Part of Don Henley never left the northeast Texas town where he grew up. You can hear as much when he speaks with a mix of fondness and sadness about life in Linden, and when you listen to last year’s Cass County, the Eagles co-founder’s first solo album in 15 years. “To use a cliché, it was my going-home album,” Henley said by phone from his Dallas base this week.
Henley will perform songs from Cass County, his earlier solo albums and the Eagles at Montreal’s Bell Centre on Wednesday, Sept. 14 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $62 to $143.50 at the venue and via Evenko (514-790-2525; evenko.ca).
In a wide-ranging interview with the Montreal Gazette, Henley discussed the recent album, why we probably won’t have to wait long for the followup, and the raw emotion that lingers after the death in January of Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey. Here’s a full transcript of the conversation. (Note: This interview contains spoilers about the set list for Henley’s upcoming Montreal show.)
Montreal Gazette: What spurred the idea for a somewhat traditional country album? Was it something you had been thinking of doing for years?
Don Henley: Yes. I’d been thinking about doing it for quite some time. Well, when one gets to be my age, one comes full circle, so to speak. I grew up in a very small town in northeast Texas. The population when I was growing up was about 2,500, maybe 2,600. And it has shrunk now to 1,900. Like a lot of small towns, it’s drying up and dying. So I just wanted to pay tribute to my home turf and to the memories of growing up, and listening to country music with my father on the radio in his car. I would go to work with him sometimes, on weekends or in the summertime when school was out. My dad had an auto parts shop in a town that was 21 miles away from where we lived, and he would make that commute every day. He would drive there and drive back. And I would go with him sometimes, and we would listen to country music on the radio. So it was part of my growing up.
I’m a little confused by what is called country music today. (Laughs) It’s something that I don’t quite recognize. So I wanted to do something that I thought was a little more traditional. I mean, I don’t like putting things in boxes. The album definitely leans toward country, but there’s that relatively new category called Americana, and I think it would fit into that box as well. There are a lot of different influences that come to bear on the album, I think. So let’s just put it this way: to use a cliché, it was my going-home album.
MG: Did you still listen to that music once you moved out to California in the ’70s?
DH: I would still listen to that music in California. I mean, Merle Haggard, may he rest in peace, has always been one of my musical heroes, and he lived in California — he was part of what was called the Bakersfield sound. You know, Merle and Buck Owens and some of that gang were recording out in Bakersfield, California. And those people had a big influence on the country-rock movement, which is always credited to Gram Parsons; he’s seen as being the seminal figure in that movement. I know that Mr. Parsons was influenced by those same people. And I still am very connected to my hometown. After my mother passed away I kept her house, and we still go back there occasionally. I’m involved in civic affairs and the restoration efforts, and I own several buildings which are … um, vacant. (Laughs) Ever seen The Last Picture Show?
MG: Oh, sure.
DH: It’s a little bit like that. I just watched that again the other day. It’s really quite a movie.
MG: In the History of the Eagles documentary, I remember you talking about the town’s one traffic light. That’s still how it feels?
DH: Yeah. Like I said, it’s smaller now than it was. It’s a fairly large county, Cass County — I mean, it’s fairly large by east Texas standards. But there are only 30,000 people in the entire county. And the median family income per year is $28,000. So it’s tough down there. Or up there, I should say — it’s north of here. So there are some of us who have moved away and done well who have gone back and tried to make things better. We have a very historic courthouse — it’s the oldest continuously operating courthouse in the entire state, and it was built before the Civil War. And of course, it’s been through several renovations, but we got some state funding and we put up some matching funds, and we managed to restore it to its 1933, 1934 iteration, and it’s a beautiful building. But that’s about all we’ve got. (Laughs) We have nothing else, really.
MG: Did you always imagine you would get involved in the town again?
DH: Well, I don’t live there, let me be clear about that. And I don’t think I could ever live there. It’s a good place to take the kids — there’s lots of woods and lakes and places to fish, and places to hike and ride bicycles, so when we want to get out of the city we go there. But I could never live there again full time. It’s just too … (pauses) There’s a great quote; are you familiar with Thomas Wolfe, the writer?
MG: Sure.
