The one album Don Henley wanted the government listen to: “It’s caused a ruffle”
Don Henley got into the music business knowing all of the trials and tribulations that came with it.
There were many cases of musicians being played for fools, and while Henley admitted that every member of the Eagles was an idiot when they first signed their recording contracts, getting out of their deals and calling their own shots was what they fought for ever since they started to become one of the biggest bands in the world. And while Henley was proud to fight for his musical independence, he also understood when music was heading in the wrong direction every now and again.
But you have to remember that music is a much different business than what he was brought up in as well. Not everyone is approaching music with the same kind of cowboy chords that Henley and Glenn Frey were doing back then, and when you look at the biggest names in music now, not all of them are worried about making the same lyrical masterpieces that Henley was used to back in the day. That’s all well and good, but Henley was more concerned about people not getting the chance to become stars like they used to.
The 2000s had already proved that singers could be found on game shows when American Idol first came up, and while artists like Kelly Clarkson weren’t terrible by any means, it did paint a grim picture of where music would be going. The greatest tastemakers were gaining their footing on the radio before anything else, and Henley felt that Tom Petty hit the nail on the head when he made the album The Last DJ.
The record isn’t exactly the biggest highlight in Petty’s career, but the heartland rocker remembered hearing that Henley had called for the bigwigs in Washington to hear the song once it was released, saying, “The song ended up being read into the Senate record, in these [hearings] on the Clear Channel and the monopoly of the radio business. And I know Don Henley took it to Washington and handed it out at a Senate hearing. It’s caused a ruffle, which I’m kind of proud of.”
But if Petty was making this kind of record, it was going to be very hard for him to toe the line on every song. If you look at the song in the wrong light, it can easily come out as an old man shouting to the heavens about how much was so much better for him back in his day, but that was never his intention. He wanted to show a version of rock and roll that was slipping away, and Henley knew that sentiment all too well when he started working on his tunes.
Henley’s solo career had always been about trying to make the best life that he could in America, and he was more than a little bit cynical when talking about big business trying to cover up the beauty in the country. And if he was going to fight for causes like Walden Woods whenever he could, he wanted to do the same thing for the kind of music that had given him a life beyond his wildest dreams.
And while the album was more than a little bit risky for Petty since radio didn’t bother playing it, it did make a statement better than anyone else could have. His contemporaries were already making tunes that were calling back to their glory days, but Petty wanted to show everyone what could happen to the music that they love so much if they didn’t bother to take care of it the way they should have.
And considering how much people cater to the surface-level artists that come up in their Spotify algorithms from time to time, Petty was practically prophetic when looking at this record. Henley is still out there trying to control every single facet of his music almost to a fault, but what makes him so devoted to the use of his music comes from the values that he held when listening to this record.
