baAY-BE

Don Henley, “The Boys of Summer” | Building the Perfect Beast, 1984

Fans of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers will appreciate this: Guitarist Mike Campbell wrote and presented a rough draft of this song to Petty as they were producing what would be the band’s 1985 Southern Accents album. In tone, “The Boys of Summer” sounds like a match. But Southern Accents already had big hits to steer overarching themes, so Petty rejected it.

Campbell then brought the song across town – this was LA in the early ‘80s – to Eagles founding member Don Henley, who was writing his 1984 sophomore solo album, Building the Perfect Beast. From Campbell’s convertible-ride, urgent melody, Henley penned liminal lyrics of memory and sun and Wayfarers and breeze and beach and lost love. It captures not just that annual end-of-summer, leaves-in-the-pool regret, but it also reaches for that perpetual yearning caused by time experienced in linear fashion – always, always having to leave it all behind. The title comes from Roger Kahn’s opus on the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, and Kahn got it from the nostalgia-racked Dylan Thomas poem, “I see the boys of summer.”  

There are three “babies” (and one “babe”) in Henley’s “Boys.” He might never be known for his subtlety in vocal delivery, but they are each like a passing summer moment – upturned, vulnerable, gone.