Music: Building On Prime Real Estate

At the onset of the ’80s, Don Henley was sitting behind the drums of the Eagles, a colossally successful Los Angeles band with a lot of hits behind it and a future of guaranteed disintegration. There was a fair portion of intramural rivalry among band members. There was also a sense, even among the group’s fans, that the Eagles’ sound — smooth melodies and often aseptic lyrics that took listeners on a twilight tour of the Hotel California — might be about played out.

Glenn Frey, Henley’s friend and co-writer in the band, was the one who put the wraps on it. He called Henley one September afternoon in 1980 and told him he was making an album on his own. No Eagles invited. “He didn’t say that he was through with the group, but I knew what he meant,” Henley says. “He was tired of all the diplomacy and compromise necessitated by a group situation. Still, I was shocked and hurt. You just don’t think of ending something that was great.”

Henley responded to the crisis in classic rock-‘n’-roll fashion: a fair amount of rambunctious confusion, running concurrently with some studious dissipation, followed by the release of his own solo album in 1982. I Can’t Stand Still sold well, but nowhere near what it deserved to. It was a superb album, yet the solid commercial breakthrough would come with his second release, Building the Perfect Beast. Its keynote single, The Boys of Summer, a romantic song full of nostalgia and vitriol, won Henley a Grammy. Now Henley is closing out the ’80s with a splendid third album, The End of the Innocence, which will shoo him into the new decade as one of the fleetest talents around. Not bad for 42 and for a guy people still mistake for Frey.

It doesn’t much matter to Henley. “People have short memories and attention spans,” he notes. “They forget me as soon as I’m off MTV. I’m glad.” That kind of confidence can come not only from satisfaction in his work but also from a sense that the work has paid off. Out just a month ago, the new album has already gone gold: the title cut, released as a single, sounds similarly hit-bound. It is a ravishing love song, slightly world-weary and bracingly off-center, nostalgic for better loves and wiser times.

Henley knows all the odd angles in the geometry of love. In one of his best songs, Long Way Home, he wrote, “There are three sides to every story:/ Yours, mine, and the cold, hard truth.” There seems to be a lot of truth on this new album. Much of it sounds tough, as on one of Henley’s favorite tracks, I Will Not Go Quietly (“It kicks ass more than any previous rock-‘n’- roll songs I’ve done”), but nothing is delivered here with the jaded swagger that often got the Eagles branded as a slick bunch of SoCal libertines. That was mostly a bum rap, and it has taken Henley until now not only to find his own voice but also to get his own footing.

There is a good bit of manicured savagery in songs like New York Minute and If Dirt Were Dollars (“I was flyin’ back from Lubbock/ I saw Jesus on the plane/ . . . or maybe it was Elvis/ You know, they kinda look the same”), and a memorably nasty cameo portrait of Ronald Reagan as a cowboy named Jingo in Little Tin God. That’s vintage Henley, delivered with a snarl and a smile, but The Heart of the Matter, which ends the record, is the struggle for a different sense of place, another state of grace: “I’ve been tryin’ to get down to the heart of the matter/ Because the flesh will get weak and the ashes will scatter/ So I’m thinkin’ about forgiveness/ Forgiveness/ Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore.” Brand new, that song already sounds like a classic.

The reputation grew from a beginning that was so typically modest it could almost be mythic. The only child of an auto-parts salesman-farmer and an elementary school teacher in Linden, Texas (“Drive 20 miles to The Crossroads or, in the other direction, to Uncertain”) — Henley had a bedrock upbringing that permitted his musical excursions but gave him something to kick out against. When success with the Eagles hit fast and hard, he lived his share of the Los Angeles high life and paid a big price. In 1980 he found himself pickled in the press when he was given two years’ probation for drug possession and fined for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. “I thought it was probably the end of my career,” he says. But out of the scandal and distortions he salvaged a memorable song, Dirty Laundry, which could have just as neatly applied to his next brush with notoriety, as the host of the New Year’s party at which Donna Rice met Gary Hart.

“Someone introduced them,” he recalls, “but it wasn’t me. I was off cooking for 60 guests, but I got the credit . . . or the blame, whatever your perspective. Donna’s a nice girl, personable and fun, but I feel sorry for her, and saddened and aggravated by the way she chose to exploit the situation. She figured her life was ruined, and she damn well wanted to get something out of it all. That’s O.K., as long as it didn’t involve me.”

If that kind of dirt were dollars, Henley would be flush enough. These days he lives in Los Angeles and travels to his small spread outside Aspen, Colo. (“my ranchette”). He also devotes time to social issues like the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as a variety of environmental groups. But what he can always take to the bank is his gift for songwriting, which keeps growing. Talking about the legacy of the Eagles, he says, “The Eagles were another link in the chain, a logical extension of what came before. But I don’t think the ’70s will ever be as important in the history of rock as the ’60s, because you don’t have the cultural and sociological upheaval combined with music.” Fair enough. But there’s a corner of the ’80s that ought to read “Property of D. Henley.” And that real estate is prime space. He’ll be building on it for quite a while yet.