Over the past year or so, Dirty Projectors have gotten their due and David Longstreth has quickly been recognized for his outrageous musical output over the last decade or so. Over the next little while the band will perform their gloriously weird album The Getty Address in its entirety with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at a few select shows. If you haven’t heard The Getty Address, it comes off as a sort of gospel hip-hop album that would be impossible to dance to most of the time. It’s an exhausting listen but the wonderful intricate craftsmanship makes it absolutely essential.
So what does any of this have to do with Don Henley? For starters, check out Dave Longstreth's open letter to Don Henley.
One of the characters on Longstreth’s album is named Don Henley and is contemplating suicide, among other things. The above letter explains the themes of the album more than I could ever hope to. I guess the question that comes to mind upon reading it is this: isn’t it completely weird that Dirty Projectors seem so influenced by a band like the Eagles, as well as a peculiar solo artist like Don Henley?
Don Henley has the capacity to be a massive cheesebag. But I enjoy his massive cheese-bagginess because it lends itself to interesting analysis in light of his life, career and influence on music at large. It is not a coincidence that the Eagles are one of the most massively successful groups of the seventies and can charge upwards of $200.00 a ticket to see on one of their various reunion tours. Nor is it a coincidence that Don Henley had the most successful solo career of any member after the band broke up.
The Eagles originally formed as Linda Ronstadt’s backing band in 1971. Across their dramatic musical and legal career, Don Henley and Glen Frey basically ran the show. Henley, who is a left-handed drummer, was the vocalist and lyricist behind some of their greatest and most well known songs. “Hotel California?” “Desperado?” “Tequila Sunrise?” These songs have really endured the test of soft rock radio time.
The Eagles are peculiar because they’re not really considered as good, by my generation, as The Band or CSNY or Fleetwood Mac, but they occupy the same the cultural space both sonically and thematically. What is it that makes the Eagles cheesy? Henley’s lyrics are often dark and scathing (as you will see when I actually get to the record I’m supposed to be writing about) and passionately delivered over some seriously badass musicianship and vocal lines. Where is the line of authenticity being drawn?
Fast forward to 1984. Henley has enjoyed some success with the single “Dirty Laundry” off of his debut solo album I Can’t Stand Still. The record is decent but still feels like a natural evolution from the Eagles albums, albeit with a new 80’s chik to the sound. Henley is co-writing all of his material with Danny Kortchmar, noted session musician who played with such acts as James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks to name a few. Adding Heartbreakers lead guitarist Mike Campbell into the mix, Henley sets out to make what is probably his best solo effort, Building the Perfect Beast.
The record begins with “The Boys of Summer,” a melancholy song that’s nostalgically vague about selling out, personified in a sexual body. Henley’s speaker is doing his best to cope with the fact that a former lover, lyrically associated with summer, is as missing from his life as the streets and beaches are of people. The song is a struggle to adapt to the change of seasons, both literally and figuratively. Henley’s creative career becomes self-referential exactly at this point. What does it mean when everything that gave your life validation is as fleeting as good weather? How do you continue your life, creatively or otherwise, once you’ve become irrelevant to everyone but your established audience? True, Henley won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for this particular song, but the Grammys aren’t exactly known for having their finger on the pulse of anything other than an artist’s bank account. “The Boys of Summer,” slick awesomeness aside, is Henley’s most enduring solo contribution to music. It’s been covered and remixed by a whole host of artists (DJ Sammy, The Ataris), and while there isn’t another version of the song that’s particularly good, it speaks volumes that so many people consistently want to put their own spin on it.
There are two other significantly amazing songs on the album. First is “A Month of Sundays,” the only song written by Henley unassisted. It’s a piano ballad about the degradation of postwar America: “My grandson, he comes home from college. He says: ‘We get the government we deserve.’ My son-in-law just shakes his head. He says, ‘the little punk, he never had to serve.’” I’m not sure if it’s relevant to point out the issue that plagues many great and not-so-great artists, that of rich people writing about lower class problems, but Henley successfully delivers a dusty old diatribe with a “things ain’t the way they used to be” bent that really hits home. His speaker never condemns the so-called progress that surrounds him but instead ponders quietly about what to do and how to keep going under the weight of obsolescence. This song was not included on the original album but was jammed in the middle for both the CD and cassette releases. It seems weird to think of Building the Perfect Beast without “A Month of Sundays” as the song that single-handedly illuminates the darker underbelly of Henley’s musical output during this period.
The other really amazing song on this record is “Sunset Grill,” which was the only single other than “The Boys of Summer.” The lyricism is pretty decent, touching on similar ideas of familiarity versus change in a local sort of setting (though it’s named after a diner on Sunset Boulevard) without being to harsh at any point. What really makes this song a sonic leap forward for Henley is the arrangement that Randy Newman provides on the synthesizers. Once the last hook is completed, the whole song turns into a glorious '80s electronic vamp out, keyboards swirling and crashing, painting a two-edged sword with their slickly sinister tone as effectively as Henley does lyrically.
The songs that really make this album interesting are the cheesy bad ones. “Man on a Mission” and “You’re Not Drinking Enough,” the album’s third and fourth songs, are both well constructed and brutally crappy. It seems like Henley is singing the kinds of songs people expect to be coming from his post-Eagles body rather than ones that actually contribute constructively to the album’s peculiar exploratory conservative feel. Or, taken as pastiche, they do exactly that; their trite pop feel is amplified and imbued with darkness when held up beside songs with a similar groove, like “All She Wants to Do is Dance,” whose infectious indictment of political ambivalence makes “Man on a Mission” seem like a joke about itself that the listener is not necessarily supposed to be in on. Maybe Henley isn’t even in on it. That possibility is what makes Building the Perfect Beast a beautifully dated expression of disquiet and uncertainty that can’t help but provoke thought the more you listen to it.
Longstreth’s The Getty Address is exactly the same way, except that the music couldn’t be more different. One of the first questions artists get asked is “Who are your influences?” With many bands it’s incredibly easy to tell (Vampire Weekend have their heads so far up 1986 Paul Simon’s ass that it’s a wonder Ezra Koenig’s voice can be heard), but in this case you would never, ever know by listening to Dirty Projectors that Longstreth is into the Eagles. Even if I’m making way too much of this peculiar connection (Tequila Sunrise = Temecula Sunrise?), it still illustrates a greater point. As an artist of any kind, every piece of other art you consume influences and directs your current artistic production. This is a not a lofty statement. We are all artists, every day, in everything we do and we’re constantly helping to paint each others’ pictures, write each others’ songs and place each others’ dead sharks in massive tanks of formaldehyde.
It is precisely for this reason that a weird prog-ish band like Dirty Projectors can be affected and changed by seemingly cheesy country rock. We are all singing the same song despite the when and where. It is verisimilitudinous (BOOSH) to say that we can only express ourselves; we express each other and everything without choosing to do so or even necessarily knowing that we are doing it.
