Don’t you just love a catchy headline that is just tailor-made to piss people off? But the honest truth is that I don’t hate Don Henley or the Eagles. I know that’s long been a popular position to take among people who like the Byrds country albums or anything that might have a connection to Gene Clark or Gram Parsons, but I’ve always appreciated the Eagles because they never really hid what they were. They weren’t hippie-dippy, peace and love. They were just a couple of dudes who wanted to get rich making chill, decent country rock. From the jump, the band always seemed pretty cynical and over the whole dream of the 1960s. They just wanted to catch a peaceful, easy feeling doing coke and taking shots of tequila at Dan Tana’s and then they all went their separate ways and took as many opportunities to poke fun at the generation they came from and the world they inhabited. “Life’s Been Good” by Joe Walsh, anyone?
And then there’s old Don Henley. The guy just always looks so bitter and angry for somebody who is worth millions upon millions of dollars for reasons I just don’t care enough to dig into. But I really love how he channeled all that angry rock dude anger into his solo albums throughout the 1980s. The End of the Innocence is the peak, just pissed off baby boomer it used to be better anthems that he enlisted…everybody to contribute to. Gloria Estefan, Axl Rose, Sheryl Crowe — they’re all on the album at some point. There’s even a Miles Davis connection with Wayne Shorter playing the sax on the title track.
But now I’m rambling. I sound like a stoned dad who likes to reflect on how he just missed out on going to ‘Nam. This isn’t about that album. It’s about the greatest of all Labor Day weekend jams off Henley’s 1984 Building the Perfect Beast.
You can go online and find a thousand interviews with Henley talking about the meaning behind the song. I’m not going to bore you with that. You can also watch the video and marvel at Jean-Baptiste Mondino truly redefining what it meant to pair a pop song with moving images. All black and white and Truffaut-inspired, it’s the sort of thing only a really massively successful rockstar could have pulled off at the time and…it worked. That, and the song slaps. I will hear no arguments about it. It’s truly the sound of summer ending. You’re aimlessly driving around some town you hate, everybody is gone, probably off to the beach or something like that. The summer’s out of reach for your crappy baseball team. All the good times are behind you. It only gets colder from here, etc. etc. etc.
But the true greatness of the song is how well it has been reinterpreted. Some may point to the Ataris 2003 pop punk hit version of the song and it’s not my thing, but I also won’t bash it because I get that was a moment for some of you almost-elderly millennials. Your dad heard it steaming from your little speakers plugged into your Dell and he maybe peaked his head into your room and was like “Hey, I know this song. It’s cool.” But for me, the best punk version of the song is the screamy hardcore version by the band Codeseven. I got to see the band a few times in the late-1990s and they’d usually end their sets with the cover and the entire crowd usually went batshit.
But for those of you who want things a little more mellow, I think Bat for Lashes brought things full circle with a haunting, piano-driven live version a few years back. It’s spooky enough, like the ghost daughter of Don Henley singing the song back to him a few decades later. A nice track to pull up and just watch the season fade away and ger ready for Yo La Tengo “Autumn Sweater” season.