Don Henley
Beauty And The Beast- Building The Perfect Album

Musician, 1985ca

By Timothy White

A throaty, twang-tinged voice leaps out of the darkness exploding the tranquility of the Los Angeles night 'Good God, it's dark out here!' exhorts a slim, wiry-haired Texan with a tape cassette in each fist as he hurries across the shadow-cloaked courtyard of a secluded ranch compound high in the Hollywood Hills. Straight ahead, out to the car! Its not locked! That's it! Everybody pile in!" Just overhead, low-hanging stars blink furiously as if startled by the sudden appearance of the boisterous trailblazer and the indistinct forms strung out behind him.

Don Henley is a man with a mission the completion if his second solo album-and on this April night in 1984 he dearly needs a sympathetic ear for the mounting urgency of that objective. See, it's now the end of the very month he had assured his new record label (Geffen) that he'd deliver the finished product, Yet at this juncture he's got only a half-dozen tracks his semi happy with, and they exist largely as rough mixes. But that not what's making him crazy this cool, hushed Los Angeles evening.

Minutes before, he had driven some guests up to his rambling, handsome home following a sumptuous Italian dinner on the Sunset Strip, eager to get their opinions of his works-in-progress. But he couldn't locate any machine on the premises to play them on. Stalking from the kitchen to the den in the custom-built stucco and stone hideaway, searching in vain in each spacious beamed room for a working portable tape deck with suitable stereo unit, he rejected each scattered piece of hardware with crisp finality. Least desirable of all, he allowed, was his old Macintosh stereo system, better suited for classical music than the pealing peaks and serrated edges of state-of-the-art rock declamations.

"Kootch" he sighed, pleading with soul mate writing collaborator Danny Kortchmar for counsel, "we can't play 'Building The Perfect Beast' and 'Sunset Grill' on this two-bit stuff! Man. I want them to hear 'em before my mood changes and chicken out again!"

"Okay now, okay..." said the broad shouldered, ever-amiable Kootch, soothing his chum and smoothing his sleek Elliot Ness haircut while he bought me for a brainstorm. Which presently arrived with a thunderclap-the Jimmy! Let's go Out to the Nakamichi in the jeep "he sad, referring to the chunky new GM off-road vehicle with the dynamite sound system that Henley has parked out back. Don's furrowed brow tightened into a fleshy grillwork as he wrestled with the proposed solution. Yes, the Jimmy is!

There is something distinctly eerie about the hushed wait in the pitch-black cab of the Jeep while the first cassette is advanced to what will prove to be the album's title track. Instinctively, the chaotic electric landscape of Los Angeles flickering far be ow. Then the music steals into the car with hobgoblin haste and a simmering hiss. Low kettledrum-like trumps and the ominous tolling of a bell give way to the predatory plunk of a quartet of sinister guitar notes. There is the rising gnash of a metallic industrial clangor, and the keening bleat of Henley's unmistakable vocals cut in: stark, anguished, strained, they have none of the sonorous hum of old, and much more impact.

"The power of reason/ the top of the heap," he intones. 'We're the ones who can kill/ the things we don't eat!"

It's the score to a cinematic nightmare of epic proportions a vision of Mephistophelian mayhem that would make a nice soundtrack for a Road Warrior sequel set in the rubble of an Armageddon razed LA. Two more cuts. "All She Wants To Do is Dance" and "Sunset Grill' escalate the near-tangible atmosphere of fantastic desolation. Maybe it's the lateness of the hour and the dust and smog-strewn L.A. air that give the local light such a queer ominous cast, but the music is so vivid it makes one wonder if we're stuck in a bunker while the scenario is coming true in the urban basin below.

Stepping out of the car after the impromptu premiere of his chilling new material, Henley and Kortchmar accept stunned praise for the tracks, but one listener speaks for the whole when he quips, "The music almost makes you want to check to make sure the city is still down there."

