The following interview, "Don Henley," was published in:
 Rolling Stone's 20^{th Anniversary Issue (Issue 512; November 5/December 10, 1987)}

Interview by: MIKAL GILMORE

Photograph by: MATTHEW ROLSTON

Typed by: Lynn

I always think of the first line in A Tale of Two Cites: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." I think the Sixties was one of those special eras: a convergence of a time and place and particular generation that produced a kind of sociological upheaval. But it was also a divisive time. It divided us from the older generation until we were left clinging to ourselves, which wasn't always a good thing. There were people in the Sixties who were sincere and intelligent and had good intentions. But there are always opportunists in any movement, and sooner or later, an ugly fringe element will crop up. The problem was we tended to use hair and clothing as symbols of friendship. We thought that if somebody looked like us, then he must be okay. We thought that your appearance signified that you stood on one side or the other of the social and political line.

Beyond that, I'm also not convinced we really accomplished all that much. Kennedy was president and everybody thought it was Camelot, but look at what we did. We raised all that hell in the Sixties, and then what did we come up with in the Seventies? Nixon and Reagan. The country reverted right back into the hands it was in before. I don't think we changed a damn thing, frankly. That's what the last verse of "The Boys of Summer" was about. I think our intentions were good, but the way we went about it was ridiculous. We thought we could change things by protesting and making firebombs and growing our hair long and wearing funny clothes. But we didn't follow through. After all our marching and shouting and screaming didn't work, we withdrew and became yuppies and got into the Me Decade.

You're right, those times galvanized us: they galvanized us out of the system. I mean, we didn't vote. And yes, we still take credit for ending the Vietnam War. But when you think about it, that war was the only crisis that our generation had to suffer through. In retrospect, we've had it pretty easy. Our parents lived through the Depression, World War II, the Korean War - a lot more shit than we've lived through. And while we may have had something to do with ending the Vietnam War - that is, the impetus may have spread from us to the "straight" sector in the end, it was actually more a matter of economics.

Like I said, those times galvanized people outside the system, and people are still suspicious today. They still don't vote. I believe that our system, as flawed as it is, and as many bad politicians as it may contain, is still the best in the world. And I think if you want to change things, you have to do it from inside. You have to take a hand in things, you have to learn about presidential candidates, or any candidate, and you have to vote. Sure, sometimes you have to vote for the best of all possible assholes. But otherwise, I don't think you have any room to bitch. I mean, we dropped the ball. We're the baby boomers: we're the biggest generation that ever lived in this country, and we could be running this place, but we're not.

I wish I could say it has changed things, but I'm afraid it's been used largely as an escape. And when it comes to political issues, most rock & roll artists are living in the Dark Ages. There is still this prevailing Sixties, antiestablishment attitude that all politicians are suspect, if not outright corrupt. They practically deny the existence of, and do not participate in, our democratic system of government - even on issues that directly affect their livelihood, such as creative rights and free speech.

I guess there are two schools of thought on what rock & roll should do. Some people say it should be for entertainment only, that you shouldnt analyze it, and that it shouldn't be used for purposes of revolution or changing things. In other words, rock & roll is just entertainment, and if you get too serious about it, you take the fun out of it. I happen to be from the other school. In fact, the older I get, the more rock & roll simply becomes a means to an end for me  a vehicle for change. Keeping in mind that a good love song never hurts on an album, I try to get as much information as I can gracefully get into a song without making it a pedantic treatise.

But back when I started, rock & roll was more or less a way out of the place I was in. It was a way to meet girls, a way to make money, a way to be popular. It was a way to be different. Still, in the Eagles we always tried, even from the beginning, to say something. As far back as l974 we were trying. It was a bad example of what we wanted to do, be that song "On the Border" was a thinly  perhaps I should say thickly  disguised political piece about Nixon and all the trouble he was in. But we weren't old and mature enough to make any sense out of it then, I think.

At the time  this was right before I moved to Los Angeles from Texas  I had come home from college and was rediscovering my hometown and nature. I was in a big Emerson and Thoreau frenzy, living that Sixties idyllic flower-child kind of life from a rural perspective. So, since rediscovering that whole American agrarian myth, it seemed appropriate to me that we go in the direction of country music. And because California was part of the West  and because you could not only play country here but could also have long hair and like rock & roll  it seemed like the logical place to go. When we moved out here in 1970, Los Angeles had much more of that kind of Western cowboy-town flavor than it does now. Now it's acquired more of the post-modern Bauhaus flavor, with the advent of New Wave music and stuff like that in the Eighties. It's funny how rock & roll and architecture and culture can all be correlated.

