Henley Forgives--But Doesn’t Forget : The former-Eagle still stumps for social consciousness with ‘The End of Innocence’

Don Henley is most proud right now of “The Heart of the Matter,” the tender, regretful ballad that closes his latest album. It’s a song of the balm that eases the human soul: forgiveness. He sings of mistakes and of learning to love and let go of the hurt, concluding, “You keep carryin’ that anger, it’ll eat you up inside.” In this song, the veteran singer/songwriter, who topped the charts throughout the ‘70s with the Eagles and has bested himself artistically in the ‘80s as a solo artist, sounds like a Ticked Young Man who at 42 has resolved to obsess less and exorcise his demons.

Nevertheless, this is not a story about the mellowing of Don Henley.

Not when he sees a world full of jingoistic presidents, intolerant fundamentalists, carnivorous journalists, media-hungry opportunists, environment spoilers, hungry land developers, bad architects, Joe Walsh and Oliver North still on the loose.

“Fanaticism runs rampant in this country today, and it frightens me, frankly,” said a flu-stricken, conscience-baring Henley. The singer was sipping mineral water and gnawing on his favorite peeves at his Malibu ranch between tour stops (which includes shows Tuesday through Thursday at the Universal Amphitheatre, Saturday at the Santa Barbara County Bowl and Oct. 1 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre).

“I just read in the paper again about how some school system somewhere banned ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ Shades of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ It looks like we’re going back to the Dark Ages, a time of superstition and fear. Racism is rearing its ugly head again. Ignorance and superstition are flourishing.”

Henley had just begun to get going. It was the sun and the illness that had turned his face ruddy, but one can imagine it’s also the wellspring of indignation at a country he sees idling in reverse.

“I still get fan mail from kids who ask me if it’s true if ‘Hotel California’ is really a satanic album and if there is really a picture of Satan and/or (Satanist) Anton LaVey on the inside cover,” he said. “That was a rumor that was started by some fundamentalist idiot preacher in the South, who actually put it in a book as if it were fact. If I could find him I would sue his brains out. . . . There are kids who believe this stuff, and it upsets me.

“That’s what the song ‘Little Tin God’ is about too: Don’t be a follower, don’t be a sheep, don’t go along with the status quo, don’t believe everything you read, don’t worship preachers or rock stars or anybody else. That is the message of this album, if anything.

“I have been accused of being a cynic and a curmudgeon and a misogynist and all kinds of things, but if I didn’t really care about people and about this country, I wouldn’t bother with all this stuff. I would write fatuous little disco dance songs like everybody else. But I happen to love this country immensely--and I like people, for the most part. They just disappoint me a lot of the time.”

That disappointment is the chief concern of “The End of the Innocence,” the predictably assured new Henley album that is predictably a hit despite a 4 1/2-year silence since his last album, “Building the Perfect Beast.” This is especially true of the title song and recent Top 10 single, a lyrical ballad co-written with Bruce Hornsby which uses its resonant deflowerment imagery for mostly political--but also sexual and familial--purposes.

“What originally spawned that song was my friendship with several people who come from broken homes, specifically where the father has left the family at some point,” Henley said. “And it is a very deep and lasting effect on the children. We’re all brought up with fairy tales, and all the fairy tales end up with ‘and they lived happily ever after,’ but the divorce rate doesn’t quite bear that out.

“The second verse is about America as a broken home and Reagan as the father figure. Besides alluding to Reagan, it alludes to the Iran/Contra scandal--’since daddy had to lie’--and there’s even an allusion to the weapons buildup versus the farm crisis. The theme that runs through the whole album is one of heroes who aren’t quite what they’re cracked up to be.

“ Or you could take it as just a bittersweet love song between a boy and a girl, who’s maybe losing her virginity or something.”

Romance and sexual release as saving grace in a world without purpose or papas?

“Ultimately the only thing that hasn’t been corrupted, yeah, is love.”

Was Henley ever let down by a hero?

“Some of my heroes in the music business, perhaps. No, most of my heroes have been killed.” He chuckles. He remains wistful about John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. “They didn’t let me down. I still have a few heroes, not in the worshipful sense, but people that I admire and respect, people like Bill Moyers, the environmentalist David Brower, even a few politicians.”

It’s hard to ascertain just how much Henley still admires and respects Gary Hart. He has some harsh words for Donna Rice, who met Hart at one of Henley’s Aspen mixers, and a verse in the song “If Dirt Were Dollars” seems to be about her, though the singer says it is also about Fawn Hall and H. R. Haldeman and anyone else who he feels has exploited dubious circumstances of celebrity for personal gain. In any case, some of his most pointed jibes are reserved more for journalists.

