Hanging in Don Henley's sprawling northwest Dallas manse is a painting by East Texas' Anthony Martin, the son of a Baptist minister whose works began decorating Dallas galleries and the homes of local art collectors in the mid-1960s. Henley says he came across it online one day.
In the piece, a couple walks through an orchard of barren, skeletal trees. The man, stiff and formal, is dressed entirely in black; the woman, all in white. They're walking toward the right edge of the painting, away from the white clapboard church to the left. The grass is brown, dead; the sky is gray, still, save for the clouds swirling above the couple -- a storm that appears to be gathering into a fist.
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Martin, Henley says, was "the rebel son of the minister who baptized me," which sounds like it could be a lyric off Henley's new record Cass County, a star-studded collection of country-music obscurities surrounded by new songs written and recorded, for the most part, in Dallas and Nashville.
It's an album with "authentic Texas roots and Texas connections," says Dallas musician Chris Holt, who plays on the album and is a member of Henley's touring band, which comes to Verizon Theatre in Grand Prairie on Thursday night.
The record, made by a 68-year-old man in a field dominated by relative youngsters singing about beer and pickup trucks, just debuted at No. 1 on the country charts. It's the first chart-topper of any kind as a solo artist for Henley, best known as the Eagles singer and drummer.
His first record in 15 years, it includes songs by singer-songwriters the Louvin Brothers, Billy Sherrill, Jesse Lee Kincaid and Jesse Winchester. On the guest list: Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, Miranda Lambert, Trisha Yearwood, two Dixie Chicks, Mick Jagger.
Henley can't remember when he started recording it, only where: "in some studio up on the tollway somewhere, in some glass office building up near Frankford" around 2009, he says, maybe 2010. He would have gotten to it sooner, but he was busy on a never-ending Eagles tour that began with the band's reunion in 1994 and culminated with the "History of the Eagles" tour that accompanied a three-hour 2013 documentary of the same name.
"I also spent that last 15 years gathering the information that went into these songs -- reading books, experiencing parenting my children," he says. "And, hopefully, I'm a smarter, wiser man than I was 15 years ago."
He picked the songs by the Louvins, Sherrill and others to "honor each decade of my youth using a cover song," then started writing around them. At that point, themes began to emerge.
"One of them is growing older, mortality," he says. "There's also the theme of leaving and returning, the circular nature of life. 'Train in the Distance' is about that. You're a young man, you want to ride the train away to your dreams, and in the end the train is coming back for you. ... And the song 'Waiting Tables,' which is about the waitress who dreams of getting away from the small town. But for right now, she's just gonna make do.
"There are all those themes running through the album," he says. "We wanted to write a record with those themes in it. There's nothing out there for people our age. It's all about the youth market and puppy love and this, that and the other. We wanted to write something that dealt with mature things."
That painting hanging in the Henley house could have served as the cover of Cass County, so named for the northeast Texas county in which he was raised. Henley owns much of his hometown of Linden, a one-stoplight town 150 miles east of Dallas, so why not this vestige too? Besides, it spoke to him: "The symbolism," he says.
He was born in Linden on a stormy and unseasonably chilly July 22, 1947, so the story goes, the son of an auto-parts salesman named C.J. and a piano-playing schoolteacher whose maiden name was Hughlene McWhorter. He was raised in the First Baptist Church of Linden. He went for Sunday school, occasionally.
"My father never set foot in the church except to go to a friend's funeral," Henley says. "And my mother wasn't a fanatic about attending." She stopped going altogether in the early 1970s, around the time the Eagles earned its first profile in Rolling Stone.
"I used a four-letter word about every other word, and I remember my mother getting phone calls from little old ladies about 'You need to talk to your son.'" He laughs. "There was a sermon that was clearly about me. Didn't mention me by name but was clearly about me and my career and the sinfulness of it and the tawdriness of it. So my mother, being the Irish girl that she was, joined the Methodist church the next day and never went back."
He too walked away from his small town and its little church as fast as he could, like many kids summoned by the world outside the county line. In 1965, at 18, he went to Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches; then to North Texas State University in Denton to study English and philosophy. He lived in Dallas during the final summers of the 1960s, sharing apartments with musicians while gigging around town. At Maple and Inwood, at the Eagle Apartments ("ironically enough"), he roomed with Bloodrock's drummer Rick Cobb. Their experiences, he says, remain quite off the record.
