Happy 59th Birthday (Texan) Don Henley

When I bought a CD player 20 years ago, Building the Perfect Beast was the second disc I ever got to replace the cassette I had. It’s still his best solo album in my opinion and it put me on a big Eagles kick during my senior year in high school. In college, many people in Alternative circles considered him to be part of the old guard so he wasn’t cool. He really lost me when he had Axl Rose on his third solo record (blech!). But it’s pretty easy to dislike his material when most radio stations only play “Dirty Laundry” or “Boys of Summer. Recently I had a reconciliation with the Eagles and Don’s material, mainly by avoiding the allegedly music-based radio stations in Austin. Last year I also bought one of the only 20,000 copies of a special boxed set containing all the Eagles’ remastered studio albums. This let me rediscover and enjoy the less-played tracks, namely “On the Border” and “Wasted Time.” He and Glenn Frey wrote some of the best Pop music of the Seventies that I personally feel has never been replicated. It’s not a wonder why their first greatest hits compilation is one of the ten best selling records of all times, somewhere around 20 million copies.