The White Paper: Don Henley's 'Inside Job' (Continued)

For this exclusive interview, Don Henley spoke from his home in Los Angeles as he began production meetings and rehearsals for an extensive tour, due to commence May 21 in Houston, in support of "Inside Job."

Let's start off by talking about the first track for radio from "Inside Job," meaning "Workin' It." The song is laugh-out-loud funny at times, but it's also a protest song. You told me weeks ago that you felt the album was something of a personal diary and manifesto. No one offers the public such honest, direct feelings anymore.

Songwriters have become like politicians; it's all rhetoric. They won't say anything substantive on the issues, except perhaps in rap music, and that's debatable.

I don't think artists are really willing to fix their positions on much of anything that doesn't have popular, commercial consensus anymore.

There's a lot of unfocused anger, but nobody will take a position; everybody's worried about offending some faction. Everybody's trying to be as edgy as they can be while still being politically correct -- or vague.

I, on the other hand, am in a precarious position because I'm successful, wealthy, and I could certainly be accused of hypocrisy. And I'm sure I'll be accused of being a cynic and a pious fuck and a self-righteous prick, but I don't care.

On the other side of the coin, I think one could look at it as, "Gee, he's part of the system, but he's still bad-mouthing the system." I'm trying to bite the hand that feeds me as hard as I can! [Laughter]

Frankly, I’ve always liked your own records better than Eagles records—

…Me, too [Laughs]

---because they have fewer compromises. The Eagles albums were great records, but I preferred the personal directness of your own stuff. The reason I like your solo work is because, from “I Can’t Stand Still” onward, you’ve said that as an artist, a person, or as a citizen, you’re not supposed to have a posse around you. The reason, for example, that “Johnny Can’t Read” in your song of that name is Johnny takes no responsibility for himself. We could all do better, and we don’t always try.

Well, I come out of the ‘60s tradition, even though my success began in the ‘70s. I still come out of the protest social movement of the ‘60s, and I was collecting folk music in the ‘50s, when there was a tradition there of brining the news to people, however band or ugly it may be. There has to be some room for thought in the music. And I hasten to add that my songs are diagnostic rather than prescriptive. [Laughs]

But they get people arguing and talking.

I would hope. That’s my hope. Although there seems to be such complacency now; the stock market is doing great, people are comfy, the economy’s great, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to push against. But I maintain that while in the ‘60s we had very visible causes like the civil rights movement and very visible things to push against like the Vietnam War, the things that are corrupting our society now are much more insidious and invisible. They’re below the surface. I think the Cold War has turned inward in the form of corporate greed and voraciousness—big fish eating little fish.

As I say in the song “Inside Job,” it’s all “insect politics” now. And the Cold War has also taken the form of turning inward in our own political system, the members of Congress arguing like petty school boys, with all this rabid partisanship to the point of complete gridlock.

Those are the things that people ought to be concerned with now, I think, ‘cause it’s wrecking the world for our children.

Part of what I get from “Workin’ It” is a critique of the pervasive mentality that money justifies everything.

Everything! Everything’s for sale, and everything has a price. Yes, that’s basically it. I’m reading a book right now titled “Everything For Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets” by a guy named Robert Kuttner.

He writes, “Consumption is doubtless pleasurable, and no one minds a high standard of living,” but the book talks about “the unfettered marketplace and trust in its ability to increase wealth and promote innovation…Dissenting voices have been drowned out by a stream of circular arguments and complex mathematical models that ignore real-world conditions and disregard values and pursuits that can’t be easily turned into commodities.”

Human dignity is also for sale. Any racial or social demonization or self-degradation is deemed OK if there’s going to be a cash return on it. And that’s supposed to be smart. It seems that there is nothing so virulently racist, self-hating, or bigoted toward black and poor people that can’t be excused so long as the scenario ends with the artist shown being paid cash for doing it.

See, that’s also an attempt to get under the critical radar, too, the thinking being that “if I’m nobody, then they can’t knock me.” In the ‘70s and ‘80s people tried very hard to be a rock star but also be like the common man. You try to cloak yourself in a blue collar, and you go, “I’m one of you.” Springsteen has been successful to some degree at maintaining that even after he’s become humongous, but I think it’s another version of that: I’m a working man, I’m one of the people.

