Don Henley

Don Henley – “The Boys Of Summer”

(45 giri, 1984, dall’Lp “Building The Perfect Beast”)

Prologue

In the long history of “famous rejects” — songs turned down by one artist that, passed on to another, became smash hits — this song deserves a place of real prominence, having been turned down by the very man who would have been its perfect interpreter: Tom Petty. And to think it had been handed to him on a silver platter by none other than his own right-hand man, Mike Campbell. Tinkering with a LinnDrum machine, the Heartbreakers' longtime guitarist had sketched out a strange sonic alchemy: “I stayed up all night programming tambourines, handclaps and snares,” he recalled, “I put together a little pattern, then that keyboard melody line came to me.” With guitar and bass added, a week later he played the demo for Petty — but failed to win him over.

In partial “defence” of the blond rocker from Gainesville, it should be noted that the instrumental demo he was played differed substantially from the final version: a different key, a different chord progression in the refrain, and a different solo in the ending; on top of that, it lacked the lyrics that would go on to become integral to the song's success. So Petty and his producer, Jimmy Iovine, busy at the time with the “Southern Accents” sessions, turned it down. If anything, a bit more of the blame falls on Iovine, who, after initially dismissing it as sounding “too jazzy,” chose not to bring it back to Petty in its final form, instead helping Campbell get it into the hands of the man who would become its definitive author — and the true beneficiary of this whole story. And he's no ordinary musician: one of the finest drummer/vocalists in rock history, at the helm of one of the most successful bands of all time: Don Henley of Eagles. And, as fate would have it, one day Campbell and Petty were driving to listen to a mix of their own track “Don't Come Around Here No More” when they turned on the radio — only to hear Don Henley's voice singing the very demo Tom had rejected just days earlier! Campbell quickly changed the station, worried it might upset his friend, but another station was playing it too. In the end, Petty was deeply struck by the song and, naturally, kicked himself for having passed on it.

A bridge between two decades

The warm voice behind “One Of These Nights” and “Hotel California” could hardly believe his luck. All it took was writing the lyrics, working with producer Danny Kortchmar to finalise the arrangement by changing the key, and having Campbell rework the final guitar solo, to end up with a killer single — practically perfect for launching his second solo album, “Building The Perfect Beast”. No matter if the title, “The Boys Of Summer”, seemed a bit out of season in that October of 1984. If anything, the feeling the song gave off was precisely that classic end-of-summer melancholy, the kind that sets in when the sunny days and fleeting holiday romances give way to the disenchantment of returning to the autumn routine, with its rigid rhythms and unavoidable responsibilities.

Transition, then, is the key word. But in a twofold sense: while Henley, with Eagles, had been one of the great protagonists of seventies rock, “The Boys Of Summer” served as the perfect link between the classic rock of the '70s and the new sonic sensibilities of the 1980s, synth-pop first and foremost. With that evocative, dreamlike mood even reawakening a touch of sixties Californian enchantment straight out of the Beach Boys playbook.

Born as an odd bit of sonic alchemy, “The Boys Of Summer” remains just that even in its final form, only now every piece of the puzzle magically falls into place. It's there from the masterful intro onward: sticks ticking away and a programmed electronic drum pattern, followed by a sequence of synthesizers (Oberheim OB-Xa), painting a dreamy, faintly uneasy atmosphere. The electric guitar, filtered and layered, gradually enters to flesh out the harmonic progression, while Henley's voice, recorded with a light touch of delay and reverb, stands out front and centre with a subdued, aching tone. Technically, the whole thing rests on an insistent riff, built on the 1-7-5 sequence devised by Campbell, laid over a VI-IV-V-IV harmonic progression. The refrain arrives like a ray of sunlight breaking over the horizon: dazzling, melodic and heart-achingly sad all at once: “But I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun/ You got your hair combed back and your sunglasses on, baby/ I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong/ After the boys of summer have gone”. With that key shift that disorients and enthrals. “Danny always pushed me to sing every song in the highest key possible,” Henley recalls, “He believed that way it would carry more emotion, more impact.” Then comes the other stroke of production genius, as naive as it is brilliant: the cries of seagulls on the shoreline, created using a Fender Stratocaster, acting as a prelude before the return of the bridge, the chorus, and Campbell's epic closing guitar solo.

Every sonic ingredient eventually falls into place, despite a LinnDrum memory glitch and a snapped analogue tape, which forced the engineers to splice it back together by hand with surgical precision. The result is a track that, as the American magazine Sound on Sound pointed out, is built on “a dynamic tension between the warmth of the human voice and the technological coldness of the electronic instrumentation, a hallmark of the finest pop-rock production of the 1980s.”

Add to that the contribution of the players involved: at Record One studios in Los Angeles, Henley assembled a group of top-tier musicians, including Danny Kortchmar on synths and guitars, Larry Klein on bass, Steve Porcaro on synthesizers, and Campbell himself on guitar. And a (not entirely) unexpected round of thanks goes to Pat Benatar, the great American rock singer who was riding high at the time on an incredible streak of four consecutive Grammys for “Best Female Rock Vocal Performance” from 1980 to 1983. Neil Giraldo, Pat's guitarist and husband, recounted that Henley showed up at the studio during the recording of “Love Is a Battlefield”, which had a fairly fast tempo, and asked if he could borrow that very tempo for “The Boys Of Summer”. Giraldo agreed, and on close listening, the similarities are certainly there.

The beach of eternal melancholy

And then there's that lyric, which nails us forever to that (Californian?) beach of eternal melancholy, leaving us endlessly aching over faded summers, lost loves and the passing years. It has nothing to do with Roger Kahn's 1972 baseball bestseller ("The Boys Of Summer"), but rather a direct link to a line of poetry: "Even though I'm a baseball fan, I'd never heard of that book," Henley would explain. "The inspiration came from a Dylan Thomas poem, which began with the line: 'I see the boys of summer in their ruin'."