I have as much right as anybody to do country music, because I am from the country. I grew up listening to country music. Also, we were helping bring a medium to people who otherwise wouldnt have listened to it. I dont claim we were doing country music; I guess we were doing what was called country rock, whatever that is. But I dont think any harm was done.

It's also true that Nashville got as far away from country music as anybody. They went way out in the middle of the road until it was disgusting. Theyve only come back around to the pure stuff in the last few years. A lot of good country music has come from California and Texas in recent years, but not much from Nashville.

Sure, some of our stabs at country were a little pretentious. I guess it wasnt the real down-and-dirty stuff. Actually, we didn't know what we were. We were looking for ourselves. And we had so many diverse elements within the group; we were fighting from day one about what we were supposed to be. We never did agree on that point until the very end. But we were young, we were growing up, and we were learning. The critics were very unforgiving of us for that kind of stuff.

In retrospect, I admit that the whole cowboy-outlaw-rocker myth was a bit bogus. I don't think we really believed it; we were just trying to make an analogy. Suddenly we were getting famous and making all this money, and it just turned out little heads around. We were living outside the laws of normality, we were out here in L.A., things were kind of Western, and we just decided to write something about it to try to justify it to ourselves.

When the band first started, I never thought wed last more than a couple of years. I thought we'd make a couple of albums and that would be it. But at first we loved what we were doing, and then, once we got a modicum of success, we said, "Well, this is nice." Then we realized that staying there was harder than getting there, which is always the case. So then we put all our energies into staying up there, realizing that you have your hour in the sun, and then you live the rest of your life in the shade.

In any event, those first three or four records were just as much us trying to grow up as anything. We were trying to explain things to ourselves, and a lot of the time we didn't know what we were talking about. There's something on all those albums that makes me cringe. I mean, our whole quest as we went along was to try to make each album better than the previous one, and that's difficult to do when you're trying to run a group as a democracy. Keeping that group together was a full-time job. I had an ulcer before I was thirty because of the Eagles.

Both. Simultaneously. There is that thing called creative tension, but I could have done without some of it. I suppose a lot of good art down through the ages has come out of turmoil and stress, but this was just too much.

There were fights about it. Because rock & roll is a peasant medium, it's street language, and you're not supposed to use big words. Some people do - Sting and Joni Mitchell get away with it, and I'm trying to stretch it a little bit - but you can't get too fancy with rock & roll lyrics. So we'd pace around and smoke cigarettes and talk about what we meant to say in a song and about how many different meanings you could cram into one line. Glenn would go with my ideas of metaphor and symbolism, since I was the college guy, while he would be good at the rock & roll part and at arranging things.

But there were huge fights about integrity and stuff like that. I never disagreed with what any of the guys wanted to say; I just simply disagreed with the way they wanted to say it. It was a matter of form, you know? All our hearts were in the right place - we all cared deeply about the music and our fellow man and all that stuff. But some of us were just less adept at saying it than others. You have to compromise when you're in a group; you have to let things slide sometimes. You have to go for the good of the whole - "the greater good," they call it. Like America.

This misanthrope business has always been a complete mystery to me. We were critical, but for fair reasons: we cared about our fellow man; we cared about the ecology; we cared about the Indians; we cared about nuclear energy. And so we would point out what was wrong. I don't consider that to be misanthropic - I consider it to be criticism.

Well, maybe we did. I still feel that way: take a good hard look at the world today; the news is not good. We probably could've put it better, but rock & roll is, by its nature, angry and rebellious. And we were rebelling against what we saw as the Establishment - the big corporations, the big this and the big that. Also, we had dry, cynical senses of humor. And as a result, I think we were misunderstood to a great degree. And we were arrogant. Sure. You have to be arrogant if you're going to be in a rock & roll band. But you know, I thought we were pretty nice people all in all.

Um, Glenn's attitude toward women was a little different than mine sometimes. I'll just let it go there.

I don't think we had any delusions that we were creating history or changing culture or anything. I mean, Frank Sinatra, Elvis and the Beatles - stuff like that only comes along once every thirty or forty years. We definitely knew we were a third- or fourth-generation act. We just wanted to do the work and be good at it and be respected by our fellow songwriters. We didn't really have too many highfalutin ideas about what we were, which is why we felt so maligned by the critics. It disappointed us and hurt our feelings a great deal and made us angry - to the point that we would lash out against the critics sometimes, which is always a mistake, because they had the last word. It's their paper, you know? But the older we got, we learned to deal with it better, though we never handled it really well But we just went right ahead, because the public liked us. I mean, we sold a shitload of records, and that's what an artist can always fall back on. "Well, they like me," you know?