Ever since he co-wrote the appropriately spooky "Witchy Woman" for the 1972 debut LP by the Eagles, Don Henley, thirty-seven, has been responsible for some of the more atmospheric, exhilarating and disquieting rock to pour from an American car radio. "Desperado," "Tequila Sunrise," "James Dean," "Best Of My Love," "Lyin' Eyes" (for which he shared a 1975 Grammy with Eagles collaborator Glenn Frey), "Life In The Fast Lane," "Victim Of Hotel" and the title track from the Grammy 1977 Album of the Year, Hotel California, all reveal the Henley flair for communicating the wrenching rigors of conscience in a world ravaged by mass alienation and folly. Many of his best songs were co-authored by Glenn Frey, and when the two parted ways following the disbanding of the Eagles in 1980, it remained unclear-as so often occurs in a seamless commercial super-group-who possessed what strength as individual talents.

With the appearance of the acclaimed I Can't Stand Still solo debut in August 1982 and its smash single, "Dirty Laundry," it was plain that Henley was not a facile pop tunesmith but rather a tough-minded, singular talent who took his communicating seriously The brawny. bristling new Building The Perfect Beast confirms that estimation and with a new support crew consisting of guitarist/composer Danny Kortchmar and deft engineer-producer Greg Ladanyi (whose work on Toto IV ensured its slew of Grammies), Henley s helping to write a new chapter in the sprawling history of Los Angeles rock. Indeed one of the few local practit loners comparable to Henley and company in marketplace stature and commercial clout is Lindsey Buckingham. whose own solo efforts outside of Fleet-wood Mac have been superb, one-of-a-kind records with a bold. wonderfully eccentric integrity.

Even as these artists strive to renew themselves and chart a new course for their music. they have been increasingly drawn info each other's camps. Small wonder then, that Henley, Buckingham, Kortchmar and several other established but still-evolving figures on the L.A. scene are seriously discussing the formation of a new group.

"I always give a record the 'car test,"' Henley offers with a wide grin as he recounts the marathon creation of the LP during a Christmas-time visit to New York City. "I don't usually use a car the way I used the Jimmy last spring Out that was a special case. I wanted a burst of feedback to make certain I was on course." He laughs, a bit red-faced and settles into the overstuffed couch in his comfortable hotel suite overlooking Central Park.

"Thing is, when I finish an album I fry to go and do something else like go skiing in Colorado or visit old friends back where I was born [in the small east Texas town of Linden]. I don't live and breathe rock n' roil, so if I ye stopped recording for six months or more, as I did after I Can't Stand Still, it makes if more difficult to get back into the mode On top of that, I was negotiating to leave my old label [Elektra] and move to Geffen. As if was, when the record finally did take shape, I still left a lot of things until the last possible moment, to literally the last day in some cases. I don't know how other people are making their records these days, but as Kootch and "Levels" [their wry name for Ladany] can tell you, mine was quite a saga.

And I was carried out with three over-lapping areas of expertise, Kortchmar focusing on the development of demos and basic work tracks, Henley immersed in lyrics, vocal interpretation and mood, and Ladanyi polishing and enhancing the integrated whole.

"I'm a little embarrassed to admit we write like this," says Henley, "but it is almost like a series of errands, stages and little missions, beginning with when Kootch, the Mad Strangler, shows up at my house with the tracks he's cooked up at the Actress, his home studio. I used to write like this with (Don) Felder, who used to make these complete, virtually finished tracks at home-which is the way 'Hotel California' was written."

"So with that as the modus operandi," says Kortchmar a few days later, "I created the bare bones of the first song that wound up on the record, 'You Can't Make Love,' as far back as January 1982. Don heard my demo and said, Awright! I want to write a song based on the colors of this music.' I always try to give him a lot of textures, moods, edges and shadings because he keys off that kind of stimulation in an amazing way. The album has a lot of aural coloration that's meant to be felt rather than heard, But he won't let me or Greg get too fancy; it's not right if it's not tight."

"And so what I'm charged with doing,"adds Ladanyi. "is to make a record out of the finest tapes Don and Kootch can grow at home-I play a game called 'Beat the Demo!' It's a mutual dialogue-our motto at the Actress studio is 'Our career comes first!' Eventually we'd end up in a commercial studio, in this case Bill Schnee's studio in universal City and the Villa in North Hollywood. But I do all my mixing in Record One in Sherman Oaks, which is where I've done so much of my work with Toto."

While the title track and "Sunset Grill" became the tours de force of Beast, "You Can't Make Love" became one of the many unsentimental, unusually affecting songs of love and regret leading towards the ultimate explosion-and a conciliatory coda.

