The one band Don Henley didn’t want to be remembered: |It’s all recycled music”
By the time Don Henley started making waves with the Eagles, he had a pretty clear idea of the kind of music he wanted to make.
The California rock scene had already seen some of the greatest heights of the Summer of Love, and as everyone was coming back down to Earth, hearing some of the most beautiful harmonies in the world sing about the dark reality of life was a great way for rock and roll to pivot into the next generation. And while Henley can be guilty of going a little too over the top at times, he would rather give audiences food for thought than empty musical calories.
After all, he didn’t go to college and get an English major to write the most mindless lyrics that anyone had ever written. He had wanted to make some of the greatest songs that he could, but it sometimes took someone like Glenn Frey to direct things in the right direction. ‘Desperado’ had sat around as a demo for the longest time, but once Frey heard it, he knew that it could become a modern classic if they just managed to switch a few words around and substitute a chord here and there.
But most rock and roll bands simply weren’t thinking that hard. For all the public knew, the music business felt like one big party whenever a band reached the top of the charts, but even if a lot of rock and roll bands had their moment in the sun and then came and went, Henley wanted to make sure that they kept their time in the spotlight for as long as they could. He could get the job done on the quality of the songs, but the big names in hard rock had other plans.
While Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were able to make some of the scariest music ever made, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley had a bit of a different idea. They wanted to create a spectacle whenever they got onstage, but despite Kiss turning into one of the biggest bands in the world around the time Eagles were getting popular, Henley could see through all of that facepaint in an instant.
Compared to everyone else that was trying to get a message through with their music, Kiss seemed to be the kind of band that would do almost anything for attention. The band itself may have even copped to that more than a few times, and even if their experiment paid off, Henley figured that the world was going down a very dark path if people kept listening to what they were doing.
The songs might have been catchy enough, but Henley felt that the next generation was in danger if all they had to follow was Kiss, saying, ”Most contemporary rock and pop bores me. It’s just not very interesting. And I’m 100 per cent sure that I don’t feel that way because I`m getting older. It’s because it’s not good stuff. It’s all recycled music, and it was better the first time around. It frightens the hell out of me to think that some kids grow up now thinking that bands like Kiss invented rock and roll.”
Henley may have been a bit too cavalier there, but it’s not like he didn’t have a point. There was a lot of smoke and mirrors to what Kiss did, and even if they did have the occasional great tune on their albums here and there, it’s not like people were going to learn about how to be a Bob Dylan-level lyricist by listening to such thoughtful pieces of prose like ‘Christine Sixteen’ and ‘Ladies Room’.
Henley’s music might not have been nearly as exciting as a Kiss show whenever he performed, but that hardly mattered to him. All that he wanted to do was give the audience something to remember when they walked out of the concert, and that meant a lot more than people having a bunch of bombs going off at the end of the night.
