The year 1984 was a watershed in pop music. The stars who’d made it big the previous decade had to embrace new instruments and MTV or risk being left behind.
Don Henley was stuck.
It was the fall of 1983, and the former Eagles star was cruising down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, listening to a working tape of a tune for his second solo album. While struggling for words to one section, he glanced to the left lane and saw a gold Cadillac Seville with a curious decoration: a Grateful Dead decal.
That image went right into the song, “The Boys of Summer,” a synthesizer-bathed memoir of lost love that Henley delivered with the kind of cutting, resonant zinger that was the signature of all his best Eagles lyrics:
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”
“It was an odd juxtaposition, to see a Deadhead sticker on a car that is associated with conservatism,” Henley recalled in a recent interview. “To me, it was a symbol of changing times.”
The music had changed too. Henley was far from alone as an A-list 1970s rocker who had arrived in the ’80s to find a music scene transformed in sound and vision, now driven by pop singles and buzzing with electronics. The hallmarks of mainstream ’70s rock — long guitar solos, bushy sideburns — were out. Synthesizers, drum machines and stylized, eye-popping music videos were in.
In most tellings of pop music history, the 1980s were primarily the springboard for a fresh crop of stars like Madonna, Prince and Duran Duran, who embraced and defined the flashy artifice of the MTV age. But the new era also had a powerful impact on the generation that preceded it. For rock’s older guard, even those like Henley, who had scaled the heights of fame, the emergence of a new order in pop was a kind of evolutionary event, and its implicit challenge was clear: Adapt or be left behind.
“The ’80s ushered in a whole new paradigm,” Henley said. “We all sort of had to get with the program. Some people got with the program, and some didn’t.”
Lots did. And those who did it well often found their careers reborn. ZZ Top, Genesis, David Bowie, Yes, Golden Earring, Stevie Nicks, Van Halen, even Bruce Springsteen — they all seized on the changes, infusing their songs with new tech and embracing the dramatic potential of music videos. Sometimes leaders, sometimes followers, they each found ways to compete in the new marketplace of pop.
“Everybody wanted to sound more modern,” said Trevor Horn, who produced key ’80s albums by Yes, Grace Jones and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. “And drum machines and synths sounded more modern.”
FOR “BUILDING THE PERFECT BEAST,” the 1984 album that featured “The Boys of Summer,” Henley gathered a wide pool of collaborators, like Mike Campbell, the guitarist in Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and Danny Kortchmar, a well-traveled session guitarist and songwriter. The studio was a playground of newfangled gear, like a Linn drum machine and the E-mu Emulator, an early sampling synth that ran on floppy disks.
That environment sparked experimentation that might never have happened in a guitar-centric Eagles session. Many of the songs originated with musicians tinkering with backing tracks; “The Boys of Summer,” which began as a Campbell demo, floats in layers of breathy keyboards and mechanical claps.
“I was glad to be doing something different, and something that didn’t really sound like an Eagles record,” Henley said. “I wanted to establish some kind of sound that was my own.”
ZZ Top, with its 1983 album “Eliminator,” went for an almost total transformation. For most of the ’70s, it had been the epitome of a good-time Texas blues-rock band, with musky grooves led by the virtuosic guitarist Billy Gibbons that had earned the trio a solid stance on rock radio yet afforded them minimal access to the larger pop audience. That changed dramatically with “Eliminator,” whose hits rode fast on a chrome chassis of drum machines — as on “Gimme All Your Lovin’” — and pulsating synthesizers, which duel with Gibbons’s guitar at the start of “Legs.” In music videos that ran in constant rotation on MTV, the members became almost vaudevillian characters, with hillbilly beards and fur-lined, twirling guitars.
In a phone interview from his home in Las Vegas — where workers were inlaying a floor decoration in the shape of a guitar — Gibbons said the seeds of the band’s rebirth had been planted during a long post-tour hiatus in the late ’70s. Hanging out in London, Gibbons was inspired by the energy and scrappy ingenuity of the punk scene. He also observed that pop listeners had come to expect the rigid tempos that dance producers could engineer with metronomic perfection but that few human percussionists could match.
“Up until the drum machine,” Gibbons said, “you were stuck with a human being attempting to have a good enough muscle memory to keep the damn beat straight!”
The precise genesis of “Eliminator” is hidden behind conflicting stories. According to Gibbons, he was the first member of the band to arrive at the studio in Memphis and, with the help of the band’s longtime engineer, Terry Manning, began tinkering with a drum machine. That device, he said, offered “trustability and repeatability” with the beat, fulfilling his key demand: “Are we going to be able to lay down a track that’s globally competitive?”
In Manning’s more detailed account, the group attempted sessions together. But after Gibbons found the results unsatisfactory, he and Manning would return to the studio late at night to “secretly” remake the tracks, using an Oberheim DMX drum machine and synthesizers — but with Gibbons’s full-throttled guitar as bluesy continuity.
“When we went in, we were trying to make a ZZ-Top-plays-on-their-album album,” Manning said. “I don’t think the intention in anyone’s mind was ever to make a drum-machine-synthesizer album.” But that is what resulted, and it went 10-times platinum and catapulted ZZ Top into global stardom.
The lines between rock and electronic pop were blurring. ZZ Top’s “Legs” was given an extended dance remix with a bubbling backing track that bore a resemblance to Duran Duran’s “Rio.” And Springsteen commissioned big-beat remixes for three “Born in the U.S.A.” tracks from Arthur Baker, the dance master who had produced “Planet Rock” for Afrika Bambaataa.
