How the Grateful Dead helped Don Henley capture the sound of the summer with his 1984 masterpiece
The sunny, old ‘The Boys of Summer’ could cause the breeze to even ruffle the hairs on Jason Statham’s head. It might be a touch corny, it might only revolve around a simple Bm-A-G-A loop, but it is Don Henley’s masterpiece.
The anthem is youthful, vibrant, and sunny enough to part clouds. You might not always look back on it as a shimmering achievement in soft rock in retrospect, but listen to it on the right day, with the right shades, and you’ll agree that it may well be the Great American Song of the Summer, to give it an invented title.
But what the hell do the Grateful Dead have to do with it? Well, they didn’t just inspire the classic “Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac lyric” in the fourth verse, but a strange incident vaguely involving the band brought about the crux of the entire song. Once again, it sees Henley dealing with commercialism and its cross-over with the death of the American Dream.
Leonard Cohen once suggested that every writer spends a lifetime retelling the same story. If that’s true, then Henley never told his with more grace than he did on ‘The Boys of Summer’. Or, at the very least, he never made musings on capitalism and culture catchier than on the 1984 hit. It sailed its way to fifth in the US charts and an eternity of radio stations’ summer playlist all while subtly lamenting the loss of the counterculture dream.
It’s at this point where the Grateful Dead become less than a passing road trip reference. When Mike Campbell presented the melody of the song to Henley after Tom Petty turned it down, the former Eagle was cruising around in search of inspiration.
“I was driving down the San Diego Freeway and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie,” he recalled in an interview with NME.
In today’s money, that’s around $70,000, and that lofty price tag made it the car of choice for “all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants”. So, when Henley pulled up alongside one and saw that it was proudly sporting “this Grateful Dead ‘Deadhead’ bumper sticker on it”, the incongruity was incomprehensible.
The contrast of the flashy car, a symbol of capitalist desire, and the iconic 1960s band was ever starker for Henley, who knew about their backstory in the music industry. As Pete Townshend recently explained, “The big thing about the Dead I remember was that they gave their road crew the same share that they got themselves. Did you know that? Yeah, it was a true cooperative, so nobody got rich. Nobody. They made a living, but they didn’t get rich.”
The Dead famously tried to embody the ‘free’ lifestyle that their songs proclaimed. Whether you were Jerry Garcia or a young kid in the audience at your first rock show, you were part of the same family. That was the spirit of the band. “The commitment of their fans was something that was interesting,” Townshend said of the Dead on Broken Record.
Yet, here was Henley driving by a vehicle that broadcast the opposite of that, but the bumper sticker remained. That’s quite something for an upbeat pop song to mull over. But perhaps the track’s finest achievement, and the reason it embodies the summertime so perfectly, is that it cruises on by with little more than a bemused laugh and an utterance of, ‘Well, how’s about that’.
After all, what erodes the woes of the world faster than a spot of pleasant weather? With a smattering of sun and ‘The Boys of Summer’ blasting, you can almost forget about the havoc “guys with the blue blazers“ have brought about.
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