Tunnel of Love

Tunnel of Love, Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone Magazine's #475

exile staff consensus: Top 1000 album

the breakdown:
1.5 cannons - , venerableseed, polchic, and eurowags
1.0 cannon - lenbarker and the angryyoungman

the essays:
11/15 @ 1:00 p.m. - Eurowags captures the general malaise all but one of us have had regarding Tunnel of Love. We all really wanted to like it; we really did.

11/13 @ 8:00 a.m. - It seems there is someone else who is not enamored by Tunnel of Love; the album is too reminiscent of the Colonial Park Mall food court.

11/11 - A dissenting view from Len Barker. If he didn't like Tunnel of Love than what will he say about Don Henley's contribution. We shudder to think.

11/9 - Jahidi Hoya counters the doubts (but then adds to them in the comment section of post 1!). Oh, Julianne, poor Julianne.

11/9 - In our last poll, Bowie beat Bruce by a 2 to 1 count. Anglophiles all of you! We now have two retrospective poll on the albums listened to thus far. One question positive one negative. Just look to your right and vote.

11/8 - I'm up first, wondering about the veracity of Bruce's personal Tunnel of Love. (Note that in less than 14 hours! Springsteen's diligent cyber-sleuths found and removed the embedded Tunnel of Love music video from this site. If you wish to watch the video follow this link to youtube.)

the introduction (done with Don Henley's End of the Innocence):
It's 1985 and two 70's classic rock heroes had just found staggering success on the MTV and with a new generation of fans.

Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. and its remarkable string of seven top 10 singles were ubiquitous on radio and television.

Don Henley's single, Boys of Summer, seemed to usher in an era of artistry to the fledgling video network. Its constant play and VMA Video of the Year only cemented this fact. So how did our heroes respond?

Both released albums adored by critics but met with modest comparative commercial success. Springsteen strayed from his usual themes of social and political despair and moved onto a personal vision of love while Henley moved away from love and towards a message of political and social despair. Neither recorded their next album with their familiar band; Bruce's minimalist tracks featured few E-Streeters and Don continued Eagle-less (but not Axl-less) for at least the time being.

But most importantly, on their album cover both artists beckon the listener longingly with steely glares, "I'm the more sensitive one." "No, I'M the more sensitive one!" Do we still like these albums? Or better yet, which one is the most sensitive.

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The End of the Innocence

The End of the Innocence, Don Henley, Rolling Stone Magazine's #389

exile staff consensus: Why is this on the list?

the breakdown:
1.5 cannons - angryyoungman
1.0 cannon - polchic, lenbarker, venerableseed, and eurowags

the essays:
11/19 @ 9:00 a.m. - Hold up. Wait a minute. Just when you thought it was over Len lends us another fitting tribute to the end of The End of the Innocence. Can he bring himself to listen to the album? Let's see.

11/17 @ 9:00 a.m. - A Don Henley supporter? Amazing! Even more amazing is that someone named the Angry Young Man is calling for an end to the hate.

11/14 @ 9:00 a.m. - Is this the end of The End of the Innocence? It's hard to believe how much discussion old Don has stirred up and at this point my post just feels like piling on.

11/13 @ 2:00 p.m. - The Ancient Scientist gives The End of the Innocence its just due.

11/12 @ 1:00 p.m. - Jahidi Hoya discusses his many memorable Don Henley concerts.

11/12 @ 8:00 a.m. - Newcomer JB is the first to capture the essence of the Walden Pond warrior's most acclaimed album.

the introduction (done with Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love):
It's 1985 and two 70's classic rock heroes had just found staggering success on the MTV and with a new generation of fans.

Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. and its remarkable string of seven top 10 singles were ubiquitous on radio and television.

Don Henley's single, Boys of Summer, seemed to usher in an era of artistry to the fledgling video network. Its constant play and VMA Video of the Year only cemented this fact. So how did our heroes respond?