DH: You Can’t Go Home Again, that book? I understand that book very well. I love my hometown, and I want to try to do what I can for the people there — although most of the people that I knew are either dead or have moved away to somewhere else. I’m trying to think of this quote now … the character in You Can’t Go Home Again is named George Webber … I’ve got it here on my computer … oh, you don’t have room for all this anyway, so it doesn’t matter. (Laughs)
MG: Oh, I was going to post this conversation online in addition to whatever runs in print, so if you want to share it …
DH: The quote? OK, this is from You Can’t Go Home Again. Are you recording this?
MG: I am, yeah.
DH: I quoted this before when I was doing interviews for the album. It says: “Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.” So, that’s kind of a nice, ironic, paradoxical little quote that I understand quite well.
MG: It certainly fits with some of your lyrics.
DH: Yeah, I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of place, and the idea of home. What is home? Where is home? What do places mean in our lives? Certain places, what dreams and memories and emotions do those places hold, and how do those change over time? I have come to understand now that it’s not the places quite so much as the people who inhabit them. At least in terms of towns. When it comes to nature, it’s quite a different scenario. Natural places have their own kind of magnetism, and they create their own kind of memories. But in terms of towns, to some degree it’s about the architecture, but mostly it’s about the inhabitants and what they’re like. Anyway, this is getting too complicated. Let’s go back. (Laughs) It’s me still trying to figure it out, you know?
MG: I’ll ask you about the guests on Cass County, then. Did you know that you wanted to have such a wide-ranging cast going into the album, or did any particular collaboration spark the idea?
DH: I had most of them in mind going in. I had sort of planned the whole thing. I mean, the recording of the album took place over about a five- or six-year period. So it was very much planned as it went along. The only person I can think of who was sort of a last-minute inspiration was Mick Jagger. I thought, “What can I do to really make this song (Bramble Rose) different from the original version that was done by Tift Merritt, and what would be a very unlikely combination?” And so I thought of him, but I didn’t think he would do it. At all. And I was shocked and pleased when word came back that he liked the song and he would do it.
But if you listen to the music that the Stones recorded between 1968 and 1972, there’s a lot of country influence in there. Keith Richards had met Gram Parsons and hung out with him. They spent a lot of time together, and I think that Gram Parsons played the great American songbook of country music for Keith Richards. He sat him down and played George Jones and Hank Williams and all that sort of thing for him. You could hear that influence in songs like Wild Horses and Dead Flowers, Honky Tonk Women — you can hear that twang. And Mick was married to Jerry Hall, who was raised right outside of Dallas here. She has a very thick accent, and I think he borrowed some of that when he wants to go country. You can sort of hear his doing the accent.
MG: That idea of going country — I might think of that in terms of somebody like Mick Jagger, but it’s not like you had to adapt how you sing to fit the genre.
DH: No. There are a lot of people making country albums who really didn’t grow up in the country. But if we’re having an authenticity contest, I think I’m in good shape, because I am definitely from the sticks. I spent my entire childhood there, graduated from high school there, went to college in a little country town, basically. Where I’m from is not really part of the west — it’s more a part of the Deep South. It’s sort of a twilight zone where the Deep South meets the west. I was fortunate in that regard, because I was exposed to a very wide array of music when I was growing up. It was sort of a musical crossroads, that part of the state. Because it borders Louisiana, it borders Arkansas and it borders Oklahoma. So I was exposed to bluegrass and Cajun music and western swing and blues. My parents — my dad was a veteran of World War II, so they loved big band music, swing music. Of course, there was always gospel music — my grandmother lived with us and she would sit in her rocking chair all day singing gospel tunes and Stephen Foster songs, in her dementia. And so I got exposed to a lot of different kinds of music, and I’m grateful for that now.
MG: Also, speaking of authenticity, some of the reviews I saw when Cass County was released seemed to express surprise that you were doing country music, but Desperado and other early Eagles music certainly carried that element.
DH: Yeah, I mean, Lyin’ Eyes has been a very influential song in the country world. No, especially early on when Bernie Leadon was in the band and played banjo, we did songs that were straight-up bluegrass. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. But now that I’ve done this and gotten it out of my system, I’m gonna do something else. (Laughs) I’m gonna go in some other direction.
“There are a lot of people making country albums who really didn’t grow up in the country. But if we’re having an authenticity contest, I think I’m in good shape, because I am definitely from the sticks,” Don Henley says of Cass County.
