The 1965 song Don Henley singled out as Paul McCartney’s finest moment
Few bands can compete with The Beatles in any capacity, but when it comes to record sales and staying power, the Eagles are up there as rare contenders for the heavyweight crown.
Don Henley formed the band near enough at the same time that The Beatles folded. A gap had been sprung in the market at that time, and the easy appeal of his band swooped right in to the ‘executive parking’ space. Now, the Eagles are the only band with two albums in the ten best-selling records of all time list.
Fittingly, their angle as a band examined the death of counterculture quite closely. Leonard Cohen said that writers have only one theme that they refine for the rest of their lives, with the Eagles, that was the death of counterculture and the myth of the American Dream. The time that they arose surely had a lot to do with that.
Although the Fab Four were not American, in some ways, they typified the American Dream and their demise and the pitfalls that brought it about were indicative of the same changes in society. This is the basis of perhaps the Eagles’ best-known, and yet most misunderstood song, ‘Hotel California’. It was a lament that the spirit of 1969 was still held as an ideal, but it was no longer being served.
It was a profound theme and the band, who’d been floating around the industry for a while, knew it. So, Henley wouldn’t have been too surprised that the song became a global hit on a scale almost incomparable in alternative music. Because, in his view, all the best songs are laments. “I think the best songs are sad songs,” he said at a Q&A event in Dallas in 2017. “I don’t enjoy happy little songs.”
He then paraphrased his music hero on the matter – the songwriter Henley called “a national treasure” – when he explained, “Randy Newman said something, that happy songs are actually harder to write. Because you have to keep it funny, you have to start funny, there has to be a middle funny part and then you have to end funny, and that is really difficult to do.”
But, just because sadder songs might be easier to write, that doesn’t make them less valid; on the contrary, in fact, as the Eagles continually proved, the seamlessness and emotive nature of melancholic tracks can make them more immediate, beloved, and in that sense, superior. “Sad songs, all the great romantic songs throughout history, from Frank Sinatra to Paul McCartney, every great songwriter does his best work writing sad songs,” Henley confidently asserted.
What is The Beatles’ best “sad song”?
“You can only hear ‘You Are My Sunshine’ so many times. On the other hand, I could listen to ‘Yesterday’ by Paul McCartney over and over and over again,” Henley commented. For the singing drummer, the song was the pinnacle of the Fab Four’s timlessness.
It is a track that has remained with him since he first heard it. He studied it closely, endlessly dipping into its emotive balm. Even the upbeat Chuck Berry studied it to the point that he called it the song he wished he had written, too. Like Henley, he figured it would live on through the ages.
For McCartney, the sadness he spoke of in the £20m anthem wasn’t immediate. The melody simply came to him in a dream, and he kept humming ‘Scrambled Eggs’ in order to retain it, later formulating the song after he realised the syllables of ‘Yesterday’ fit perfectly while on a long drive on a Portuguese holiday when he couldn’t sleep in the backseat.
Thus, we can assume that the sorrow in the song is a sort of distant encapsulation, which is ratified by Henley’s own view of how his saddest tracks come about. “I think we’ve all been hurt at one time or another,” he explained, “Especially when I was a kid in high school, in junior high, you get beat up, you get bullied. And I’ve had a lot of girlfriends. It’s like Joni Mitchell said, you take all your pain and you turn it into art. That’s what you do with it.”
In that sense, ‘Yesterday’ might not be the most complex tune, but is perhaps The Beatles at their purest. As Henley concluded: “Most great art has some tragic element to it. Paintings, songs, films, it’s just part of the process.”
He continued, “And it’s so much easier to work from tragedy than it is from…” at this notable juncture, Henley, the wasped-faced man who is yet to find a bandmate he couldn’t fight, trailed off, comically adding, “I can’t even think of any happy songs that I like.”
Maybe he could start with ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ by his old buddy. But if that doesn’t work, ‘Yesterday’, it seems, will be around to comfort the downcast for eternity; it has entered the canon, and earned Macca an absolute mint in the process, so even the saddest clouds can have a silver lining.
