Excerpts from “To The Limit: The Untold Story Of
The Eagles” by Marc Eliot 1998
... He [Henley] listened to his favorite albums and began to notice a certain sound floating to the surface, particularly in the records of Jackson Browne and James Taylor. He especially liked the approach of Browne’s backup band, the core of which was made up of guitarist David Lindley, drummer Russ Kunkel, bassist Lee Sklar, and guitarist-arranger Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar. Henley gradually focused on the contribution of Kortchmar, whose name went to the top of the list of possible collaborators.
Kortchmar grew up with the nickname Happy because, as he later remembered, “I was the most miserable kid you’ve ever seen in your life. I never smiled. I always wore black. My friends would see me in the summers going to the beach dressed in black. I grew up in Larchmont, which was only twenty minutes out of New York City but still very provincial. I couldn’t relate to much that was going on there until I heard rock and roll on the radio when I was seven or eight years old. I especially liked the blues, which is the first music I really got into, folk blues, country blues.”
Kortchmar had originally been a member of James
Taylor’s sixties band Flying Machine, which caught the attention of Peter
Asher, then the A&R representative for the Beatles’ fledging Apple label.
Asher eventually became Taylor’s manager and when both were in L.A., introduced
the singer and his band to his other major client, Linda Ronstadt, and also
good friend Jackson Browne, thus giving them entrée to the select inner circle
of Troubadour singers and songwriters.
Henley had met Kortchmar at the Troubadour front bar,
known him socially for years, and had recorded with almost everyone Kootch had:
Linda Ronstadt, Warren Zevon, and of course Glenn Frey, whom, Henley noticed,
Kootch had played with on No Fun Aloud. After thinking it over for a
couple of days, Henley decided to give Kortchmar a call, knowing he’d have to
wrest him away from Frey, Jackson Browne, and his own group Jo Mama.
As Henley suspected, his and Kortchmar’s musical taste
meshed, more so than their dark, implosive, somewhat insecure personalities.
The former made them the ideal team, the latter made it hard to actually get
anything done. They went into the recording studio, where they discovered they
both liked to stay high while they worked, these days by sharing a drink.
According to Henley, “Kootch and I were just guzzling scotch and vodka; we’d
record until three in the morning and then go to my house, sit up with bottles,
and tell each other how great we are, just to bolster our confidence.” He adds,
“He was easy to hang out with. We both had fire in our belly. He was just as
angry as I was, if not angrier. We hit it off right from the start. I really
liked him, and he really understood me. Plus, he was so talented and so
versatile. It was fortunate for me, if a bit slow moving.”
To move the project along, Kootch suggested to Henley
it might be a good idea to hire their mutual friend producer Greg Ladanyi, who
was responsible for many of the best recordings of Browne, Ronstadt, Taylor,
and Zevon.
Ladanyi recalled, “I was working with Danny
[Kortchmar] on something else, and we were a loose sort of team. Danny and I
had made a lot of records, starting I guess with Jackson’s Running on Empty,
which we recorded live, and for me, as an engineer, was an amazing
education. It’s where I figured out how to make records.
“What Kootch and I eventually did was to try to
capture an identifiable L.A. sound. What we captured on record with Jackson,
James, Linda, and Warren was what everybody meant when they talked about L.A.
rock and roll, a group of players who played on everybody else’s records and
made a very clean sound with great, perfect-sounding harmonies.”
It took Henley a year to complete his first solo
album. Unlike Frey’s No Fun Aloud, for which no one at Asylum had been
able to muster any real enthusiasm, Henley’s I Can’t Stand Still generated
a solid buzz, especially one track, “Johnny Can’t Read,” which many at the
label considered a can’t miss hit single...
... Greg Ladanyi recalls, “’Johnny Can’t Read’ was the
combination of Kootch and Don – Kootch’s sound and Don’s lyrics. The song is
about a guy who goes to school but never gets the chance to excel. As a result,
he grows up stupid. We and the label were so excited about that cut we did in
four languages – French, Italian, English, and Spanish...
... “I think he [Henley] had something to prove, or
felt he did, going solo. That first album was really a collaboration among all
three of us, Don, Danny, and me. The idea was to make a record that was not
an Eagle record, that didn’t sound like an Eagle record. One of the
things we did to make it happen was to take Don off the drums. That instantly
gave the record another groove pocket that would not be familiar to people
listening to it, because Don as the drummer for the Eagles created their
groove. When that changes, everything
else is going to change.”