MG: Is it still the R&B direction you’re thinking of for the next album?
DH: Yeah, R&B and ’60s soul music. I grew up on a lot of that. My first band played a lot of it — when we were doing clubs and parties and things like that in Austin, Texas, soul music was at its peak. Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett and James Brown and Aretha Franklin — a lot of those people were having big hits. They were produced in Memphis and produced in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and places like that. So I’d like to do some of that. I’ve been sneaking those kind of songs into my albums for a long time now, and nobody seems to have noticed. On the End of the Innocence album, there are two songs: there was one called Shangri-La, and one called How Bad Do You Want It?, that are both … I don’t know, I guess you could call them blue-eyed soul songs. There were a lot of blue-eyed soul singers in the south when I was growing up. People like Wayne Cochran.
And I’ve got a horn section on tour with me now, so we’ve been doing that stuff and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve got a 15-piece band — not counting me. (Laughs) Yeah. As I say on stage, it’s not very profitable, but it sure is fun. So I think people will be pleasantly surprised, and I’m looking forward to Montreal, because I remember getting a very warm reception the last time I was there.
MG: Yeah, I think the last solo show you did here was way back in 1990.
DH: Yeah, ’90 or ’91. Yeah. I remember being somewhat surprised and pleased at the warmth and the affection that I felt that night. I came away very happy. Because I wasn’t expecting it. I think that was the night that I tried to speak French and people weren’t really having it. (Laughs) I tried to dig up some of my college French, and it was very rusty and very bad. And I realized that most of the people in the audience were not Québécois.
MG: It’s the thought that counts.
DH: (Laughs) Yeah, well, it was a good experience.
MG: Was there an adjustment period in going back to focusing on performing solo these last two years, after so long performing primarily with the Eagles?
DH: Well, I’ve been doing solo gigs every year, even between the Eagles stuff. We all did a few of our own gigs here and there, so that part of it wasn’t an adjustment. It’s been an adjustment trying to realize that the Eagles are no more. It’s been a very strange time trying to wrap my head around that, and realizing what a big part of my life that was, and how much of my identity was wrapped up in it — although I’ve always been careful not to let it define my life completely, so I’ve been able to get through this without just losing it.
And the fact that I do have a solo career to go to … you know, I’m not the only curator, but I’m the primary curator of those songs and that catalogue now. And it’s my responsibility to make sure those songs are carried forward with respect, because I know that people still want to hear them.
MG: Is that why you went back to including some in the set? I saw that last year you weren’t doing any Eagles songs, at the earlier Cass County shows, right?
DH: Yeah, that’s right. I was trying to get people familiar with the new album. But that’s changed now. I do a long show now — the show is about two hours and 20 minutes, so that gives me time to do some of all of it. I do five or six songs from the Cass County album, and then I do songs from my solo albums in the ’80s, and then I do Eagles songs. So I try to put in something for everybody. Naturally, most of the people have come to hear the Eagles songs. Although there’s a portion of the audience that’s familiar with the Cass County album. It’s just a little tightrope that I have to walk every night. (Laughs) You know, how much of this, and how much of that, and what to leave in, what to leave out. But I try to do a little bit of all of it.
MG: I’m not positive that most people are there for the Eagles songs, though. I’m sure some, like myself, are glad to see you resurrect more solo songs from the ’80s than you were able to play in the Eagles’ shows.
DH: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun for us with that horn section, and I’ve got three fabulous backup singers. They’re young women in their 20s, and two of them graduated a couple years ago from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles with music degrees, so they really know their stuff. And then the other one is sort of a Broadway veteran I stole from a musical production called Once. She was in that in Dallas, and I saw her on stage and I said, “I want that girl in my band.” Turns out she’s from Amarillo, Texas, but she lives in New York now.
MG: I hope you don’t mind me asking, but in terms of performing the Eagles songs, is it something that’s extremely emotional for you on stage, all things considered?
DH: It gets emotional at the end when I do Desperado, because that’s the first song that Glenn and I wrote together. So every night I dedicate it to him. And the crowd gets emotional, and that’s part of the healing process — for them as well as for me. I think they expect it. I won’t sing any of his songs, though. I don’t think that would be quite right, even if I co-wrote them. I’m just not doing it.