"Regardless of when the songs were created, I came to realize that pacing and sequencing would be very crucial on the record," says Henley. "I saw that I had love statements and political themes, and they had to be placed right to show a good interrelation and give off an overall feeling of forward movement. I've always liked records you could put on and leave on, playing the sides in order, and I wanted the listener to feel as if a lot had occurred, ebbed and flowed, in the ten songs.

"The first track, 'The Boys Of Summer,' I wrote with Mike Campbell of Tom Petty's band, who brought me a tape lust as Kootch always does. We changed the structure of his track,

shortened it, changed the ending and the bridge and threw out one section completely. It was just the beginning of autumn, and with my melancholy Irish nature, I've always been a sucker for the metaphor of change in the fall. I put the tape in my car, drove up the Pacific Coast Highway towards Zuma Beach and the words came to me like gangbusters. At one point, I just sat there overlooking the cliffs with the car doors open and wrote all but the last verse.

"A couple of days later, I got in the car again, hit the freeway, and I saw this brand new Cadillac Seville and it had a big, green Deadhead sticker on it. The Cadillac is a symbol of the middle class American businessman, and I thought, 'Either this guy is a great eclectic or this is a sign unto me!' So I reworked the song with it."

Like the track that follows, "You Can't Make Love," Henley says that all the record's rather flinty ballads are about the perils of letting yourself get stuck, losing the thread of personal growth, getting in dangerous patterns that turn into sadness or.. monsters. A trap is a trap, and trappings are just trappings.

"In the 1960s, love was confused with a lot of trappings-the flowers, the f lowing clothes, peace sign, word phrases. The 1980s versions would be fur coats, diamond rings. The first thing (Bob) Seger said when he heard the lyric to 'Can't Make Love' was, 'Boy, that really makes me feel old and impotent.' I said, 'Seger, lighten up, it's an honest song about semantics, divorcee, arrogance.

"Love is something that takes a long time," the recently-engaged Henley offers intently. "That's part of what growing up has been for me. I'm starting to figure out what love is. I was about thirteen when my paternal grandmother died. My grandfather died eight or nine months later, and there wasn't anything previously physically wrong with him. was flabbergasted. I said, 'What's wrong with grandpa?' And I was told that, after he and grandma being together for fifty years, he just pined away died of a broken heart.

"The divorce rate alone says that people don't really know what love is They think they can conjure it up once they get married. You can't make love the way you can make a record, going around saying~ 'We'll fix it in the mix."'

"We're open to good accidents and serendipity when we're on the case," says Danny Kortchmar, "but what we're really trying to do is tinker and test until we have it knocked, and bringing in support to make that happen. We asked Pino Palladino, the bassist with Paul Young, to come into the studio after we heard Young's No Parlez LP, saw him live, and were floored by how much we dug his stuff."

Another impulse was the decision to contact Sam Moore of the immortal Sam & Dave to do the harmony vocals on Korchmer's "You're Not Drinking Enough." "I cut me teeth on Stax-Volt,' says Kortchmar, "I lived and breathed that stuff as a kid in New York City, and when I felt myself easing into that kind of R&B ballad groove I talked with Don about it and we knew we had to try to get Sam involved. I mean, he was a hero to both of us; Don played his stuff in honkytonks for years. And he turned out to be a phone call away.

"When he came into the studio to sing his part, he was singing so intense and powerfully from Jump Street, from the first note of the first take. We all leaped about a foot I I was so blown out, I talked to him over the studio PA. and said, kiddingly, 'Sam, you're looking lonely out there. You want Don for company?' To my surprise, he nodded, and then I realized that he was awesome on his own, but always used to the physical presence of dueting with somebody like Dave Prater. So when he and Don tried it together, their mikes facing each other-forget it! As Don says, 'Sam began to sweat.' It was inspired."

The presence of Lindsey Bucking-ham's harmonies on "Can't Make Love" came about in a slightly more sheepish fashion, however.

"We've always been a little bit standoffish," says Henley. "Our groups had been a little bit competitive; he used to go with Stevie and then I went with Stevie for a while. But it was great fun hanging out with him, and I look forward to the prospect of us touring and being in a band together. If I say that enough times maybe he'll get so embarrassed he won't dare change his mind."

