“We accomplished a great deal”: How Don Henley moved on from the Eagles
What Led Zeppelin were to British rock in the 1970s, the Eagles were to American rock. While the music couldn’t have been more different, with Don Henley and Co’s lush, harmony-laden country rock providing a soothing alternative to Zep’s hammer of the Gods hard rock, both were titans of their era. The biggest, most successful and beloved bands of that decade who both, for very different reasons, were wise enough to call it off once the decade was up.
This was, again, due to very different reasons. Led Zeppelin tragically lost their talismanic drummer John Bonham and, understandably, decided that they couldn’t go on without him. Eagles, thankfully, had a much less tragic reason that’s a lot easier to joke about. Put simply, the band’s success might as well have been directly proportionate to how much they wanted to murder each other, and the Eagles were extraordinarily successful.
It’s something of a miracle they made it to the end of the decade, to be honest. An Eagles concert wasn’t a real Eagles concert without some form of punch-up backstage or, sometimes, onstage. Thus, it marks a certain amount of success that the individual Eagles had a lot more solo work than the individual members of Led Zep in the 1980s. One can reasonably assume that Page, Plant and Jones were all pretty much content with what they’d done as a group.
The Eagles had a point to prove, and none so much as singing, songwriting, and drumming Don Henley. The man was arguably the heartbeat of the whole band, and not just because he was behind the kit. He saw himself as their creative lead despite being stuck at the back of the stage while his guitar-slinging bandmates soaked up the adoration. With the sheer amount of dick measuring that went on in the Eagles, it must have intensified greatly when the band members were in direct competition with each other, so the pressure was on.
How did Don Henley separate himself from the Eagles?
By the standards of the band, Don Henley stalled at the starting line with his first solo release. I Can’t Stand Still sold decently enough and had a hit in the form of ‘Dirty Laundry’. However, Joe Walsh’s first solo album after the Eagles landed, There Goes The Neighbourhood, charted higher on the Billboard 200. This was absolutely not enough for Henley, especially because he felt like he’d changed as a man in many ways after leaving the outfit, as he explained in an interview with Record.
He said, “I’m not ashamed of having been in the Eagles. I think we accomplished a great deal and added some pretty good music to the annals of rock ‘n’ roll.” Which is an all-timer of a backhanded compliment, but you’re allowed some of those, had you withstood the hell on Earth that was being in the Eagles, I guess.
He went on to say, “The songs I’m writing now are simply extensions of songs I wrote then. They’re more mature, succinct versions of those songs. I still am basically the same guy, and I feel the same way about certain things. I’ve matured a great deal about other things, such as male/female relationships.” Which is always great to hear; however, he’s not blowing smoke either.
After all, Don Henley is describing the songs that would make up his breakthrough solo album Building the Perfect Beast. One of the defining classic rock albums of the 1980s, especially with songs like the deathless ‘The Boys of Summer’, a meditation on what happens when a rock ‘n’ roller grows up. Which, if you have read anything about anyone involved in the Eagles, is exactly what each of them needed to do the whole time. They just had to wait until after they’d split to do it.
