The era Don Henley called the worst part of his career: “The whole transition”
Across a few short but dizzying years, Don Henley went from top of the soft rock world to the biggest crisis of doubt in his career.
As the 1980s arrived, the Eagles were still heavyweights. Hotel California’s mammoth selling success was still carrying them some way, and The Long Run follow-up topped the album charts, but touring fatigue began to take its toll on the band and exacerbate the simmering tensions, especially between co-founder Glenn Frey and guitarist Don Felder, after a perceived slight at Californian Senator Alan Cranston’s wife backstage of a benefit show triggered such fury from Frey he made several threats of violence to Felder during their tense July 31st 1980 show at Long Beach Arena.
They wouldn’t take the stage again for another 14 years, and an embittered hiatus kick-started Henley’s solo career, whether he wanted it or not. “I never planned on being a solo artist; I just didn’t think about it,” he recently confessed to Buddy magazine. “…I’m a band guy — I’d always been in bands — and I was sort of forced into that position by the breakup of the Eagles, and I was pretty lost for a while. I was just adrift, rudderless, and depressed.”
Henley’s wayward drift would finally find the solo spark he needed in the chance meeting with Danny Kortchmar. Crossing paths at one of publicist Betsy Asher’s July parties, the session man and songwriter seemed the perfect foil for Henley’s solo chops and proved an essential creative partner for the rest of the decade.
Yet, it was a new dawn in both the music industry and the wider American culture. In between calling it a day with the Eagles and the release of Henley’s solo debut, I Can’t Stand Still, in 1982, MTV upended the pop landscape with a new demand for shiny visual promos in its cable maw, and a vastly different cultural terrain had materialised wrought from cable channel’s flashy aesthetic and chiming with a renewed, cartoon patriotism surging up and down the States during President Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Times were changing fast, and the Woodstock generation suddenly found themselves wading through a commercial gloop they hadn’t wagered for, potentially stumbling into confused videos while the day’s Madonnas and Princes steamrolled over them.
“…that whole transition period in the beginning of the ‘80s was pretty tough,” Henley confessed. “I didn’t really get my footing until 1984, 1985 — Danny was a big part of it, and Greg Ladanyi, the great engineer.”
His old Eagle pal Frey managed to embrace pop’s great shift, releasing ‘The Heat Is On’ for 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop and fashioning himself as a star in the vein of Huey Lewis. Henley, too, found Billboard wins with that year’s Building the Perfect Beast and the mega ‘The Boys of Summer’, but was able to still tethered to a soft rock realm in closer orbit to the Eagles’ LA heyday.
Through the decade’s low ebb, Henley made it through, 1989’s The End of the Innocence breaking the top ten and standing the old Eagle as one of the 1980s’ biggest names, despite his crisis of confidence only several years earlier.
