‘You Can Never Look Back’: How ’70s Rockers Rebooted for the ’80s ‘You Can Never Look Back’: How ’70s Rockers Rebooted for the ’80s

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:

“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.