“Then there is the writing of Danny and Don together
as opposed to the writing of Don and Glenn. Completely different. Plus, Danny
is a much different guitar player than Glenn is, in both technique and style,
maybe a little funkier and more groove-oriented than Glenn, more of a
songwriter-guitar player.”
“All these things made Don’s music change, and also
made him sing differently.”
Henley described the difference in his singing on the
solo album this way: “Kootch and I always tried to put a song in a key that put
me in the top of my range, so I had to strain a little to get it. I don’t like
relaxed vocals. My voice changes a lot while I’m warming up. It confuses
recording engineers a lot, who go around trying to fix things.”
He recalled the methodology they used for all three
albums they would work on together this way: “Kootch would do most of the track
in his studio. He either played or programmed every instrument. I wanted to do
it that way because of the sound quality, almost like a demo. You lose some of
that in a regular studio. I’d been programmed to think you have to record in a
big studio for sound quality and fidelity and all that, but I’m not necessarily
sure that’s true. These recordings Kootch made in his own setup, along with
Steve Porcaro, sounded great to me.” ...
... The Henley-Kortchmar-Ladanyi-produced album
[Building the Perfect Beast 1984] sold more than two million units in its
initial release, went to number thirteen on the charts, and received great
reviews from the very same critics who had always put down or dismissed the
music of the Eagles.
...The album yielded a string of follow-up hits,
including “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” at number nine, the gorgeous “Not
Enough Love in the World” number thirty-four, and the melancholic,
metaphor-heavy Sunset Grill,” the title the name of a favorite Henley Hollywood
hamburger joint, whose hardworking owner reminded him of his own father, number
twenty-two.
Kortchmar described “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” as “a song about the ultimate Ugly American couple. All she wants to do is dance, and him, all he wants to do is buy everyone off and throw money at the problem. A nasty, disgusting groove is what I was looking for, and when I found it I almost jumped a mile in the air. It was four in the morning, I called Don and woke him up. Which I’ve been guilty of doing in the past. “That’s great,” he said, “Can we go to sleep now?”...
... At the same time, Henley contributed a song to the
sound track for the movie Vision Quest with the unlikely title of “She’s
on the Zoom”. According to Danny Kortchmar, “There was an album on Folkways
Records called Innerviews by some old blues cats from Chicago. At one
point someone asks someone what happened to Little Walter, the great blues
harmonica player, and he says, ‘Well, he was kilt “on the zoom”’ which means
nobody knows how he was killed, I just loved that expression. I told Don, and
it became the title of a song for the Vision Quest album.”
“She’s on the Zoom” reached number eleven and although a legitimate hit, was buried by the airplay Frey’s much more popular hit singles received, Henley nevertheless remained the critical favorite, and in March 1986 , he won a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance for “The Boys of Summer”...
... In addition to “The Heart of the Matter,” which
was a huge hit and remains a perennial on FM adult contemporary stations, The
End of the Innocence [1989] yielded several additional chart singles,
including “I Will Not Go Quietly”, “New York Minute”, “and “The Last Worthless
Evening”.
Still, the price of personal expression continued to
take its toll on Henley’s friends. Greg Ladanyi recalls, “The End of the
Innocence “ is a different-sounding album [than Henley’s first two solo
efforts]. Part of that I can attribute to my not being there. That mostly had
to do with time. He was just taking too long with the album. The originally
planned length of time that I was prepared to spend on it just kind of came and
went. A lot of things were happening in all our personal lives, and at one
point, it became a matter of, well, maybe you should go your own way on this.
That was Don’s response when Danny and I wanted to be paid a little bit more
money to continue. He wasn’t happy about it. His point of view was that this
wasn’t about money, it was about the work, and anyway we had points on the
record and were going to ‘make millions’. All fine and good, we told him, but
what do we do now?”
“About three days later we got an unofficial call from
Irving [Azoff]. Irving said that Don didn’t feel he could go on working with
Danny and me. Eventually, Danny and Don did get back together to finish the
album. I think Danny’s involvement in the writing of it was so deep, it was a
little too difficult for Don to walk away. But with me, that apparently wasn’t
the case”.
Says Henley: “It had been okay for a while, but again,
[with] drugs, drink and our own personalities... after a while there was nobody
flying the plane. From the first album, we needed one guy to be straight. By this
time, I had for the most part phased drugs out, and making an album became a
much more enjoyable experience. I no longer had to depend on drugs or anything
else to give me a false confidence. By the time we had gotten halfway through
my second album, we had cleaned up the act quite a bit. When I made The End
of The Innocence I was pretty much drug free.”
And alone once more...