting end and producing begin? Where does producing end and engineering begin? Sometimes I can hear the whole thing in my head, sometimes I can hear all the chords and the melody and the words. I get 'em in bed sometimes, and I wake up and they're gone. I'm really bad about not keeping pen and paper around to jot things down, I make it so hard. I don't use all the conveniences. I don't have a computer, I just use legal pads and pens.

But basically, the most important thing, and the thing that a lot of people don't realize, is that you have to have an idea, and you have to have something you believe in. It has to really mean something to me inside, I can't just sit down and dash off a song and make it rhyme. I can't just make it an exercise, I really have to be interested in what I'm talking about. That's why it takes me so long to write an album. I have to go away and let the well fill up. I have to read a lot of books and I have to live and get some experience. I know guys that come in beaming and say, "Boy, I wrote ten songs this week." I can't do it that way.

Record: Our generation has certainly changed in terms of its priorities, although I think people still want to be gratified and feel good.'But I think there's a certain powerful need for stability and maybe a belief system that wasn't always such a high priority.

Henley: There's definitely a big spiritual vacuum, not only in this town (L.A.) but in America.

Record: I think we look to our rock stars to fill that spiritual void. The way people venerate Springsteen, because of his overwhelming sincerity-he's something to believe in.

Henley: As long as they remember that he's also just a guy, and he puts his pants on one leg at a time. That's the only danger in venerating rock stars or whatever we are. As long as people keep it in perspective, I think it's great. I think he's doing a great thing, I'm all for it. That's basically what I'm trying to do too, in my own way, is disseminate information, make people think, make people care.

Record: Have you ever had any doubts that this was what you wanted to do, in the last 15 years or so?

Henley: When I was growing up I never wanted to do anything but this. This was what I was gonna do and there were no two ways about it. I don't know how I got herejust nerve, I guess. I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I never thought I'd get this far.

Record: Was there a period there in between where you wondered if you could pull it off on your own?

Henley: Yeah, I said, "God, can I do this by myself?" I thought maybe I should put another band together. Then I said, "Nah, I can do this. " I drank a lot of Scotch making that first album. And then after it was done I figured, "Yeah, I can do this," so this album was much more confident. It sounds more confident, I think, and I stretched further and took more chances.

I still don't think of myself as a solo performer, it still seems very funny to me. I was always a group guy, and I was comfortable there, and it was fine with me. Some nights I'll catch myself out front going, "Jesus, what the hell am I doing out here? This isn't me." But I've got enough experience and I'm old enough now that I can have a sense of humor about it.

If I took it seriously I couldn't get out there and do it, but I've gotten to the point where I really don't care 'cause I know it's going to be all right.

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