Henley's lyric expresses a similar nostalgia, a sense of grief for lost innocence and youth, through the device of the season that is by definition fleeting, and the memory of a youthful love now faded and blurred, to the point of merging with a dream ("I never will forget those nights, I wonder if it was a dream"). Then, in the final verse, another flash of brilliance: "Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac". A line that manages to sum up the nostalgia and lost hope of an entire generation. "I was stuck on the bridge section; I couldn't find the words, or the melody," Henley would reveal. "One afternoon I was driving on Interstate 405 towards San Diego, blasting the demo tape of the song on the stereo, when a $21,000 Cadillac Seville went by – the status symbol of the conservative American middle class – full of guys with blue blazers, mohawks and grey trousers – and on its side there was this 'Deadhead' sticker from the Grateful Dead! It struck me immediately as something ironic, paradoxical, with a touch of nostalgia. And it went straight into the song."

As if the lyrics weren't enough, further evocative allure was added to the track by its gorgeous music video, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino and steeped in Nouvelle Vague atmospheres. Shot in black and white, the clip shows the song's protagonist at three different stages of life (first as a child, then as a young adult, and finally as a middle-aged man), always caught in the act of digging through memories of the past (matching the line "A little voice inside my head said don't look back, you can never look back"). The young Henley is played by Josh Paul, the girl by Audie England. At the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards, the video would win four awards, presented to Mondino by Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey: Video of the Year, Best Direction, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.

The icing on the cake for a hit that announced itself as "The Boys Of Summer": released as the lead single from the album "Building The Perfect Beast", it would climb to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and become Henley's biggest hit in the UK, reaching No. 12. While the Texan musician's solo debut ("I Can't Stand Still", 1982) had gone rather under the radar, the whole of "Building The Perfect Beast" would succeed in carving out an identity of its own, blending the instincts of American singer-songwriting with a production sound thoroughly updated to the standards of the era. Crowning an underrated career as a vocalist, the former Eagles drummer would go on to win the 1986 Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.

The legacy

But "The Boys Of Summer" is not your typical one-off Eighties hit. Its influence, in fact, has unfolded across the years in a far-reaching way, well beyond anyone's expectations. To begin with, there have been some curious covers, such as the one by Codeseven (1998), the dance-flavoured version by Dj Sammy (featuring singers Loona and Mel) from 2002, and the especially successful one by The Ataris in 2003, which updated the lyrics ("Deadhead sticker" became "Black Flag sticker") and reworked the arrangement in a pop-punk vein, before another surprising reinterpretation – this time in a pop guise – by Papercuts (2010). Other covers bear the names of Night Ranger, Show Of Hands, 3JS, A Balladeer, Bree Sharp, Sara Johnston, KT Tunstall, The Hooters, and the Norwegian quintet made up of Espen Lind, Kurt Nilsen, Alejandro Fuentes and Askil Holm.

But it's within the revivalist aesthetics of the 2000s that the song has found a new centrality, unexpectedly becoming one of the chief inspirations behind one of the most disorienting musical binges of recent times: hypnagogic pop. "A series of bedroom/basement musics that developed in the American underground," as Antonio Ciarletta and Giuliano Delli Paoli define it in OndaRock's special feature, "the sound of an imaginary, the sound that recontextualises the frayed, threadbare, hazy memory of an imaginary – the eighties imaginary, precisely. Music that bears witness to memories, to recollections of teenage summers spent around evening bonfires, blazing sunsets and episodes of 'Miami Vice' on TV. And in many cases these sounds, at once so familiar and so saccharine, turn out to be little short of irresistible. Among the acknowledged forerunners of the hypnagogic sound are the aforementioned Don Henley, the soundtracks of certain 80s blockbusters, and the Windham Hill school of new age. So not simply a calligraphic exhumation of the Eighties – the process that shaped the nu wave of the 2000s – but something different, one that draws memory itself into play."

After all, the particular tension between personal melancholy and collective imagery, mediated by synthetic yet emotionally charged sonorities, is one of the elements that made the track especially influential in this field. Perhaps it's no coincidence that "The Boys Of Summer" was also reissued in August 2013, and even made Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time (at No. 423).

For Don Henley, more than forty years on, it remains his signature song and one of the best he's ever written: "It's just another reminder that life is short, but very wide," he would sum up. A bittersweet fruit of a decade, the Eighties, which, in the end, was itself nothing more than one long summer of illusions and heartache. Until the abrupt return to reality.

Nobody on the road

Nobody on the beach

I feel it in the air

The summer’s out of reach

Empty lake, empty streets

The sun goes down alone

I'm driving by your house

Though I know you're not home

But I can see you

Your brown skin shinin’ in the sun

You got your hair combed back and your sunglasses on, baby

And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong

After the boys of summer have gone

I never will forget those nights

I wonder if it was a dream

Remember how you made me crazy?

Remember how I made you scream

Now I don’t understand what happened to our love

But babe, I’m gonna get you back

I’m gonna show you what I’m made of

I can see you

Your brown skin shinin’ in the sun

I see you walking real slow and you’re smilin’ at everyone

I can tell you my love for you will still be strong

After the boys of summer have gone

Out on the road today, I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac

A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t look back. You can never look back”

I thought I knew what love was

What did I know?

Those days are gone forever

I should just let them go but

I can see you

Your brown skin shinin’ in the sun

You got that top pulled down and that radio on, baby

And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong

After the boys of summer have gone

I can see you

Your brown skin shinin’ in the sun

You got that hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, baby

I can tell you my love for you will still be strong

After the boys of summer have gone

Ride the wave of great music

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26/04/2026