MG: Could you see yourself in a situation where those songs are performed again, whether it’s you and Timothy B. Schmit and Joe Walsh working with Jackson Browne on a one-off like you did at the Grammys, or something else?
DH: (Pauses) At some point in the future, we might work our way around to that. You know, Glenn has a son who can sing and play quite well. And one of the only things that would make sense to me is if it were his son. With Jackson, of course, we could do Take It Easy and a couple other things, but the only way I would consider any kind of reunion, I think, would be with Glenn’s son, Deacon. But there have been no discussions along those lines, and we’re still going through the healing process — trying to get through all this. And those are things that might happen somewhere down the road. But right now, everybody’s doing the solo thing. Timothy’s got a new album coming out, and Joe has been on the road in conjunction with Bad Company. And I think Timothy plans to go on the road. So we’re all just doing our thing.
I’m touring through September, and then I have a one-off in October — in Hawaii. (Laughs) I’m flying all the way over there and back, but that’s OK. And then I’m home for a while. I have a New Year’s Eve gig, which I don’t normally do, but they promised me that I could be off the stage by 10 o’clock, so I said “OK, fine.” (Laughs) I do not want to be on the stage at midnight.
And I want to start on the other album sometime later this year or early next year, because I can’t afford to wait. Obviously it’s a long time between my albums, and I’ve finally figured out that I don’t have the luxury of diddling around anymore. (Laughs) I’ve got to get on it. But I have two kids still living at home, you know, so that’s very important to me — to be a good parent — and that’s one reason I haven’t been very productive in the past several years, is I take my role as a father very seriously. And I spend a lot of time on that.
MG: Do you wish you had a more extensive solo catalogue, or is quantity not something you’re concerned with? I mean, I’ve talked to some musicians who say they want to leave behind this massive body of work, as if every song is one step closer to the goal.
DH: (Laughs) Yeah, I have some regret that I didn’t produce more work in the past — solo work. But on the other hand, when I tally it all up with the Eagles catalogue and my solo catalogue, there are a lot of songs there, you know? There are still songs I could do in my set. I mean, for example, I haven’t been doing Taking You Home — because it’s really f—ing hard to sing. (Laughs) But I’m not doing that; I’m not doing Last Worthless Evening. I haven’t done Wasted Time, but I might start doing that.
But I have dug up a few chestnuts. Like I said, I’m doing those two songs, those two funk songs or whatever they are, from the End of the Innocence album. I’ve also been doing The Last Resort from the Eagles, and that brings down the house, because I’ve got two violinists in the band and I’ve got that horn section, and so we can make it sound pretty much like the record, with the addition of some digital magic. We call it orchestra in a box. But we’ve been doing that, and it usually gets a standing ovation. So that feels good. It’s fun.
MG: It’s great to hear you’re doing that song. I never expected to see it performed live.
DH: Yeah, well, we did it in the Eagles, but not very much. We only did it back in the ’70s, I think. But yeah, it’s been a great experience doing that.
MG: I wanted to ask you a bit about the difference between what you’re saying in the early and present-day footage in the Eagles documentary …
DH: (Laughs) Yeah. Yeah.
MG: There’s that bit from the ’70s where you’re saying, “Well, it’s not like we can do this for very long,” and then that last line from the present: “From where I sit, rust looks pretty good.” At what point did you realize this would be your lifelong calling — that you could keep on doing this?
DH: You know, (pauses) I don’t think we ever got comfortable in that regard. I think we all thought that it could disappear at any minute, in any given year, you know? Glenn kind of got us to a point … he said, “We’re gonna do this on a yearly basis: we’re gonna meet, we’re gonna talk every January after the holidays, and decide whether we want to tour some more or not.” Which was really just code for him saying, “I’m gonna decide whether I want to tour anymore or not.” (Laughs) And that’s the way we proceeded basically from year to year.
I think we were all somewhat shocked and delighted when we got back together in 1994 and realized we still had such a strong following on a global scale. And I think everybody was pretty happy about that. But even then, we only thought it would go on for two or three years: we would tour the world, and then that would probably be it. But it just kept going. But I was surprised each and every year. Maybe during the last two or three years, when we were doing the History tour, I think maybe at that point I said, “Well, I guess we could just do this for as long as we wanted, if our health holds out.” And then, of course, the tragedy happened. But we were always walking on the razor’s edge, just not knowing how long it would go on. I knew that it had to stop at some point, but I didn’t think it would end the way it did.
