Andrew Sherman
Audio By Carbonatix
The dust from the initial collapse of the Eagles was still settling when Don Henley released his debut solo album in 1982.
I Can’t Stand Still produced a top-10 hit in the form of “Dirty Laundry,” but it sold just over half a million copies. (Ironically, his former Eagles bandmate and co-writer, Glenn Frey, also released a solo debut, No Fun Aloud, in 1982 – it, too, sold a little over 500,000 copies and spawned a top-20 single, “The One You Love.” Together, it seems they’re platinum; apart, only gold.)
With his second solo record, the man from Linden hit it big. Building the Perfect Beast, released 40 years ago on Nov. 19, is the record that propelled him through much of the 1980s – he would not follow it up until five years later, in 1989 – delivering some of his most indelible hits (“The Boys of Summer,” “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” and “Sunset Grill,” among others) and marking him as a consequential solo artist fully apart from the band that first brought him fame.
To mark the 40th anniversary of its release, Rhino Records released a newly remastered, two-LP set of Beast on 180-gram vinyl on Nov. 15. This will be followed by vinyl reissues of Still and his 2015 solo LP, Cass County, on Nov. 22.
The reissue of Beast, remastered from the original analog tapes, features the track “A Month of Sundays” for the first time on vinyl. All prior releases of the song were available only on the CD, cassette or digital versions.
Although Henley had met success on his first solo foray, Beast is where the chart-dominating and award-accumulating Henley of the 1980s fully took hold.
He wasn’t doing anything differently from what he was doing at the twilight of Eagles 1.0 or on Still. But here, it’s the synthesis of the disparate pieces – not least of which is Henley’s evocative lyrics brought to life by a murderer’s row of musicians (Lindsey Buckingham, Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, David Paich, Danny Kortchmar, Steve Porcaro, Pino Palladino, Charlie Sexton, Jim Keltner, Patty Smyth, Waddy Wachtel, Belinda Carlisle – oh, and Randy Newman – are just some of the artists who contributed) – that catapulted Beast to multiplatinum status.
That ability to stitch together so many different contributions from so many different artists whose own sensibilities are, put mildly, not exactly tightly aligned with Henley’s own is remarkable. Particularly listening to now-classic tracks such as “The Boys of Summer,” “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” or the epic “Sunset Grill” is to behold cohesive, textured work that feels authored by a singular entity, not a multitude of voices struggling to unify.
To hear Henley tell it at the time, the breakthrough could also be attributed to his, well, loosening up a little.
“I have learned, and I’m still learning, not to take all this quite so seriously. I mean the Eagles and rock ‘n’ roll in general and what it means in the scheme of things,” he told journalist and rock critic Bud Scoppa in 1986 for Record magazine. “It’s what I do and I love it, but it’s not my entire world anymore. I’m very thankful and thrilled about my new solo career, and I take my work deadly serious sometimes, and I do try really hard, I’m an overachiever. …
“So having been in the Eagles gives me a certain amount of comfort now, because I’ve done it once, so I don’t have quite as much to prove, especially after this album. I’m not quite as much of an angry young man, and I don’t have that “I’ll show you” attitude quite as much anymore. It helps, actually, it frees me, it opens my mind up to be more creative and not get bogged down in all the clutter and hoopla and crap that surrounds any rock ‘n’ roll career.”
Contemporary critics embraced Beast as a sterling showcase for Henley’s strengths.
“Building the Perfect Beast is a meticulously crafted and programmed set of songs about love and politics,” Kurt Loder wrote in Rolling Stone. “The first side is given to personal reflections on love and loss … side two is more issue-oriented, tackling subjects from genetic engineering … to America’s reckless foreign policy.”
“This one makes you listen,” wrote Robert Christgau in his Consumer Guide. “Its abrupt shapes and electro/symphonic textures never whisper Eagles remake.”
Beast, which marked the apex of Henley’s infatuation with synth-driven rock music, ultimately sold more than 3 million copies in the U.S. alone, and each of its four singles cracked the top 40 of Billboard‘s Hot 100. “The Boys of Summer” earned him a Grammy for best male rock vocal performance the following year.
The follow-up to Beast, 1989’s The End of the Innocence, shifted Henley’s solo career to another level altogether: 6 million copies sold, another Grammy and five hit singles. Innocence also marked the beginning of his turn, as a solo artist, toward the folk and country sounds he first embraced as a member of the Eagles.
He eventually put aside his differences with his Eagles bandmates, and the band reunited in 1993, releasing the Hell Freezes Over live album the next year.
The reunion proved durable – apart from lawsuits from Don Felder and a brief pause after Glenn Frey’s death in 2016. The Eagles have continued to tour extensively since releasing Long Road Out of Eden in 2007 and are currently situated at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
There’s a reason the songs on Building the Perfect Beast are as beloved now as they were upon release – what the album illustrated, as did the Eagles’ catalog before it and his subsequent solo work, is that Don Henley, more than many of his peers, excels at discerning the currents propelling rock and pop music forward, tapping into them and finding enormous success with the results.
