100 Best Albums of the Eighties

73. Don Henley, ‘Building the Perfect Beast’

The Seventies were the favored habitat of the Eagles, whose tales of “livin’ it up at the Hotel California” vaulted the West Coast rockers to superstardom. In the wake of their unannounced breakup around the turn of the decade, the individual members faced the Eighties with a much less certain hold on their audience. While his band mates ”” especially his erstwhile writing partner, Glenn Frey ”” have steered a safe, commercial course, Don Henley has written and recorded songs with a sociopolitical conscience, working at a painstaking pace. He has made only three solo albums in this decade.

Building the Perfect Beast is a meticulously crafted and programmed set of songs about love and politics. The first side is given to personal reflections on love and loss, such as the wistful, gorgeous “Boys of Summer.” Side two is more issue oriented, tackling subjects from genetic engineering (“Building the Perfect Beast”) to America’s reckless foreign policy (“All She Wants to Do Is Dance”). The album’s longest and most ambitious piece, “Sunset Grill,” describes in disturbingly vivid images a character’s sense of entrapment in an evil, convulsive metropolis: “You see a lot more meanness in the city/It’s the kind that eats you up inside/Hard to come away with anything that feels like dignity.”

Henley’s collaborator is guitarist Danny Kortchmar, who has also accompanied James Taylor and Jackson Browne. Kortchmar wrote or co-wrote nine of the ten compositions on Building the Perfect Beast. The arrangements are more varied and generally edgier than the Eagles’ easy-rolling songs ”” a development consistent with Henley’s growing politicization.

“Maybe what I’m trying to do is find a purpose for being in the music business,” he told Rolling Stone in 1985. “I’m trying to make people think a little bit and be aware of things. Maybe rock & roll is not the vehicle for this sort of thing ”” but I don’t see why it can’t be.”