The song Don Henley wrote about the worst people in the music business: “The biggest pricks”
The music industry isn’t commonly considered a place to make friends. The idea of playing music among the greatest artists in the world might sound fun in the first few seconds, but when people start asking about money and the royalty checks, the fine print is usually when everyone finds out how ruthless everyone can be. This is a business where people either kill or get killed, and Don Henley felt that some of the most vicious members of the business deserved to have the light shone on them.
After all, Henley was the one squarely focused on the creative aspect of the music before anything else. It should be fairly easy on paper for artists to make their records, but when Henley found out how the sausage was made, there ended up being more than a few middlemen in the mix that got in the way of everything, especially when it came to members of Eagles or working with members of the press.
Then again, there are probably a few people who could have said the same thing about Henley as well. Most people in the singer’s position would have been well within their rights to get the kind of adulation and financial reward for the songs whenever he played live, but when Don Felder took issue with his cut, it wasn’t shocking to see them part ways when they were complaining over the money everyone was making.
But Henley never stopped looking out for the little guy in his music. Many of his greatest songs during his solo career were about looking out for small-town Americans who were concerned with keeping a roof over their heads, and songs like ‘The Garden of Allah’ may as well have been a cautionary tale with him playing the role of Satan looking over society and seeing how things could get even more twisted.
The music world had changed a lot for Henley once Eagles got back together, though, and while he was more than happy to balance out his solo career with their comeback album, Long Road Out of Eden felt like two sides of his musical personality. There were some fantastic tunes like ‘Busy Being Fabulous’, but some songs spoke to the darker side of life like ‘Business as Usual’.
For Henley, this was his opportunity to attack virtually any lawyer who was out to take their money right from under their noses, saying, “A portion of the song is also a reference to the legal profession, the utter ruthlessness of it. It seems that some of the biggest pricks in the profession, the most contemptible, soulless scumbags to ever ‘practice’ law have offices in Century City. They will, I’m sure, take that as a compliment.”
Henley is well within his right to take people to task for wronging him in the past, but it makes for a bit of a disorienting listen when Joe Walsh’s ‘Last Good Time in Town’ is on the same record. The frontman said on numerous occasions that he would have loved to have tightened up the band’s final album, and while many people claim it works fine as it is, ‘Business As Usual’ is the kind of great song that feels like it belongs on a completely different album.
There’s no telling what Henley would have done with it during his solo career, but it would have been interesting to see if he could have added something new to the song rather than the traditional Eagles sheen. The band could have added subtle beauty to anything with their harmonies, but never had their voices ever sounded so vicious.