Being one of the people I having the courage to take an isolated position. Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of it.” You don’t believe you’re not afraid of things.

Believe me, when I sit around writing these lyrics, I have fear. [Laughs]

On "Workin' It" you're speaking the truth to power: "We've got a whole new class of opiates/To blunt the stench of discontent/In these corporation nation-states/Where the loudest live to trample on the least." There are corporate nation-states now, and in the 21st century, social observers have said people may have to go to war against corporations rather than countries, and for good reasons.

I fucking hope so, because I'm sick of it, and that includes record companies and film studios, and the oil companies and chemical companies. Across the board, the song ostensibly seems to be about the entertainment business, but it's about all of them, as far as I'm concerned. Because I've spent half the money I've made in the past 25 years fighting those bastards, mostly on the environmental front.

On the song "Goodbye To A River," I say, "They're killing everything divine," and they are. And they're killing, as you said, human dignity. You can turn on daytime TV and see the most disgusting, squalid display of the lack-- or disappearance -- of human dignity I've ever seen in my life. The networks are exploiting people's flaws, exploiting human weakness. Like Jenny Jones, who ought to be in prison in my estimation.

The question asked every day in our culture, in capital letters 10 feet high, is, "WHAT WILL YOU GIVE UP FOR MONEY?"

Or for 15 minutes of fame -- it's one or the other. These people, they must want to be on television really badly. I guess Andy Warhol was right -- everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

But I think they also want to be paid for it. The time and money that went into that weird “wedding with a millionaire” stunt on network TV must have been considerable. What viewers are watching isn’t a real human high point but rather a cynical public attempt at diving for the bottom.

As Stan Lynch said recently, “The barrel has no bottom.” Some people just laugh about it; they go, “Oh well, you should ignore that stuff,” but it’s affecting our culture. I don’t want to sound like William Bennett, but even I agree with him about some things.

The problem with William Bennet is that he didn’t walk it like he talked it. He waited until he could make money in the private sector as a moralist. Because when he was Reagan’s secretary of education from 1985-1988, he attacked rising college costs and lowered academic standards—but then he defended every budget cutback on higher education spending~ And when he was the “drug czar”—head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bush—Bennett advocated zero tolerance for recreational drug users and Pentagon involvement in drug interdiction, yet he was silent on Jan. 18, 1993, when Bush pardoned Aslam P. Adam, one of the biggest Pakistani drug dealers in modern history. Adam was a real drug czar, a known crook, and they let him go!

I’m really tired of people passing the buck, and you cannot find one person who’s responsible for anything anymore. I was in a health food store in my neighborhood the other day and heard a guy say to a nice teenage man who asked where some product was, “It’s not my job,” and walk away. I’ve heard that line in clichés but I never actually saw it happen.

My parents used to say, “We’ll always love you, but the point in life is that you’re supposed to feel lonesome most of the time, because you have to be willing to be the last good person if that’s what it takes to behave honorably. How did "Workin' It" come to be written? What got your goat that day?

[Laughs] That day -- and every day! Well, we were over in a studio in North Hollywood called Royaltone a year and a half ago, and we wanted to do something echoing [Jimi] Hendrix. I kept saying to Stan [Lynch], "I wanna do something like Hendrix on this record; I want to bring back that sound and feeling." So we got a couple of drummers in there, and we got my guitar player from my band, Frank Simes, and I said, "Frank, go out there and play some Hendrix riffs!"

So he started playing amorphous stuff like that, but with no shape or structure, and Stan just recorded it all. Later on he got on the computer and Pro Tool-ed it into a sequence and made a song out of it and gave me the track. So I went into a '60s mentality, when people were protesting.

But oddly enough, the song in the beginning had a different title. The editor of Harper's magazine, Lewis Lapham, wrote a book several years ago about Ross Perot and why people exalted him; the book was called "The Wish For Kings." Lapham is a pissed-off, angry guy, and it's a brilliant little book. So my song was originally called "The Wish For Kings," and it had the same spirit about it, and the chorus was "The wish for kings!," and we were shouting it. The song was about how we want a king, want to be led, but when we get a leader we end up hating him or her and burning them at the stake.