Actually, I was a little disappointed with how the record was taken, because I meant it in a much broader sense than a commentary about California. I was looking at American culture, and when I called that one song "Hotel California, I was simply using California as a microcosm for the rest of America and for the self-indulgence of our entire culture.

It was, to a certain extent, about California, about the excesses out here. But in many instances, as California goes, so goes the nation. Things simply happen out here or in New York first  whether it's with drugs or fashion or artistic movements or economic trends  and then work their way toward the middle of America. And thats what I was trying to get at.

With that record, we reached some sort of creative peak, as all bands do. You can go back and trace any bands career and find that one album that was the zenith of their productivity. That was ours, and we knew it.

I guess there was a brief period of time where I tried to put some kind of creative stock into drugs, but I realized pretty soon that you could get more work, and better work, done if you were straight. We did a lot of work on drugs in the Eagles. Our schedule was just so grueling; we didnt have the stamina otherwise. Wed do things like go out on tour, play a few gigs, then get on a Lear jet and fly to Miami and start recording at four oclock in the morning, then get back on the Lear jet at three or four in the afternoon and go back to Cleveland and do a concert. And wed do it all just to meet deadlines. So we took drugs.

But from the beginning in the Eagles, I would get in fights with the other guys about smoking joints or doing coke before going onstage. Using drugs would screw up their voices, and they'd sing out of tune. So I got the nickname of Grandpa. I mean, drugs had their place, but I was never one of those guys to get up and roll a breakfast joint.

I think we reached our saturation point with drugs around '77 or '78. And, of course, now they're very unpopular. Now Alcoholics Anonymous is the addiction - people who want to sin and tell and confess in public. I'm sick of those people. Every week in People you read some crap about somebody who was on drugs. You know, keep it to yourself. Have some dignity, for chrissakes.

Yes, it's a good thing that people are getting straightened out, because maybe now we'll all be a little more responsible. And hopefully, we'll all get involved a little more, because drugs are a bit too synonymous with self-involvement. I'm all for it. I just don't want anybody preaching to me, because that's an excess in its own regard. But then we're a culture of extremes - we long for extremes in this country. That's why rock & roll came along in the first place.

The romance had gone out of it for Glenn and me. I mean, The Long Run was not as good as Hotel California, and it was an excruciatingly painful album to make. We were having fights all the time about the songs - enormous fights about one word - for days on end. That record took three years and cost $800,000, and we burned out. I think we knew early on that fame was a fleeting thing. That's really what Desperado was all about: that you get up just to get torn down eventually, and that this is a fickle business. That's what that album was all about, you know: that we would all be hung sooner or later. Or hang ourselves.

Also, we were growing in different directions, and there was a tremendous pressure on us after Hotel California to keep that commercial and creative momentum going. But you can't really do that again. We were exhausted, and we were sick and tired of each other. We needed a vacation, and we didn't get one. So we just flamed out.

Actually, "The Last Resort," on Hotel California, is still one of my favorite songs. I'm more proud of that than I am of "Hotel California" or "Life in the Fast Lane" or any of that other stuff. That's because I care more about the environment than about writing songs about drugs or love affairs or excesses of any kind.

The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence - by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment.

The environment is the reason I got into politics: to try to do something about what I saw as the complete destruction of most of the resources that we have left. We have mortgaged our future for gain and greed.

Well, you can't climb a soapbox on your record and rail all the time, because that turns people off. When caring becomes a fad, when activism becomes fashionable, look out - because people are going to turn away from it.

The truth is, I don't know how to get people involved on a sustained level. All I can do is my part, getting involved in what I can without sacrificing my career. My friend Jackson Browne has the same problem. He's committed himself to so many causes, and they're all good causes. The only reason he and I can have some influence is because we've had hit records, and if we let the record making go, then we can't do as much. It's a tight wire that we have to walk. I do not want to have my name slapped on too many causes. For all his good intentions, I do not want to become the Ed Asner of rock & roll. It's better to write songs about what you're concerned about than to endorse every cause that comes along, because you wear out your welcome. At the same time, I get up every day and think about it: Am I doing too much on this side, or too little?

Believe me, these times are just as urgent, just as dangerous, as the Sixties, and there's just as much to rally behind. Especially with Reagan telling us how America is back on track. America is not back on track. People are still homeless, people are still out of work, the farmers are going out of business, and we're experiencing the biggest deficit in history. A large part of the nation has gone back to a narrow, fundamentalist way of thinking. We think God is an American.

Well, I guess in the mornings I'm optimistic, and by the time the day is done, I'm a little pessimistic - especially if I watch the news. But I keep hoping, I do have hope. I mean, inside every cynic there's an idealist trying to get out. At least in my case there is.

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