MG: Is it almost better, though, that it ended the way it did rather than it possibly falling apart again?
DH: Um … no. No. I don’t think it would have fallen apart — I think we would have sort of come to a gentleman’s agreement. I think Glenn would have been the one to say, “Fellas, I just don’t feel like doing this anymore.” And we would have all said, “OK. It is what it is. We had a good run.” I think it would have ended that way. So no, nobody’s happy about the way it ended.
MG: No, and I didn’t mean to imply …
DH: No, I know you didn’t. I know you didn’t. But you know, looking back, it lasted so much longer than any of us ever thought it would. It was just a miracle. Nothing short of a miracle. And we’re all very grateful for the run that we had. Not many bands get that. At all. And it was an extraordinary thing.
Don Henley, left, and Glenn Frey perform with the Eagles at the Bell Centre in 2013. Following Frey’s death in January, Henley says, “it’s been an adjustment trying to realize that the Eagles are no more. It’s been a very strange time trying to wrap my head around that.”
MG: What do you attribute it to — especially in the second act? I mean, even without much new material aside from the double album (2007’s Long Road Out of Eden), the appetite for it never really seemed to go away.
DH: I don’t know. I guess we did something right. We really tried hard to better ourselves as songwriters and musicians as we went along. We were very conscious of upping our game, and we put a lot of time and effort into making those records and writing those songs. We put a lot of time and care into our live performances, and I think people appreciated that. We just tried to give people … (pauses) quality. And whether it’s music or cars or clothing or whatever, if something is well made and well marketed, then it has lasting value to people. It does well. And we were also very fortunate to have good management in Irving Azoff. Our paths crossed in 1974, and that was just one of those moments of serendipity and good fortune when we met him and he became our manager. He really played a large role in taking the band as far as it went.
So the stars aligned. I met Glenn Frey just by being in the right place at the right time. You know, you look back on it and you see all the intersections and all the pivotal moments when things could have been very different. But they weren’t. And I don’t know how much I personally had to do with that, or whether it’s just the fates or what. But it just worked out, amazingly well. And I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. I’ve just accepted the fact that it happened. (Laughs)
But I will say, and I will always say, that we had a great work ethic. I mean, we played hard, especially in the ’70s, but as we got older and became parents, we were much more — and we’ve been criticized for it — we were more businesslike and more professional about the whole thing. Which is why we were able to deliver the music in concert in such a consistent manner.
I still work out like a fiend. Just before I picked up the phone with you, I worked out with a trainer for an hour and a half, and I’m sitting here soaking wet. But that’s what enables me to sing and to do what I have to do on the road. I mean, I’m 69 years old. It’s not easy. But I found out that if I behave myself (laughs) … I mean, I don’t drink when I’m on tour, because it wrecks my voice, and I work out on tour — sometimes I bring a trainer, sometimes I just do it on my own. But my preparation for the show starts at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and goes on until we get on stage. And so it’s a real effort, but the rewards are worth it. I really don’t want to go out and sing badly. I’ve seen a lot of aging artists go out and be really wobbly, and I just don’t want to do that. I’d rather quit.
MG: Yeah, I’m always kind of torn from the perspective of a fan when that happens. I’m a big fan of Rush and was crushed when they informally semi-retired last year, partly because of some health challenges. On one hand, you obviously want to see them last forever, and there’s that fan mentality that makes you think an artist is immortal — but then, like you said, you see artists who do stick around too long.
DH: Yeah. Yeah. This year has taught us, if anything, that they’re not immortal. We’ve lost a lot of people. Yeah, the Rush fans — I encountered them when I inducted Randy Newman into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Rush was being inducted the same night. They were a drunken, rowdy bunch. (Laughs) They shouted down Oprah Winfrey! It was funny. But Rush, they were very charming. Which one was it who got up and did a whole acceptance speech just using the words “blah blah blah”?
MG: That was Alex Lifeson.