Both released albums adored by critics but met with modest comparative commercial success. Springsteen strayed from his usual themes of social and political despair and moved onto a personal vision of love while Henley moved away from love and towards a message of political and social despair. Neither recorded their next album with their familiar band; Bruce's minimalist tracks featured few E-Streeters and Don continued Eagle-less (but not Axl-less) for at least the time being.

But most importantly, on their album cover both artists beckon the listener longingly with steely glares, "I'm the more sensitive one." "No, I'M the more sensitive one!" Do we still like these albums? Or better yet, which one is the most sensitive.

click here to
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Dan Henley & Pat Nebatar

I can relate to JB’s post on Don Henley’s End of the Innocence and how his pop culture point of reference to Walden has shifted from that album to Eric Cartman and South Park. I have long been unable to think of Don Henley without recalling a Beavis and Butthead episode in which they watched one of his videos, referring to him as “Dan” Henley throughout and discussing his legal problems due to molestation charges* and how those troubles had led to the break up of his marriage to Pat “Nebatar”. And I don’t feel bad about that, because that’s about how much respect I have for Dan.

The first and only time that I have ever heard this album was at summer camp, somewhere between ’89 and ’92. Some of my fellow counselors introduced me to some great bands over the years, but other guys listened to some real crap in the shack where we used to hang out. As you may have guessed, I would place this album in that latter category. In fact, it may have been the single worst album that anybody dared to play on that shared jam box for all four of those summers. It somehow manages to stand out in my mind as being even worse than M.C. Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em or Aerosmith’s Pump, both of which were both played ad nauseam. I remember being astonished when my fellow counselor played End of the Innocence, because I was unable to find any redeeming qualities. It was simultaneously too stale to be exciting, too predictable and stupid to be intriguing, and too trite to be moving.

In the process of reviewing albums for this blog, I have tried to re-listen to all of them in order to refresh my memory and perspective, but I cannot bring myself to listen to this POS again. This fact, that I cannot summon the strength to listen to this thing again after not having heard it for between 15 and 18 years, has me hoping that this is the worst album on Rolling Stone’s list.

I’m rethinking that statement about how much respect I have for Dan, because it makes it sound like I consider him to be on the same level as Beavis and Butthead and South Park, when I actually hold those cartoons in substantially higher esteem than I do him.

* See jahidi hoya’s response to Ancient Scientist’s review for elaboration; I had never gotten the reference but found it funny anyway, so it was great to learn the story behind it. click here to
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The End of the Henley Hating (but not the Boss Hating)

It was sort of my idea to do Tunnel of Love and The End of the Innocence together. At least it was my suggestion that Bruce has a Don Henley/Bruce Hornsby sound going on on Tunnel that prompted Kid Seed to put them up together. When I listened to Tunnel for the first time in years in preparation for this blog, I realized it didn't sound as much like Innocence as I had remembered. Mostly it's just the title track and Brilliant Disguise that really have that sound. So why did I always associate them in my mind for years?

Aside from the superficial similarities Kid Seed point out in the intro, I think it's because they both have a tone that's at once despondent and defiant. Tunnel's despair is more personal, while Innocence's is more societal, but that brooding quality is apparent in both. And also they're both totally full of shit.

The kicker though, is that while Innocence is a tight, smooth, well-crafted rock/pop time capsule of 1989, Tunnel is just, well...I don't think Len Barker and I see eye to eye on much musically. I mean, we like a lot of the same shit, but being a musician, I think Len probably has a lot broader interests than I do. But we're muy simpatico on Tunnel of Love. It stinks. There's no getting around it. I can't conceive what was going on in the minds of the RS voters who put Tunnel in the top 500. You can't call it Bruce's worst album ever, because he did release Human Touch, after all, but come on.

I'm probably even prepared to give Tunnel a bit more credit than Len, because I do pay attention to rock lyrics (in fact I think they're the most important part of the best rock music since rock & roll is basically our poetry) and the lyrics of certain tracks have the making of something sort of kind of halfway decent. Maybe.

