Don Henley on why Chopin was the precursor to rock stars: “He was the dude”
Rock and roll wasn’t a genre that came out of nowhere. Every generation has that one specific style of music that manages to piss off their parents and enrage so-called “real” musicians, but the entire appeal of those songs is for younger kids to find something to rally behind rather than the musical composition. Rock music has a lot of great players, but it also works best on the back of attitude. Don Henley, one of the genre’s softer stars, knew that some people were born rock stars even if they weren’t playing the same style of music.
Granted, it’s not hard to see why people are treated like rock stars even if they don’t belong to the same genre. Even if he played some of the most elegant piano lines of his time, seeing someone like Liberacci go against the grain and make music with his level of flamboyance had the same kind of rebellious attitude that people would find when listening to Elton John or David Bowie years later.
That kind of rebellious spirit wasn’t limited to strictly older music, either. Even in the modern age, when rock has faded into the background of the pop charts, hearing people like Kendrick Lamar go against the system of what the music industry is supposed to do is another way of people testing the limits of what popular music could become.
And while Henley kept things fairly close to the chest in Eagles, he still had a vast love of music beyond country rock. His tastes were shaped when living in Texas, and outside of hearing the biggest names in Dixieland jazz when he was first coming up, there was more than enough time to listen to classical music as well.
This was nothing new for most rock stars, either. Both Billy Joel and Elton John had their moments of becoming obsessed with classical music and listening to the way that Henley constructs melodies, there’s a certain elegance in the way he sings them that brings to mind the kind of elegant inventions that people like Beethoven would have written years before him. But for Henley, Chopin existed in a world of his own.
Despite being one of the best melodists of his time, Henley said that he would have loved to sit down with Chopin and discuss music, saying, “I’d like to meet Chopin and tell him how awesome his stuff is. He was a rock and roll star in his time. He was the dude. He was extraordinary.” But even if some of the composer’s stuff was far away from Chuck Berry, there are still traces of his tunes baked into Henley’s vocabulary.
While he might not have learned theory properly and managed to fail out of the one music class he took in college, Henley has channelled that same kind of musical sophistication into the songs he writes. There are not nearly as many strange detours in his music, but listening to ‘Desperado’ makes you realise that this composer has gone through his fair share of symphonies in his day, even if what he plays is relatively tame by comparison.
So, while classical music might seem taboo to anyone who worships at the altar of bands like Led Zeppelin, there is still plenty more to explore when digging into the greats of the genre. It may have less to do with what modern music is supposed to be, but no music sticks around for hundreds of years without doing something right, and even if a few notes speak to someone, that’s more than enough.
