Don Henley anchored the Eagles as the band’s drummer, frequent frontman, and co-leader. He wrote and sang many of their biggest songs — Hotel California, Desperado, The Long Run, Best of My Love, Life in the Fast Lane, One of These Nights were among his signatures, classic rock staples all — but he also found considerable success on his own in the ’80s following the group’s disbandment. He established a distinctive, flinty voice right out the gate with Dirty Laundry, the Top 10 hit from his 1982 solo debut I Can’t Stand Still, but 1984’s Building the Perfect Beast was a blockbuster, aided by the chilly, stylish MTV hit Boys of Summer. Three other singles were pulled from the record — the Top 10 All She Wants to Do Is Dance, followed by the Top 40 Not Enough Love in the World and Sunset Grill, all arriving in 1985 — and he then labored on his third record, 1989’s The End of the Innocence. Although this didn’t have as many Top 40 hits — the title track reached eight, followed by The Last Worthless Evening and The Heart of the Matter, both peaking at 21 — it was a bigger hit, going platinum six times, but after it ran its cycle, Henley decided to turn his attention to reuniting the Eagles in 1994, a project that kept him busy off and on for the next two years. His solo albums slowed — he released Inside Job in 2000, 11 years after The End of the Innocence, and then took 15 years to record Cass County, his return to country-rock roots — but he was never out of the spotlight thanks to ongoing work from the Eagles.
Born on July 22, 1947 in Gilmer, Texas, Don Henley was raised in Linden, a small town in Cass County, Texas. His parents — his WWII veteran father ran an auto parts business, his mother taught — instilled a love of music into him at an early age but despite having some piano lessons, he didn’t take to playing music as a child. Henley instead was drawn to football and he played into high school, when he suffered an injury that led him to switch over to the marching band. There, he picked up drums and he took to it quickly, next playing in a group called the Four Speeds with his guitarist friend Richard Bowden. Soon, the band switched its name to Shiloh and the group was a going concern throughout high school but Henley put his music career on the back burner once he attended college. He spent a year at Stephen F. Austin University before transferring to North Texas State University, where he was an English literature major. Henley spent three semesters at North Texas State before returning home to Linden to attend to his ailing father and, while he was there, he began playing with Shiloh again. In 1968, Kenny Rogers — who was then riding high after the Top 10 success of 1967’s Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) — caught a Shiloh show and encouraged the band to head out to Los Angeles to take a shot at the big time.
Once out in Los Angeles, Shiloh recorded an eponymous album for the independent imprint Amos in 1970, but the bigger breakthrough for Henley arrived when he met guitarist Glenn Frey, a native of Royal Oak, Michigan who had also recently relocated to L.A. and released an album on Amos. Singer Linda Ronstadt contracted Frey to assemble a touring band, so he asked Henley to join him, along with guitarist Bernie Leadon and bassist Randy Meisner, and this quartet supported the singer just once — at a July 1971 show at Disneyland — but they did back Ronstadt on her self-titled 1972 album. Before that album was released, this quartet became the Eagles, signing a deal with David Geffen’s Asylum Records.