The 1982 song Don Henley never forgave Joni Mitchell for: “He was insulted”
Joni Mitchell didn’t need to spend the rest of her life making music if she didn’t want to.
By the end of the 1970s, she had already made her mark as one of the greatest folk singers that the world had ever seen, but if she was going to continue on, she was going to need something more than an acoustic guitar to get the sounds she wanted. Her music needed to mean more than that, and to get the right song usually meant having the right person for the job on every single track.
And while Blue was a pure expression of her own heartbreak, the real magic came when she had the right band behind her. The LA Express had some of the finest musicians that she could have asked for, and once she left them behind to start working on more jazzy songs, there was no one better equipped for her tunes than Jaco Pastorius. He wove the lines that she dreamed of with his bass parts, but there was a lot more to explore that didn’t even involve her voice half the time.
Each of her albums is like an art project, really, and if her voice wasn’t the right musical colour for that particular song, it was only fitting to bring someone else in. And when she began work on what became her album Wild Things Run Fast, it was easy for her to give the other artists free rein to feature on the album. No one would have expected someone like Billy Idol to sing on one of her projects, but he ended up having the perfect voice for the bully character that she was looking for.
And for someone who lived and breathed Los Angeles as Don Henley did, he seemed like the perfect person to provide a voice as well. His register seemed like absolute gold no matter what he sang, but when Mitchell started working on mastering the track, she felt that the tune didn’t really have what it took to become a classic. Henley’s voice was too low, and instead of having him perform the whole thing again, Mitchell figured it was better to have someone else in the mix.
After all, Lionel Richie was in the next room over, and since he was already one of the biggest workaholics in the music industry, no one really needed to twit his arm to get the results they needed. His voice fit perfectly for what the song needed, and when the album finally came out, everyone seemed happy. That is, everyone but Henley, who was absolutely furious to have his voice wiped.
Mitchell was apologetic, but she remembered getting a nasty message back from Henley when she tried reconnecting with him, saying, “I was dissatisfied with it and Lionel Richie was working across the hall, so I put Lionel on it. I forgot to tell Henley! Years went by and when I called him up to do this he said, ‘You’re not gonna take me off and replace me with a Negro this time, are you?’ I said, ‘Oh my God, did I ever explain to you what happened there?’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t want to know.’ God knows what he was thinking. He was insulted.”
But even if he was insulted, it’s hard to really argue with the results. Never mind the difference in genres, Richie is the perfect voice to play off of Mitchell in this instant, and while Henley didn’t have the right instrument for that particular song, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have tried doing something else later down the line if Mitchell felt that he was right for whatever song she had.
Then again, a little miscommunication goes a long way in the music industry, and sometimes Henley knew that things weren’t going his way based on the kind of hand he was dealt. He could have been a little more cordial about it towards Mitchell, but sometimes the biggest artists in the world have to eat some humble pie and let someone else take over for them behind the scenes.
