“It was my fault”: the song Don Henley said he was wrong to release
The key to staying successful in the music industry is making the right decisions. Many people think that the key is to keep writing great songs until they can’t think of anything else, but if there isn’t a good promotional campaign or something to draw people in, there’s no point in anyone caring all that much in between listening to everything else on their playlist. And when looking back on his career, Don Henley admitted that he never made the best decisions regarding which songs got put out.
Granted, that’s also coming from someone who was a born perfectionist when working on Eagles albums. Henley and Glenn Frey were never going to settle for merely good whenever they made a record, and when they got to songs on Hotel California, they needed to make sure everything sounded as best as it could before it even got a spot on the final record, which got more and more difficult when working on albums like The Long Run.
So when the band finally called it a day, it should have been the moment when Henley missed the opportunity to become a star in his own right. It’s a good idea in theory, but as soon as the band broke up, Henley was as apprehensive as everyone else when it came to being free from every one of his old bandmates.
It’s nice knowing that there wasn’t anyone holding him down from doing what he wanted, but there was an added pressure of having to take the brunt of the criticism. Anything that he put out was bound to be torn apart by the press at some point, and when listening to I Can’t Stand Still, there were more than a few moments where Henley felt like he was figuring himself out apart from his old band.
“It was too controversial. It pissed people off.”
Don Henley
It’s strange to hear him sound closer to new wave on a few songs and even make an instrumental track halfway through, but tracks like ‘Dirty Laundry’ has the words “hit single” prestamped on it, especially with a great chorus from him and the same kind of cynicism that made his other musical criticism songs hit so well. But when rolling out the new album, the label decided to go in a different direction and throw ‘Johnny Can’t Read’ into the mix.
While the nervous energy of the tune might have fit in with Talking Heads, it was never something Henley felt comfortable with, saying, “Part of it was my fault. ‘Johnny Can’t Read’ was the wrong thing to do. It was a little bit too much of a leftfield turn from the Eagles days, and it took a lot of people by surprise. It was too controversial. It pissed people off. There was a DJ in Houston who wouldn’t play it. A DJ in Atlanta said it was un-American! And it hit home to too many people who couldn’t read, you know?”
So when he did get his footing again, it’s easy to see Henley correcting himself a little bit on Building the Perfect Beast. He was more than happy to experiment with pop on ‘Boys of Summer’, but the deeper cuts on the record were more about the struggles of the working man, like ‘A Month of Sundays’ detailing the problems that every generation has when technology changes and their organic way of making things work suddenly becomes obsolete.
Then again, that doesn’t make ‘Johnny Can’t Read’ a bad song on principle. It has the makings of a decent Henley deep cut in it somewhere, but in terms of making a good first impression, Henley needed a little bit more work as a solo artist before he started to get the real hits on records like The End of the Innocence.