And it was here, at the Electric Rocking Horse at McKinney and Hall, that Henley bumped into Kenny Rogers, who eventually took Henley and his band Felicity (later renamed Shiloh) to Los Angeles, where he would form the band responsible for the biggest-selling record of the 20th century, the Eagles' first greatest-hits package.
Then, Henley came back.
He's lived in Dallas since his California home was destroyed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake and has spent years buying up big pieces of his hometown -- his mother's house, his grandmother's house, his father's store, storefronts along the town square, a giant chunk of acreage he refers to as "the farm."
Henley also helped raise the $7 million needed to restore Cass County's courthouse, which sits in the middle of the Linden town square and dates back to 1860. And he helps fill the Music City Texas Theater with big names and old friends, among them, most recently, J.D. Souther, who co-wrote the Eagles' "Best of My Love," "New Kid in Town" and "Heartache Tonight."
"All they have is the music theater and the courthouse and the fact I'm from there," says Henley of his hometown, which also boasts native sons Scott Joplin and Aaron "T-Bone" Walker. "The fact I'm calling this record Cass County has them so excited and hopeful. They're putting up billboards on the interstate: 'Home of ...' I've not allowed them to do that for 30 years, and I finally relented. I said, 'OK, put it up there, but when it starts deteriorating ...'
"I was halfway through before I called it Cass County, and why not?" he says, sitting in a room filled with leather-bound signed first editions of classic novels. "That's where a lot of the musical influences came from. And my hometown needs a shot in the arm."
On his current tour, Henley's joined by two Dallas musicians: guitarist Holt and multi-instrumentalist and scene vet Milo Deering, both of whom play on Cass County. Holt, the singer-songwriter who spent time in Sorta between solo records, grew up an Eagles fan. His dad "raised me on the Eagles," he says. "Hotel California was the first album I ever owned, the first album I ever bought with my own money."
For Holt and Deering, playing with Henley's a big deal -- professionally, sure. Personally too.
Henley originally hired Holt to teach his son guitar. A couple of days and emails later, Holt was sitting in Henley's home studio trying to record the solo on "That Old Flame," which became a duet with Martina McBride. It made the final cut, but months passed till they spoke again. Then, Henley asked him to perform with him at the funeral of a friend. Later, he asked Holt to come with him for a Vegas gig. He was, suddenly, a Don Henley sideman.
"And it matters to me that he has Texas connections inside this band," Holt says from the road, the day after the band's formal bow in Phoenix. "I think it's an accident we became involved, but it's not an accident it worked out this way. It's natural. And he recognizes that.
"And to be part of this personal journey ..." He pauses. "It's not lost on me the significance of this, how incredible it is that he's coming full circle and coming back to his roots, and for me to be a part of that has been a really special thing."
One day, Henley says, he would like to move out to Linden -- maybe -- and become "the philosophical, intellectual farmer who farms and writes. That's my life, to have that." Between now and then, though, there is much to do -- like that "solo funk-R&B album" that pays homage to Texas greats (Bobby Bland, Bobby Patterson) and hitmakers (Kool and the Gang, Ohio Players). He also says he wants to make a record of "nouveau torch songs."
And there's the long-promised book.
"I had 24 pretty interesting years of life before the Eagles, just my family history alone," he says, bringing the conversation back home. "My great-grandfather was a captain in the Civil War. Led a company of 100 men from Cass County and fought along the Red River and kept the Union Army out of East Texas. Was on the wrong side of history, of course" -- he laughs -- "but he was a captain. My family never talked about it. I learned this from a historian three weeks ago, and I've seen the guy's grave."
It's suggested that maybe he should just leave the Eagles out of the book.
"Yeah," he says, laughing. "And nobody would buy it."
But there won't be any Eagles songs on this tour, save for "Seven Bridges Road," itself a cover on the 1980 live album. Henley, now playing for himself, say he's done being a human jukebox.
"It's been nice and lucrative, but geezus," he says. "As Ricky Nelson, bless his heart and God rest his soul, so poetically put it: If memories were all I sang, I'd rather drive a truck."
