The Don Henley classic that was almost completely erased
Despite having scores of hits under your belt, both as part of a band and in a solo capacity, no song has a tried and tested formula for success, so artists have to be picky. Sometimes it comes off as bossy or as if they’re being a pain in the arse, but ultimately it’s the price they pay for chart-topping domination as you never know when it could be stripped away. But for Don Henley, one of his biggest solo hits almost slipped from his hands.
In many ways, however, if things had gone down the drain, he could take comfort in knowing that he didn’t have himself to blame, at least on one specific occasion. As it turns out, in the case of his huge hit ‘The Boys of Summer’ from 1984, everything he had worked on very nearly got lost forever – and it was all the fault of Mike Campbell, the guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Campbell had a lot of explaining to do for the close-shave incident, and essentially blamed the perils of technology for the near-fatal faux pas. He said: “I went down to the studio with my little LinnDrum [an electric drum machine], set it up in the room and they said, ‘OK, go and put it on your drum machine and then we’ll record it [the song] on to analogue tape’.”
Sounds simple enough, right? Yes, but the technology gods had different ideas that day, and the whole tune came scarily close to going up in flames. “I pushed play, and it just said ‘error’,” Campbell bashfully explained. “I took my cassette out and put it back in five or six times, and every time I would push ‘load’, it would say ‘error’.” It’s fair to say that the panic was setting in, with the composer knowing that Henley would be the most displeased of all.
“’Fuck, this is messed up,” Campbell recalled he thought. “My song’s gone, they’re going to think I’m a fool, an idiot.” So, what was he left to do – confess the error of his ways, or give it one last shot. Well, like any decent gem of technology advice, he decided to turn the machine off and on again. Voila! “Boom – it loaded up by some miracle, thank you God,” he said, rushing the rest of the band into the studio before things went haywire again.
With that, the day was saved, and Henley had his hit safely back in his hands – until he decided to re-record it, that is, because he wanted to change the key. At least on the second attempt, Campbell could keep his cool if his now not-so-trusty drum machine chose to have a mind of its own, because he knew what to expect. But still, the memories of the fear of that moment has never left him.
Thankfully, after the near-miss and the subsequent second attempt at recording, ‘The Boys of Summer’ went on to become one of Henley’s most surefire solo hits, reaching number five in the US and number 12 in the UK. But if Campbell had lost the original recording, who knows what might have happened? Henley definitely wouldn’t have been happy, anyway.
