Glenn Frey picks the best song Don Henley ever wrote for Eagles: “Henley’s opus”
Rock and roll doesn’t always have to be serious; it can be flippant, fun or downright irreverent. But, for some reason, the majority of artists choose to make music with a message. None of the Eagles’ subject matter was meant to be taken lightly.
They had their softer moments, to be sure, but half of their appeal and half of their insufferable side came from the heavy-handedness of many of their tracks, which seemed to turn off as many people as it turned on. Don Henley never apologised for making his audience think, and Glenn Frey respected that he would go out on a limb for the song ‘The Last Resort’. It might not be the first song you thnk of when picking out Don Henley’s best ever, but it is certainly the one Frey gives a lot of weight to.
When looking at how Hotel California is structured, though, the album’s closer feels like the flipside of what the title track was. While everyone knows the idea of what the mystic hotel is supposed to be, the entire album seems to play out as a loose concept album centred around the dangers of stardom. It was a unique proposition that would turn the band into giant icons of the soft rock brigade.
Compared to the failed attempt at a concept record on Desperado, every track feels like a mini movie scene playing out in your head. The band invite you in with the opening song, but ‘New Kid in Town’ is already hinting that not everything is right with the world, seeing the band already looking at their replacements.
After tearing through lost love on ‘Wasted Time’ and trying to pick themselves back up on tracks like ‘Try and Love Again’, ‘The Last Resort’ is when Henley starts looking at the world outside his little bubble. Since all of the world’s resources are spent on the big wigs trying to make life more artificial, Henley finally sees what they are taking from the land.
While the song definitely has an environmental angle, this is far from the Captain Planet school of song lectures. This is just Henley softly crying over what it cost to make Hollywood, turning something into a paradise while kicking out all the natives and turning the beautiful wildlife into industry parks.
They may have started with a song about glitz and glamour, but Frey was proud to see this was where they ended up, telling The Very Best of the Eagles, “We started the song early in the record, and Don finished seven months later. I called it Henley’s opus. I helped describe what the song was going to be about and assisted with the arrangement, but it was Don’s lyrics and basic chord progression”.
There are so many avenues where a song like this could have failed, but it’s hard to deny it when listening to how earnest it is. Plenty of songs have been made about an artist whining about the greater problems with the world, but when you hear it come out of Henley’s mouth, he wants to do his part to help fix those problems rather than just mope around.
It’s not like Henley hasn’t delivered, either. Throughout his solo career, Henley has put just as much effort into The Walden Woods Project, which sought to fight against big business paving over some of the greatest forests in America. Since that foundation also indirectly contributed to the band’s reformation in the 1990s, it’s safe to say that Henley has become just as much of an activist as a musician.
