The article focuses on how prominent 1970s rock musicians adapted to the drastically changing music landscape of the 1980s. The rise of MTV and the increasing popularity of synthesizers and drum machines forced artists to evolve or risk obsolescence. Don Henley's experience, exemplified by his song "The Boys of Summer," illustrates the challenges and transformations faced by these musicians. The 1980s, often associated with a new wave of artists like Madonna and Prince, also profoundly impacted the careers of established 70s rock stars, compelling them to integrate new sounds and visual aesthetics to remain relevant.
The article highlights the key shifts in the music industry. Long guitar solos and the traditional aesthetics of 70s rock were replaced by synthesizers, drum machines, and music videos as central elements of popular music. The evolution was not just sonic, but visual, demanding a new level of presentation from artists.
Henley's example is used to portray the broader experience of many successful 70s artists who had to adapt or face being left behind.
The core argument is that established 70s rock artists faced an evolutionary challenge: either adapt to the new music scene or risk becoming irrelevant. This adaptation involved embracing new technologies, styles, and presentation methods. The 80s presented a new paradigm that necessitated change for survival in the music industry.
The year 1984 was a watershed in pop music. The stars who’d made it big the previous decade had to embrace new instruments and MTV or risk being left behind.
Don Henley was stuck.
It was the fall of 1983, and the former Eagles star was cruising down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, listening to a working tape of a tune for his second solo album. While struggling for words to one section, he glanced to the left lane and saw a gold Cadillac Seville with a curious decoration: a Grateful Dead decal.
That image went right into the song, “The Boys of Summer,” a synthesizer-bathed memoir of lost love that Henley delivered with the kind of cutting, resonant zinger that was the signature of all his best Eagles lyrics:
Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac A little voice inside my head said “Don’t look back, you can never look back”
“It was an odd juxtaposition, to see a Deadhead sticker on a car that is associated with conservatism,” Henley recalled in a recent interview. “To me, it was a symbol of changing times.”
The music had changed too. Henley was far from alone as an A-list 1970s rocker who had arrived in the ’80s to find a music scene transformed in sound and vision, now driven by pop singles and buzzing with electronics. The hallmarks of mainstream ’70s rock — long guitar solos, bushy sideburns — were out. Synthesizers, drum machines and stylized, eye-popping music videos were in.
In most tellings of pop music history, the 1980s were primarily the springboard for a fresh crop of stars like Madonna, Prince and Duran Duran, who embraced and defined the flashy artifice of the MTV age. But the new era also had a powerful impact on the generation that preceded it. For rock’s older guard, even those like Henley, who had scaled the heights of fame, the emergence of a new order in pop was a kind of evolutionary event, and its implicit challenge was clear: Adapt or be left behind.
“The ’80s ushered in a whole new paradigm,” Henley said. “We all sort of had to get with the program. Some people got with the program, and some didn’t.”
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