THINGS DID NOT always go smoothly. Frank Beard, ZZ Top’s drummer, was largely replaced by machines on “Eliminator” and, according to Manning, he stormed out of the sessions in anger. For “Building the Perfect Beast,” the forest of new equipment sometimes functioned as it should, sometimes didn’t. “It was madness,” Henley recalled.
And, this being a story of rock stars, ego clashes were never far away. Cue Yes, the English band that became heroes of 1970s progressive rock with long, eclectic compositions and dazzling instrumental skill. By the early ’80s, after a series of lineup changes, the group was in need of a new beginning.
Yes hired Horn — who had briefly been a member of the band — to produce what became its 1983 album “90125,” a sleek, high-tech reboot that would give the band its first, and only, No. 1 hit.
“I knew that Yes needed a hit single,” said Horn, the enfant terrible of avant-garde pop with his groups Art of Noise and the Buggles (“Video Killed the Radio Star”). “In the ’80s, everybody needed a hit single. Times had changed.”
That single was “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” with a sharp-edged guitar riff and a dreamy, irresistible hook. Horn was intrigued by the short synthesizer interjections on the demo version by Trevor Rabin, the group’s newest member; Horn used the Synclavier keyboard — then the cutting edge of studio tech — to turn them into jarring, multilayered sonic goblins that seem to leap from the shadows.
Horn insisted on programming the beat on a drum machine, which Alan White, Yes’s highly experienced drummer, would then recreate. Conflict over that approach nearly killed the song. Jon Anderson, the helium-voiced lead singer, recalled seeing Horn, Rabin and Chris Squire, the bassist, standing around a “silver big box” in the studio, endlessly tweaking the sound of a synthetic kick drum, while White idled with a cup of tea.
“I just said, ‘Guys, you’ve got Alan White outside, one of the best drummers in the world, and you’re messing around with a drum machine.’” Anderson left, but returned the next day to find the same scene. “I was sick and tired of that bloody machine,” he recalled in a video interview, still shaking his head in exasperation.
One day, Horn said, the band told him they would not move forward with “Owner of a Lonely Heart”; the drum programming was just too much. “I threw myself on the floor and I pulled at their trouser legs,” Horn recalled. “‘You’ve got to do it. Let me program it. Please, please, please! You’ll ruin my career!’”
In some ways, “90125” was a clean break for Yes, a sharp turn into radio-ready pop. But in retrospect it was more of a face-lift than a total rebuild. The band had been using synthesizers since the early ’70s, and the jump cuts and oddball sound effects on “Owner of a Lonely Heart” are reminiscent of “Roundabout,” the band’s wildly inventive eight-minute prog odyssey from 1971.
But the changes worked. “Owner of a Lonely Heart” hit No. 1, and “90125” went triple platinum, with a world tour that Anderson said was like a real-life version of “This Is Spinal Tap,” the classic mockumentary of rock-star inanity. “We were super-duper stars,” Anderson said, “and I never laughed as much in my life.”
One listener who was paying close attention to Horn’s synthetic surgery was Nile Rodgers of Chic, one of the era’s most in-demand producers. He had already recorded “Let’s Dance” with David Bowie, perhaps rock’s greatest change agent, who, Rodgers recalled, once made a pointed request for a synthesized imitation of a classic electric piano rather than the real thing.
“When I did ‘Let’s Dance’ and wanted to put a Fender Rhodes on a song,” Rodgers said, “David said to me” — deep Bowie voice — “‘Nile, I want it to be a Fender Rhodes, but I don’t want it to be a Fender Rhodes.’”
The day after he first heard Yes’s “90125,” Rodgers said, he bought a Synclavier.
SYNTHESIZERS AND DRUM MACHINES could help generate a pop hit, but MTV was even more essential. The new channel, which began in 1981, had leveled music’s playing field, forcing every act to present a sharp visual identity, and compete against all the era’s newest stars.
For “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Yes made a spy-state horror story, common to the era (see Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”). ZZ Top, whose stage show had long involved some hammy showmanship, took to the format easily. “We’re all about a loud and good time,” Gibbons said. And in Van Halen’s “Jump,” Eddie Van Halen’s smiling prestidigitation and David Lee Roth’s slow-motion splits conveyed as much about the band’s appeal as the bright keyboard part.
Henley well understood the importance of videos, but, seeing himself as an introvert, bristled at the process. “There was competition from younger, prettier people,” he said.
But Henley hit the bull’s-eye with the black-and-white video for “The Boys of Summer,” directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino in a semi-surrealistic nod to the French New Wave; an unsmiling Henley is seen singing on the back of a truck, with wind blowing through his hair. It became an influential hit in its own right, and won video of the year at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards.
The video paralleled the mood of “Building the Perfect Beast”: coolly stylized, but with a mordant commentary that showed that Henley’s core songwriting approach had not changed since the days of “Hotel California” and “Life in the Fast Lane.”
“It’s always a balancing act, isn’t it?” Henley said. “You want to sell records, you want to be commercial, and at the same time you want to be artistic. It’s an uneasy marriage sometimes.”
Stan Lynch, the Heartbreakers drummer who was a producer on the album, recalled the vibe of the sessions as one of excitement, of seeing what they could get away with. “I didn’t smell any desperation,” Lynch said. “What I smelled in the room was open-mindedness. Curiosity. There was a sense of like, ‘That should get their attention.’”
To Henley, the sounds were primarily vehicles for his songwriting, and he returned to more traditional instruments on his next album, “The End of the Innocence” (1989).
“‘Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac,’” he said, considering the musicality of the lyric. “It has a certain kind of pop to it.”
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