Don Henley forced his band to record ‘The Boys of Summer’ all over again: “You’re nuts!”
Every artist can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to their own material. No one’s going to be putting out an album looking to be merely decent, and while Don Henley already had a high standard of what Eagles were supposed to sound like, that was bound to get kicked into overdrive whenever he started his solo career.
Because if something goes wrong within a band, it’s easy to share the blame amongst a bunch of people and try to get it right the next time. With Henley on his own for the first time, though, he knew that he needed to create something that he could be proud of years down the road, and while he had somewhat of a false start when working on I Can’t Stand Still, it still had some quality tunes across the record.
He had already been pissed off seeing Glenn Frey release an album so quickly after the band broke up, so by the time that ‘Dirty Laundry’ came out, people got to see what Henley was like as a solo superstar It took him a while to get his bearings, but when working on his sophomore release, he wasn’t looking to build off of any momentum. He wanted to create a whole new musical palette, and ‘The Boys of Summer’ was the perfect starting point for him to build his empire.
Although Tom Petty didn’t want the initial riff idea when Mike Campbell presented it to him, there was bound to be some way for Henley to toy with it a little bit. The whole thing may have been riding in on a drum machine, but the real life of the tune comes from Henley’s vocal, as he mourns the relationship that he lost and wondering if there is any chance that his other half will love him after summer fades.
But when they first cut the track, the whole thing seemed a little bit too lifeless for Henley’s taste. He could still sing the shit out of the lyrics, but no one gets to hear a record to hear a great singer. They want to hear someone leave something of themselves on the final tape, and that meant Henley had to dig a little deeper and pull out the notes most people wouldn’t have been capable of.
Despite it being in a totally different key, Henley forced the rest of his band back into the studio to cut the track in F#, saying, “When we did ‘Boys of Summer’, we recorded the whole song in whatever key it was written in, and I did it, and I said, ‘This is not quite right.’ And it was finished, we’d done the whole thing, and the album was late-and I said, ‘We’ve got to raise this up half a step.’ And they all looked at me like, ‘You’re nuts! What’s the matter with you?’ And I said, ‘No, believe me, it’ll be a lot better.’”
It’s not like Henley wasn’t telling the truth, either. While the rest of the instruments haven’t sped up by any means, hearing Henley’s voice on the verge of breaking in the chorus is a lovely bit of tone-painting. The whole song is about him looking back on his past and getting a hint of melancholy about the one that got away, and hearing him sing in the chorus makes him sound like he’s holding back tears every time he hits those lines.
Henley is human, though, and that meant that the song needed to be lowered slightly whenever he played the song in his later days. There’s hardly any reason for anyone to expect Henley hitting those notes today, but the important thing was that he created a musical document in 1987 that everyone could cue up when looking through his finest vocal performances.
