The best lesson Don Henley learned from Kenny Rogers: “I learnt a lot”
Before his cataclysmic success as the frontman of the Eagles, Don Henley was in a country-rock band called Siloh, and we wouldn’t ever have heard of them today if it weren’t for Kenny Rogers.
The American singer-songwriter had an impressive handle over his own career, which spanned six decades and led to the sale of over 100 million worldwide records. At the same time, he also found the time to prop up young musicians when their early demos revealed something extraordinary behind the patchy sound quality and the poorly mixed instruments.
In an interview with Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 2015, Henley admitted that he was well aware that Siloh weren’t any better than any other young hopefuls with a spritely twang in their formulaic rock music, but the failed project that wrapped up after one album would bring him close to Rogers, which is quite the opposite of a failure in the grand scheme of things.
“Kenny is a wonderful guy,” Henley reminisced, five years before Roger’s tragic death in 2020. “He’s generous, he’s honest, he’s kind, he’s thoughtful. He told me an interesting thing at some point after we met him that someone had told him. He said, ‘Son, always be nice to people you meet on the way up, because you’re going to meet those same people on the way back down’.”
“That stuck in my mind like glue.”
Don Henley
Rogers practised what he preached, and though Henley hadn’t quite reached the top of the mountain yet, the former knew that it wouldn’t cost him a dime to extend kindness, passion, and consideration to a star in the making, so he helped the band relocate from Texas to Los Angeles, closer to more opportunities in the industry.
The selflessness went further than that: Henley, as well as his then-bandmates Richard Bowden, Michael Bowden, Al Perkins, and Jim Ed Norman, stayed at Rogers’ home for the duration of the recording process for their self-titled 1970 album.
However, unlike the first Eagles projects, Shiloh’s work was muddled, convoluted, and lacked personality, but even then, this first experience was salient for the oncoming upturn in Henley’s career: “He gave us a chance to experiment in the studio,” he reminisced. “Actually, we weren’t ready to record an album when Kenny recorded us. We were green, as songwriters, we really didn’t know what we were doing. But we went in, and we did an album; it came out […] and had some marginal success with one single, and that was the end of that.”
In this instance, sales are the least important thing to take away from the experience. Henley mightn’t have known how huge the Eagles would become, but he sure absorbed Rogers’ words like he was preparing for war: “I learnt a lot from watching him work in the studio. I learnt about his work ethic and about the business. He was one of the first honest people I met in the business.”
Two years later, the Eagles would make their industry debut with the hit, ‘Take It Easy’, and for everything Henley learned from Rogers, we might as well call it a collaboration.
