The one singer Don Henley said “changed the history of music forever”
When Don Henley was first coming up, rock and roll was only one portion of his music world.
There had been millions of people wowed by what the British invasion did back in the early 1960s, but Henley had already begun listening to everything from R&B to country whenever he turned on the radio. But when rock and roll first came across the dial, he wasn’t passively listening anymore. This was now a calling, and it wasn’t until the right person started singing that the Eagles frontman knew life would never be the same.
But in the first few years of Henley’s career, you weren’t going to find him playing too much rock and roll. Whereas Glenn Frey got his chops down by playing tunes like ‘Satisfaction’ with his first bands, the clientele that Henley served weren’t exactly into rock and roll. A lot of his work was Dixieland jazz music, but when he started to hear the music coming out of California with acts like The Byrds and Linda Ronstadt. It may have taken the help of Kenny Rogers, but rock already stirred something in Henley’s gut years before.
Both he and Frey were on separate sides of the world when The Beatles first played on the Ed Sullivan Show, but there was a seismic change once those few minutes were up. Chuck Berry and Little Richard had shown everyone that rock and roll could be exciting and fun, but when listening to The Beatles, every kid figured that they could do the same thing. Hanging out with friends seemed like the coolest gig in the world, but showbiz was a lot more than a bunch of guys playing through their set every night.
And Henley didn’t exactly get the memo about showmanship when Eagles first started. The band had some impressive harmonies and some of the greatest songs in the business around Hotel California, but they were known for practically loitering onstage compared to the massive stage setups coming from people like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd. But when you’re competing with the likes of Elvis Presley, it’s best not to try and match what he could have done.
‘The King’ had a voice like a freight train whenever he started singing, but half the battle was seeing him perform live. The kind of dance moves that he was doing were groundbreaking for the time, and while a lot of them had to be put on the back burner when he eventually became a Vegas act, no one could deny that he still had that spectacular voice all the way up to the very end of his life.
But that voice was all that mattered when Henley heard him on The Louisiana Hayride when he was a kid, saying, “Listening to the radio with my father and my grandfather, and the programs we heard when I was a kid, including the famous Louisiana Hayride from Shreveport, La, on KWKH, which is where Hank Williams made his big broadcast debut in 1948. That was the first year of the Louisiana Hayride, and then six years later, a young man named Elvis Presley stepped on that same stage and changed the history of music forever.”
If you listen to those early recordings of Presley, though, they were a lot different from the caricature that a lot of people remember. This was a kid trying to make the best with the time he had, and when he started singing a bunch of bluesy tunes like ‘That’s All Right Mama’, people started to think of the kind of possibilities a kid like him could have if he got put on the bigger stages.
A lot of the flashiness hadn’t happened yet, but Henley was among the first to hear the innocence of Presley for the first time. That mild-mannered kid was about to have the hell beaten out of him by the fame machine, but without him making those first steps, rock and roll would have ended up dying a quick death years before it had time to get off the ground.