“We do live in an era now where the media are very voracious in their appetite to bring people down. Media wilding , I call it. It has its benefits and its drawbacks. On the one hand, people like (Jimmy) Swaggart and (Jim) Bakker get what they deserve, and people like Reagan don’t get what they deserve, and people like Joe Biden get what they don’t deserve. So it’s kind of a mixed bag.”

The end result, as Henley sees it, is that a peeping-Tom populace now prefers politicians with rigid personal lives and suspicious agendas over candidates who have heartfelt agendas but make private messes.

“People want robots for leaders now. They want perfect people. I’d rather have a guy with a big heart who makes a mistake once in a while, personally. The consequence of this is it’s going to lead, and has already led, to no intelligent, sane person wanting to run for public office and subjecting himself to the glare of the kind of scrutiny that is so rampant now.

“I would like to see some guy say exactly what he means and stand behind it and not be afraid.”

Such a guy is, well, probably Henley, who makes liberal pronouncements from the stage in addition to the usually clear-as-day positions on his albums, and says he regularly gets death threats for it. Despite his forthrightness, and his willingness to put substantial pieces of himself into his songs, he has managed to stay a private person.

“With the exception of a couple of occasions,” he added with a laugh. (Besides all the credit he got for “introducing” Hart and Rice, which turned out to be not quite true, he got some unwanted media attention from a 1981 no-contest plea to drug-related charges involving a 16-year-old girl.)

“I don’t buy this bunk about ‘public figures.’ The attitude toward celebrities and politicians is: You asked for it, you don’t deserve a private life. Well, I’m sorry but I do deserve and demand a private life. . . . My former girlfriend had to sell a home she had worked for since she was 14 . . . and move because some lunatic was following

her and knew where she lived. . . . I don’t owe people anything except the best work I can do.”

As the only ex-Eagle who has maintained an ambitious musical career, Henley won’t say whether his sense of disappointment in people extends to a disapproval of the way his fellow former band members have treaded the water of the ‘80s.

“They all have their agendas and I have mine,” he mused. “I’m not here to judge any of those guys--except one, maybe.”

He laughed. The unstated reference is to his well-known anger towards Joe Walsh, who Henley claims was largely responsible for breaking up the Eagles. Walsh has received Henley’s wrath for singing “Desperado” and “Life in the Fast Lane”--two songs Walsh had little or nothing to do with--on the just-completed tour with Ringo Starr.

“As Glenn (Frey) and I used to say, ‘He’s an interesting bunch of fellows.’ I have nothing to say to him.”

Henley’s a bit more sympathetic toward his other ex-bandmates. “I think I understand how Glenn (now focusing mostly on acting and commercials) feels. I think he sorta got a bellyful of the whole business, and he wanted to be healthy and happy, and he’s pursuing a career in which he believes he can achieve that. It’s not something I would do, but I’m not him. Timothy Schmit and I are pretty close; I produced a track for his upcoming album. He’s probably the only guy in the group everybody’s not mad at.”

“I’m an extremely fortunate man,” Henley reflected. “I’ve had fame and fortune beyond my wildest dreams, and it just keeps on coming--to the detriment, however, of some parts of my personal life, which are quite obvious.”

By that, Henley--who has touches of gray in his now-straight, ponytailed long hair--alludes in part to the fact that he has just arrived home in a Porsche with a pretty girlfriend, but he is greeted by dogs, not offspring. “I certainly don’t want to raise children here, and I would like to have some children in the not-too-distant future.

“I grew up in a very small town in Texas and moved here to Los Angeles a little over 19 years ago, and I have never felt quite at home here. I always feel like I’m just visiting. I think a lot of people feel that way, slightly rootless and dislodged. There’s a very temporary feeling about L.A., and it’s reflected in the new architecture, which is heartless and gutless and soulless stuff, temporary architecture for a temporary town.”

The song “Sunset Grill,” from the last album, comes to mind: The big emotional climax in which he urgently promises to get himself and his gal out of L.A., followed minutes later by a denouement in which they order beers and resign themselves to the warm-weather unsettledness.

“I can’t go back where I came from,” he confessed. “It’s a constant game of emotional Ping-Pong, an approach/avoidance conflict. So I’m sort of in a state of limbo. I’m floating over New Mexico somewhere.”