Don Henley - Building the Perfect Beast

In the fall of '84 two albums dropped that were huge for me. Toto's maligned Isolation, and Don Henley's Building the Perfect Beast. Toto's album will be another day but today I'm sitting in the basement with the music on and pretending in twenty one again and discovering the album for the first time. David and Steve from Toto show up here quite a bit which I always thought was cool.

I'd heard "Boys of Summer" on the radio and that song was so good, and the fact I had a Grateful Dead sticker on my car at the time only added to the fun. I always think of the album as being excellent, but honestly the two songs I really associate with the album are the aforementioned "Boys of Summer" and "Sunset Grill" ... I try not to think about "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" because I still think it's a giant musical turd.

I still remember pouring over the credits while listening to the album, and "Boys of Summer" drove me nuts at the time because Don's name wasn't there as the drummer. There was a little line about Mike Campbell providing percussion but Mike was a guitar player ... what was going on? Of course as time went on I'd figure out that Mike had programmed the LinnDrum for the song. Mystery solved.

What I'd forgotten was how much of the album was borderline filler ... at least to me. The songs were okay, and they felt like the songs on his debut but they were just sort of "meh" while waiting for the ghood stuff to come on.

Of course that's about as uncharitable as I get, considering when things got good, they got real good real quick. A song like "You're Not Drinking Enough" still gets me, it feels like the musical bookend to "Long Way Home" from I Can't Stand Still a couple years earlier Which made sense as Danny Kortchmar helped produced both songs. Since I'm on the subject the entire album was produced by Danny and Greg Ladany which really did help with consistency.

Side two opens with "Building the Perfect Beast" and all of a sudden there's a tonal shift. It's also a song that never clicked for me, and hearing Don sing at the absolute ceiling of his range is more irritating than impressive. It only got worse from there with "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" a song so clunky and awkward it baffles me to this day how this was a top ten hit.

However, it was "Sunset Grill" that erased any ill will. The song was co-written by Ben Tench (you know Benmont Tench, another Tom Petty guy) and while I have to admit some of the programmed sounds are a bit dated here and there, the song itself is still so good. Pino Palladino's fretless bass work elevates the whole song. Even now listening to this, all I can think of is how good this album is ... even the bits I don't care for.

Weird.

"Driving with your Eyes Closed" was another Danny Kortchmar special that sounded like a variation of "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" but it wasn't as irritating. I suppose it was a sound they were going for. After all the album's closer "Land of the Living" is more of the same so yeah it was pretty deliberate.

This was the album that truly established Don as a solo artist.

When it was good it was so good, but I was surprised at how much of the album wasn't that enjoyable. He did build a beast, it just wasn't perfect.