One of the many, many great releases from that year was Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" from Building the Perfect Beast. The album has plenty of high points besides this single, although it's not as good as his 1982 debut, I Can't Stand Still. Henley was one of my two first musical heroes (along with Lindsey Buckingham), years before I discovered Springsteen, Prince and the fact that heroes eventually suck almost as much as having heroes (a lesson brought on by most of Henley's post-1984 material among other things)
The linchpin of the single is, of course, the line "Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac", a line so indelibly brilliant, it even eclipses the fact that he needed to explain it in the following line. I invite any of you reading this to produce a line as good or better than that.
Now, in 2003, a band called The Ataris covered the song, changing the key line to "...a Black Flag sticker on a Cadillac", which doesn't work the same for me. But what it does achieve is this and follow me 'round the horn here:
- Don Henley rises to fame in a band called the Eagles. Said band comes to represent for many the corporatization of rock music, leading those many to become...
- ...punk rockers! Punk goes through many phases and guises over 15 years until Nirvana breaks through, paving the way for the recombinant bastard called (by me, at least) "corporate punk", epitomized by bands like, well, The Ataris, who pay homage to Don Henley, instead of, I don't know, maybe Joe Strummer, Joey Ramone or even John Lydon.
- Kurt Cobain wonders if he should have pulled the trigger instead of continuing on in the path he opened with Unplugged in New York, which was in 1994 as "punk as fuck" as "punk as fuck" got.
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