When “Boys of Summer” came out I bridled because I liked the band that provided the object of scorn near the end: “out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.” The bumper sticker, it is probably those goddamned dancing bears, is the song’s sign of autumn. It’s 1984 and the counterculture kids are corporate sellouts now, man, even if they convince themselves otherwise. When the Ataris remade the song two decades later they swapped in Black Flag for the Grateful Dead. It’s a cheap and easy “critique” and it’s hard to think well of Don Henley for that, even if you dislike the Dead, even if every other note and notion of the song is perfect.
You can hear its perfection in Taylor Swift’s “Style,” which is the same song, the echoey guitars calling up the distance of time, the loss-drenched verses switching to the present-in-the-past of the chorus built from Fifties appurtenances. Don sings, “You got your hair combed back.” Tay sings, “You've got that long hair slicked back.” Don has Way-Farers, Tay had James Dean and pencil skirts, because the Fifties mean…what again? Guilt-free American power, industrial growth, the fresh deposit into teen pockets of disposable income and car keys. All the basic conditions for poignant love.
You could think this was a sort of MAGA thought, but the MAGA thought is founded on the fantasy of restoration — the conditions of the Fifties including its immense and fictive whiteness will be brought back through sheer force. This vision is missing entirely from both songs. Nothing’s ever gonna be great again. If you were the privileged subjects of the nation, if you were culture, the Fifties were America’s Summer, and then there was the counterculture’s Summer of Love, and then we went out of style as a nation. Actual loss, like, loser. And if you think that a whole broad class of people’s affective dramas about love and loss are not entirely entangled with an ambient experience of imperial power, you should read Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” it’s good. I mean, it’s terrible, you’ll hate it, but it’s good.
It is easy to hate “Boys of Summer” and many do. Those people suck. Or whatever, they are mired in an irony. Hating the song for being the very corporate rock it claims to despise — haha! — is a critique every bit as easy as Don’s critique of the Cadillac hippie. Or maybe hating the song is the Deadhead sticker itself. One’s dislike says, I am cool, I am the counterculture, I know better. This is the mantra you repeat, I know better, I know better, in the silence of your sleek electric car skimming down a two-lane. I think Taylor Swift is truly great but it would make more sense if she were named Tesla. “Style” might have been Tesla Swift’s last perfect song. We won’t know until later.
The thing you have to know is this (by have to I mean both it’s important and it’s obvious; by you I mean me): When Don sees that Deadhead sticker, it is not on some passing vehicle. Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach. There are no other cars, bro. The sticker is on Don Henley’s Cadillac. He’s just…looking at his car. Don Henley, and this is not good news, knows exactly who he is in this moment. He is prepared to tell you. He likes the Grateful Dead, who are a fine country-rock band. He probably has a lot of Cadillacs; eight years after “Hotel California” Don is, and here I approximate, a trillionaire. He knows who he is but he also knows his time is over. Don’t look back, you can never look back. Earlier that year, “When Doves Cry” had hit number one on the Dance/Club charts, the R&B/Hip-hop charts, and the Hot 100. Then “Let’s Go Crazy,” same. When people peer back at 1984, these are the songs they will conjure. “Purple Rain,” the single, is released exactly one month before “Boys of Summer.” It is climbing the charts. The world has come for Don Henley, come to start the long project of forgetting him, and the world appears in 1984 under the name Prince. I think this is the stuff you have to know to write a perfect song, or to write the perfect song that is “Boys of Summer,” to write the end of your own story without even dying. To see your own hypocrisy and emptiness, your own sellout, your own Deadhead sticker on your own Cadillac. To look at yourself and know how it ends. That is what that song is about.
The difficulty of knowing how it ends inhabits 2017’s great song of loss: Brad Paisley’s “Last Time for Everything.” It is in some ways a formulaic country song, much as Brad Paisley is a largely formulaic country artist distinguished by his penchant for lists and his guitar playing. You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that the song’s video features an empty beach and also a car on a lonely road. More than one in fact, and one of the cars seems to be the DeLorean from Back to the Future (1985) and the other seems to be KITT from Knight Rider (1982-86) so maybe it is not unreasonable to think back to that moment in the Eighties from whence springs “Boys of Summer.”
The song lists a series of things that you will do for the last time. The examples are universal but sort of dudely, wide-ranging but white as fuck, and steeped in small town nostalgia: using a fake ID, making out in a car, asking SuperCuts for a mullet, last time for everything. What distinguishes these from things you do for the first time is not that it’s the last time but that you do not know it’s the last time when it’s happening. You think you will come back to this beach, have another summer, feel this love a second time. You won’t, last time for everything. This is what the boys of summer don’t yet know, and it is about them.
Lit by heartland virtue, the song seems sort of sentimental and possibly boring. Then it scales up. At the end of the second verse, Paisley remembers “Watching Glenn Frey sing “Already Gone” at the Forum in LA.” Run the chorus, now gone dark: “last call, last chance, last song, last dance.” Frey was already gone two years. There’s a last breath for everyone. But we still don’t know what’s coming. We find out 100 seconds later.
In the interim we get a solo, concise but virtuosic as ever, and then a final verse which returns to cloying sentimentality as Paisley sings, in plain manner, things like “kissin’ goodbye on the porch and drivin’ away” and “getting’ woke up at 5 a.m. to see if Santa came — there’s a last time for everything,” and with that tag there are 40 seconds left in the song and we are expecting, if we have been listening to Brad Paisley for 20 years, the possibly histrionic guitar outro but instead we get the list, he only has two moves and this time it’s the list, “biscuits and gravy at your mama’s house” and “spring break on a foldout couch” and so on, each item punctuated by Paisley singing the title phrase.
That could be it but it isn’t. With 21 seconds left, already too late for anything new to happen, after an almost bored “last time for everything,” we arrive at the final enumeration, there’s a last item for everything, “…hearing Prince sing “Purple Rain,”” but this he sings with a sudden abandon, breaking into falsetto that heads for the heavens as it trails off and I want to assure you it is the first Black reference in the entire song and you suddenly recognize that this is not a blind spot but a strategy, that the song’s naïveté and predictability and invocation of the fucking Eagles were all a long and patient way to make it okay for country to talk about this, except that all talk ends there, there’s a last line for everything, and it is at this moment that you can hear how the guitar’s rolling arpeggio has been calling down “Purple Rain” the whole time, since the very beginning, and that the song is the first great elegy for the last great star.
It’s heartbreaking. Prince is dead and Glenn Frey is dead and Don Henley is the “Boys of Summer” guy. Your tomb is Paisley Park or the Hotel California or it’s Eighties Radio. Henley is there, “Boys of Summer” was the last time for him, the last song he made that mattered, he is there looking backward from the autumn of 1984 from which he would not escape, suspended there between never go out of style and already gone.