Danny Kortchmar: Don Henley’s lesser-known musical collaborator
What records do you picture when you think of those mellow and contemplative LA singer-songwriters of the 1970s? James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James? Carol King’s Tapestry? Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty?
Well, Danny Kortchmar played guitar on all three of those albums, and if you expand the tent to some other ‘70s radio titans from further afield, like Bonnie Raitt, Warren Zevon, Harry Nilsson, Billy Joel, and even Ringo Starr, Kortchmar played with them, too.
“I think the reason I could get work was I played well in the ensemble,” Kortchmar, now 79, told the Intelligencer Journal in 2011, “I’m a rhythm section player. I love taking solos, and I’m good at it, but what I really have to offer is to sit in the rhythm section and play in the ensemble.”
Kortchmar, known in the biz as ‘Kootch’, grew up across the country in Massachusetts as a pal of James Taylor, and the two were briefly in a band together called The Flying Machine, which Taylor later name-checked in his hit ‘Fire and Rain’; however, it was with another superstar of the LA scene that Kortchmar arguably had his most fruitful connection.
When Don Henley left the Eagles’ nest and set out on his solo career in the 1980s, Kortchmar was one of the first musicians he reached out to, knowing that Kootch was a steady hand with an ironclad track record not just as a session player, but as a songwriter and producer, as well.
“My intuition told me Danny Kortchmar was the right guy,” Henley recalled to the Associated Press in 1985, “It has worked out wonderfully well. He is in demand. I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He has two songs on this album [Building the Perfect Beast] he wrote himself and shares the writing of most of the rest of them.”
Kortchmar had already proven his worth to Henley on his solo debut, 1982’s I Can’t Stand Still, co-writing the record’s breakout hit single, ‘Dirty Laundry’. On the follow-up album, he had an even bigger influence, as Henley noted. In particular, Kortchmar brought Henley a tune he’d written on his own, called ‘All She Wants to Do Is Dance’, which became another top ten hit for the ex-Eagle.
“That record was made back when the technology had just started to really take over in music,” Kortchmar told Songfacts in 2013, recalling how he’d written ‘All She Wants’, “I had one of the first Yamaha DX 7s, which was a keyboard that was used a ton in the ’80s, but we ended up luckily getting one of the first ones in the United States…
“I used it to get that sound that you hear the record starting with. I was fooling around with that and created a track at home while we were making one of those albums. The next morning I woke up and wrote the whole lyric in about 20 minutes; wrote the whole thing. It came very easily.”
Kortchmar was also a producer on Building the Perfect Beast and its follow-up, 1989’s The End of the Innocence, which remains the best-selling album of Henley’s solo career, highlighted by the Kortchmar co-written single ‘New York Minute.’ While the Eagles will always remain Don Henley’s best-known collaborators, his success in the 1980s, as he proved himself as a solo performer, owed a lot to the instincts and input of Danny ‘Kootch’ Kortchmar.