On the other hand, I'm going to defend Innocence against all the haters on this blog. I most love its cohesiveness. It sounds like it was thought out and put together as a real album, as opposed to just a bunch of songs. The tracks flow into and build upon each other in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And how can anyone bitch about Axl's vocals? There's no song that was ever made worse by adding Axl Rose vocals. Now if only he would finish Chinese Democracy. click here to
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The End of the End of the Innocence

Listening to The End of the Innocence is an exercise in patience. Songs struggle to begin (the ten songs have 36-second average intro, three clock in at 50 seconds plus!) and they never, never finish (average song length 5:45). Is "The End of" part of the album's title Don Henley's sick joke?

It's not as if Don was alone in his excess. His list of co-conspirators is just as endless. Imagine them as the three concentric circles of Henley's late-eighties self-indulgent personality: condescending Hollywood liberals, fusion jazz musicians, and a crystal-using non-traditional (but sort of rootsy) spirituality. Overlap may occur.

Here's a truncated list: Axl Rose, Take 6, Patty Smyth, Melissa Etheridge, members of Toto, Stanley Jordan, Sheryl Crow, Bruce Hornsby, hell, just go to the wikipedia list. But take note the Maxine Waters listed there is NOT the Honorable Senator from California, although oddly that would make perfect sense.

Each song features a different set of this ridiculous cast of characters thusly making the album (as well as the unending songs themselves) a disconcerting roller coaster ride of hilarity all held together by Henley's preening vocals and third grader-on-coke-level insights. I'll make it short and just look at song 3, "I Will Not Go Quietly" co-chorused by Axl Rose.

It opens with a Sportscenter-intro-lame 15 seconds of Led-Zeppelin-esque drums and guitar which segues into a jangly wah wah guitar solo which is then backed by a building synthesizer wall of sound. We're now at 59 seconds which is where Don first chimes in and is swiftly backed up by a reverbing monstrosity of a synthesizer bass. And at this point there's just too much happening in the background for me to continue. This is what 128-track studios were made for. There must be two-dozen people playing on this song!

At 1:35 the chorus comes in with Don and Axl singing "Gonna Tear It Up/Gonna Tear Sh!t Up". And really I have yet to get any further. I giggle I laugh and I turn my mp3 player off and think "once I finish this next sentence I can delete this album forever." click here to
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End of the Innocence...

Dad rock.

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Last Worthless Evening

I have seen Don Henley in concert five different times. I thought each concert was amazing, but unfortunately the most lasting memory of he show usually had nothing to do with Mr. Henley.

Lake Compounce - Bristol, CT - The End of the Innocence Tour #1
I was a big fan of 'The End of the Innocence' and I was really looking forward to the show. I was also discovering the music of the Eagles at the same time so I was pretty excited. I had really good seats about 30 rows from the stage.

Shortly before the opening act came out (Edie Brickell and New Bohemians) a moment happened that dramatically changed the course of my life.

There was a flyer handed out to each customer as they walked into the venue. It was a flyer with descriptions of each act that was playing the same venue that summer. There was an article in there about the rituals and customs associated with the concert of a one-hit wonder named Jimmy Buffett. The article described grass skirts, Hawaiian shirts, heavy drinking, dancing like a shark and a sermon about getting drunk and screwing.

I showed the article to my sister and we agreed that we would see him in concert next time he was in town. The next day my sister gave me $20 to go out and buy the live album that was referenced in the article. A Parrothead was born.


Madison Square Garden - New York, NY - Benefit for Walden Woods
The benefit to raise money for Walden Woods had three acts. Up first was Bonnie Raitt. She put on one of the most boring live shows I have ever witnessed. The headliner was Don Henley. However, the reason I went to the show was the other performer of the evening... Jimmy Buffett. It actually ended up being my very first Jimmy Buffett show. As promised, my sister was with me. I was also able to convince my mother to join us as she also started to ejoy the 'Feeding Frenzy' live CD that my sister had financed earlier that year.