DH: It was brilliant. It was f—ing brilliant. Because you knew what he was saying, because of his inflection and his hand movements and stuff like that. It just brought the house down. I’ll never forget that. But I was lucky that night, because I got to go on first before their audience got toasted. So they were fairly quiet while I was on. I left after my bit was done, but I understand it got pretty ugly. Anyway …
MG: You touched on the idea of quality craftsmanship. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the issues you had with Frank Ocean and Okkervil River a few years ago. (Ocean used the music from Hotel California in his track American Wedding; Okkervil River’s Will Sheff rewrote some of The End of the Innocence’s lyrics in his cover of the song.)
DH: (Laughs)
MG: Did you see them as interfering with the quality of the work? I know it’s a much more complicated issue than just that …
DH: Yeah, this gets into the issue of copyright, and tampering with somebody else’s song. I’m not comparing our music to da Vinci, but you can’t go in and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. You just can’t do it. And they did! They took our songs — they took part of the songs — and then they added their stuff, their part to it. And you can’t do that. Not only is it against the law, but it’s just ethically wrong, you know? It would never even cross my mind to do something like that. It’s just so brazen and clueless at the same time. (Laughs)
You just don’t do what they did — without getting permission, at least. And I know that young people don’t understand that, because they grew up in the Internet era where everything is interactive and you can tamper with anything, change anything. They grew up in the age of sampling where you think you can just take a piece of something else. I didn’t grow up in that era. I grew up in the era where people’s work belonged to them. And you simply don’t tamper with it. And again, I could cite you chapter and verse of copyright law, but that’s boring stuff.
But Frank Ocean’s lawyers tried to explain it to him, because they knew he was gonna get sued. They knew what he had done wasn’t right. And he was just young and arrogant and he couldn’t understand why we were not happy — that he took the track to Hotel California and wrote his own song over it. (Laughs)
But at the same time, I think the idea of homage and the idea of doing something in a certain style is fine. But you can’t take the work itself that you’re paying homage to and layer your own stuff on top of it. You have to start from scratch. I think the legal decision in the (Blurred Lines) Marvin Gaye / Pharrell Williams case, I think that was a really bad decision. I don’t think that was plagiarism. I think that was simply influence. So there’s a fine line. It’s a very grey area of law and of ethics.
But yeah, I mean, I know I took some heat from those kids, but I don’t care. They have to learn. Frank Ocean, his attorneys finally convinced him that he couldn’t do that anymore. And now I understand he’s got a new album out, and I haven’t heard it because I’m not a fan. But good luck to him. When you’ve been in the business 50 years like I have, you see things very differently from the way young people see things today in the Internet age, how the Internet age has spawned a different kind of consciousness — or, I should say, unconsciousness. But that’s a whole other conversation.
MG: Did you see Will Sheff of Okkervil River’s reply to your interview at the time of his End of the Innocence cover, where he wrote an essay for Rolling Stone about it?
DH: I may have seen it; I don’t remember any specifics of it.
MG: He was suggesting that what he did with his End of the Innocence cover had roots in the folk tradition of, for instance, Bob Dylan borrowing a song and putting his own mark on it. Or Nina Simone doing that in a jazz song.
DH: I don’t agree with him. I mean, if he will recall, Led Zeppelin got their asses sued for doing just that — for borrowing the riffs and the lyrics and melodies from some of the old blues greats. And they got taken to court for it, and they settled it as quietly as they could. But no, I don’t agree with that at all. I mean, you know what, if he had come to me first and just said, “Look, I’d like to do this, and this is why I’d like to do it,” then I might have said OK! But when you don’t ask, it’s just disrespectful. Not only is it illegal, it’s disrespectful.
MG: Were you OK with the Ataris changing “Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” to “Black Flag sticker” in their Boys of Summer cover?
DH: Not really. No, not really. But I wasn’t upset enough to do anything about it. I just went, “OK. Fine.” And if you noticed, we haven’t heard much from the Ataris since then. You know that story, right, what happened to them?
MG: I can’t remember.
DH: I mean, they wrote some songs, very poorly — they were not very good songwriters — and they put out an album, and the only song that people would want to hear when they did a concert was Boys of Summer. And the lead singer apparently got so angry about it that he had a T-shirt made that said “Who the f— is Don Henley?”, or “Who the hell is Don Henley?” or something like that. And he would apparently wear that on stage (laughs) … and I thought that was really childish. But it was funny at the same time, because it was a clear message to them that they needed to work on their craftsmanship.
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The Complete Conversation is an occasional series where the Montreal Gazette publishes full transcripts of interviews with musicians.