One of the last additions to the often last-minute orchestration of the project was Patty Smyth, who was pulled in after Henley and Kootch caught Scandals "Goodbye To You" video on.MTV for the umpteenth time. "It was late one night, and we were just sitting around," Henley recalls. "I said, 'This girl is cute,' and then I said, 'Hey, this girl can sing I' Next thing, we call her up, get her a first-class plane ticket, put her up in a hotel and we all became great friends. Me and Kootch are like her big brothers now. She's doing well with rock but she also really likes R&B, and during one session at about three o'clock one morning, we did a duet thing, that old hit 'Break up Or Make up.' We changed the tempo and it came out neat. I'd still like to put it out.

"She meshed with me so beautifully, especially on 'Sunset Grill,"' says Henley, beaming. "She gave the song a softening effect, a touch of lonesomeness and longing. It's meant to be a story about a last outpost in an age of the inability of anybody to take responsibility. You can't find the cat who's responsible for anything that's hurting you or making you crazy, certainly not in government-although I should add that there really is a Sunset Grill. It's run by a guy from Vienna, Austria named Joe Frolich, down on the corner of Sunset and Gardner, it seats about fifteen people and the cheeseburgers, which get eaten by hookers, drifters and rock singers, are wonderful.

"The melody of 'Sunset Grill' came from a jazz piece Kootch had lying around from his days with the Section. The rifts that sound like trombones or trumpets, they're actually Kootch's new Roland GR-707 guitar synthesizer, and those 'horns' are supposed to be reminiscent of the Nelson Riddle theme from the old TV show, Route 66. That highway, which once ran from Santa Monica, is now a wasteland of empty gas stations, closed cafes and desert motels with concrete teepees out front. We wanted to evoke that bleakness."

The wailing 'horns' on "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" were underscored by the unnerving reediness of a Yamaha DX7 manned by Toto's David Paich. He set it on the harmonica stop and it was run through Kootch's Marshall stack into the studio, which Ladanyi had miked through some AMS reverb units so that it sounded like the Phantom of the Opera.

Even more difficult to conjure up was the maniacal cacophony of the harrowing Last Straw-the Beast.

"It actually was like making a movie out of a song," according to Ladanyi. "We were bouncing tracks back and forth in SMPTE-running two 24-track reels at once to exploit probably seventy-two trackings. In terms of the appropriate effects for the building' motif, we got a nice white noise thing from our Simmons drums, picked up an anvil from a Synclavier. Hell, at one point, we even went out and bought some garbage cans to bang; we wound up dropping them, though, in favor of African percussion and talking drum as a nice counterbalance to the evil technological din you were hearing.

'For Don's narrative part in the 'All the I way from Malibu/To the landing of the I Talking Drum' section of Beast-which Danny wanted to sound like a desperate telephone message-we ran the vocal through headphones. Then we took an old RCA 44 radio mike and set it about six feet away from the phones. By adding to the original signal in that way, we got a blend that was off of phase with itself, scary and sinister.

"With Don's other vocals on 'Beast, he got coached by Steve Jordan (drummer with the David Letterman Show band), who encouraged him to go for an unadorned, dire, James Brown kind of attack. Like so many of the other tracks on the album, it also opened Don up to being more adventurous with his singing than he's ever been, giving a performance instead of thinking technique."

"You know," says Henley, rising from the hotel to get ready for a dinner date in Soho, "I knew that the record had to end on an up note of relief, and that's why I saved the promise and optimism of 'Land Of The Living' for last, but by that time, my voice was so beat up from the previous singing experiences, it sounded like I had been through some kind of ordeal. I sounded like Gladys Knight after a bar fight."

Seemingly both drained and exhilarated by reliving the building of his Beast, Henley hurries downtown to the nouvelle cuisine of the fashionable Odeon, and then suggests moving on to the Ritz to catch a first-rate set by the rollicking East L.A. band, Los Lobos. As singers David Hidalgo and Cesar Rojas guide the group through a set that mixes Richie Valens, Santo and Johnny and norteno polkas, Henley leaps to his feet and bops around the balcony in glee. "I grew up listening to this kind of Tex-Mex border music as a teenager, man!' he exults. "This was my preEagles education!"

The band launches into "La Bamba." Henley orders another round of beers, and I recall something he'd said, with a wink, as he left the hotel: "Thomas Wolfe was right. You can't go home again. But if you hang in there, it'll come and find you."