Like I said in Tim's forum, Kate has inspired me to post some articles from an article database I have a subscription to. Here's one for Don:

Some excerpts from NME - February 23, 1985
by R. Cooke

"No, I don't have any sensational stories to tell. And I don't have anything to say about drugs."

Huh! There goes the Don Henley interview. The former Eagle looks grouchy.

"There's a whole new generation of kids out there who don't know about the Eagles. I think I've stretched out from that. It's inevitable it'll be compared with the Eagles, but that's alright. We did some good things."

This is how we cover our traces. But Henley's new record Building The Perfect Beast proves to be a lot more than another hippie burn-out. One side collects thoughtful love songs, the other ruminates on the state of his country with insight and a fair showing of blood. It almost eludes the weary West Coast bag.

"I think this bias against the West Coast is a little silly," says Henley, in a considered and pleasant Texan twang. "I'm not gonna change the place I live to get a good review someplace.

"We're all American kids from the mid-west or the south. Most of the way I view the planet at large was formulated back in Texas. As far as I'm concerned the last pure West Coast sound was the Beach Boys. I grew up listening to the Dillards – I don't consider myself mellow or laid-back. I'm quite an intense individual and a workaholic."

<snip>

"I supported Gary Hart for President and I did some work for his campaign – phone work, fund-raising. I'm a Democrat. I used to feel a dilettante but I've learned a lot in the last few years. Everybody's a dilettante, anyway – Reagan's a f--kin' dilettante. He's the master of ceremonies at someone else's dinner. Nobody knows what's going on, except maybe the CIA."

"The sad thing is that great men don't run for President any more. They don't want the job."

Mondale?

"I met him," he says without enthusiasm. "His intentions were good, but I perceived him as sort of weak. He wasn't a brilliant guy. But I'm baffled and appalled at Reagan's success. I wonder what happened to my generation, all those great liberal ideas we had. Now everything's swung back to the Right, the TV preachers with their own networks...it's pretty scary."

<snip>

"Since kids don't read much any more, most of the information they get is from television or music. I think songwriters have a responsibility because of that."

The LP's most singular example of that comes in the last lines of 'The Boys Of Summer', a damning requiem for his generation.

"I was driving down the San Diego freeway and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the Right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie – all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants – and there was this Grateful Dead 'Deadhead' bumper sticker on it!"

Henley shivers slightly at his own Big Chill.

A last irony: the best thing from these sessions is 'A Month of Sundays', a short story where Henley constructs mythic poetry out of the hopeless fate of a small-time farmer. It's a little masterpiece. Geffen has left it off the LP and relegated it to a single B-side.


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