But I decided as time went by that that wasn't going to fly and was too obtuse, and I wanted something more accessible, and somehow it just morphed into "Workin' It." I wanted a hook that was universal, and that phrase is in the lexicon now. It has a little bit of a "Chain Gang" thing about it, subtly, to me, and part of it was influenced, I'm sure, by my utter dismay and loathing for what's happening in the record business: for all the giant octopuses that keep rising out of the sea and gobbling all the little creatures around them. Corporations were originally formed for expeditions, for explorers in ships.

They were meant to share risk and benefits for a specific expeditionary aim.

Yes, they would form a corporation, and the monarchy would bless it. But now they've turned into something they were never meant to be. And this echoes the same thing I was trying to get across in "Sunset Grill" -- the demise of the little man and the mom-and-pop business. The theme is not new to me, but I guess I'm getting more blunt or blatant about it. The most telling moment for me is in the song "Inside Job" where I'm literally screaming, "Wake up!"

For instance, our entire culture is awash in guns, whose popular use is shoved down little kids’ throats in every cartoon and video game. When the Constitution was being written, the right to keep and bear arms had a symbolic and an actual validity. Now it’s a better defense of individual freedom to be able to keep and bear intellectual property rights. A gun isn’t gonna protect you.

[Laughter] Exactly. But this culture has raised to the highest level in history the art of looking the other way.

This raises a good point. With all the themes on this new record, like talking about the responsibilities of marriage on “Taking You Home” or offering public thanks and not having a sense of entitlement on “My Thanksgiving” or quasi-religious expectations on “They’re Not Here, They’re Not coming,” I assume you mean for this stuff to have an effect on people, right?

Right. I repeat, the word is “hope.”

But there are lobbyists in this business who have actually written in Billboard commentaries that “music cannot cause action.” That means music cannot make people dance! So do you, Don Henley, think your music can have an impact on people, change their minds, move them to make a midcourse adjustment?

Yes, I think so. And not in great numbers, you know? I think I long ago gave up any theories that music was going to revolutionize the world in big broad strokes. But I know that it can change the lives of individuals, because I’ve got letters right here on my coffee table from fans of mine that I just received.

One here has written me about how the Walden Woods Project and my involvement with that brought him back from a wasted life, and how he’s turned his entire life around, and he’s married and has children and reads Thoreau now. It’s an incredibly touching note.

And I feel music and art and literature can have the power to change other people’s lives, too. I don’t think it’s going to change entire societies or cultures or the general direction in which this world is going, but I think it can have a life-changing effect on certain individuals, and they in turn can change other individuals. I suppose it’s the ripple effect I’m hoping for.

I just don’t want people to forget what music is about and what is was capable of doing at one time. I want them to try to remember how they were moved by it—in their youth, especially.

If music can do no wrong, then it can do no right. And if we can say a song like “We Shall Overcome” had no validating effect on the civil rights movement, then we’re saying it and other such activist hymns had no effect on anything, didn’t inspire anybody, didn’t make anyone step off a sidewalk and join a march anywhere.

Yeah! So what’s the point? To say music is meaningless? Are we just doing music to make a living now? Just for the money? That’s not the reason I do it.

So when did music change your life? What particular thing would make you say that?

Oh, I think when my mother brought home “Hound Dog” in 1956. When I was 10 or 11 years old my mother made periodic trips to a larger town like Marshall or Texarkana to the record stores to get me Looney Tunes records, cartoon-type records. One day she said, “I’m going to Marshall,” which was 40 miles away. “Do you want me to get you anything from a record store?”

I said, “Yeah! I heard a record on the radio from Elvis Presley called ‘Hound Dog,’ and I’d like you to get that for me.” She brought that home, and that was the beginning—it made me feel excited.

But the more profound change was when the Beatles came along in ’64. I liked rock’n’roll, and I was interested in it, but hearing the Beatles was what solidified the direction of my life. That’s when I decided I wanted to somehow live my life in connection with music and making records.

I used to listen to the Beatles every morning before I went to school. They used to give me the strength to get through a day in high school and all the cruelty that that entailed. And the music spoke to me of faraway places and other kinds of lives.

So I just hope. Because everything has been and continues to be brought down to the lowest common denominator now, and I just refuse to go there.

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