The Jimmy Buffett set absolutely stole the show. It was a party from beginning to end. By the end of the night I actually felt bad for Don Henley. He had to follow a man that lit up the Garden with tales of pirates, landsharks and margaritas. Hearing about some sort of desperado was a doomed exercise.


Lake Compounce - Bristol, CT - The End of the Innocence Tour #2
The opening act was Susanna Hoffs. She was the former lead singer of The Bangles. She was even more beautiful than when I first saw her on MTV in the 'Dance Like an Egyptian' video. She wore a short black dress, clearly playing into her sex appeal. At one point she decided to dedicate a song to a guy in the front few rows that was standing and dancing the whole time. It was a cover of 'Feel Like Makin' Love' by Bad Company. I am still jealous that she did not dedicate that to me.


Giants Stadium - East Rutherford, NJ - The Eagles
I brought my sister to the show. Looking back on it, I really should have waited to catch the show in a smaller venue. A stadium was not the best place for the more subtle sounds of this type of show.

The highlight of the show was Joe Walsh. He was amazing. He remembered that playing in a rock 'n roll band is supposed to be fun! The other guys on the stage all felt more like businessmen.


Madison Square Garden - New York, NY - Music to My Ears
This show had the single greatest concert lineup for any show I have ever attended. It was a benefit for Timothy White - a very well-respected rock journalist.

• Brian Wilson
• Jimmy Buffett
• Roger Waters
• James Taylor
• Shery Crow
• Don Henley
• Sting
• John Mellencamp

The best set of the night was without a question Roger Waters. He performed a new song in his set. A song that to my knowledge he has never released. Normally a new song in a set from a classic artist is a reason to run and get a beer. In this case, Roger Waters created something that was absolutely special and I experiened one of the most moving musical performances I have ever seen.

During "Comfortably Numb" he had a guest musician stand quietly at the microphone next to him. He was dressed in black and was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. It was not until he sang that I knew it was Don Henley. An absolutely amazing collaboration. It was my 5th time seeing Don Henley perform live and it was the first time that I walked out of one of his shows remembering one of his performances. click here to
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On second thought, maybe I will go quietly

I can't remember specifically, but I surely had moments in high school when I considered instigating a campaign to revive Transcendentalism to its mid-19th century height. I passed Brook Farm on my way to/from school, had swimm'd in the waters of the great pool in Concord, and thanks to my sophomore year American Lit class, I was well versed in Thoreau and Emerson. All the elements were in place to become a transparent eyeball and go live deliberately, following the beat of that different drummer and all that shizz. Naturally, I gravitated towards Don Henley's The End of the Innocence to aid my quest. I recall prying the jewel case free from its cardboard cocoon the day it arrived from Columbia House, assured that this album, my first ever mature record purchase, would usher me out of innocence as the title suggested. And so began a lifelong effort to suck the musical marrow out of every lyric.

My ambitions abated around track three. 'Is that really Axl Rose?', I wondered. W. Axl Rose on this super-serious-supposed-to-whisk-me-into-socially-conscious-adult-preppyhood record?

My new CD listening routine consisted of a blind listen first and then a second listen while reading the liner notes. "I Will Not Go Quietly" inspired my first ever mid-initial-listen liner note check. Sure enough, 'twas Axl screeching those background vocals. Edie Brickell, Melissa Etheridge, and Bruce Hornsby contributed to other tracks to make for a somewhat eclectic list of collaborators. (Edie Brickell was still cool back then prior to the Paul Simon brainwash. Hey whaddya know?!? Just wiki'd Edie Brickell and turns out she released a new album with the New Bohemians last year. I'll have to check it out.)

Don Henley became something of an adopted New Englander by vigorously supporting the Walden Woods project in the early '90s. Turn on the news any given night and there was Don giving a speech or making a pondside appearance. With commercial development around Walden Pond in check now and for the foreseeable future, Don Henley seems to have disappeared. My pop culture point of reference for Walden is now Eric Cartman from South Park. BEEFCAKE! BEEEFCAAAAAKE!!! click here to
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