Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell was playing around with a LinnDrum drum machine and synthesizer one night when he created a pattern consisting of tambourines, handclaps and drums. He overdubbed some guitars and a week later played the instrumental track for Tom Petty and producer Jimmy Iovine, who were working on the band’s 1985 album, Southern Accents.
“They said, ‘I think that’s a little jazzy for what we’re doing right now’, and I agreed with them,” Campbell told Music Radar.
Iovine suggested Campbell take the track to former Eagles drummer Don Henley, who was looking for songs for his second solo record. Campbell played it for Henley, who didn’t seem very enthusiastic.
“He didn’t tap a foot or move his head or anything. He listened to it all the way through and I thought he hated it,” Campbell said.
When Campbell returned home, Henly called to tell him the music had inspired “the best song I’ve written in ten years.”
The result was “The Boys of Summer,” which became Henley’s most acclaimed solo hit. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won Henley a Grammy for best rock male vocal in 1986. The video won four awards at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards, including Video of the Year.
Henley lifted the title from Roger Kahn’s 1972 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers. Henley’s a baseball fan but he didn’t have the game on his mind when writing the lyrics.
“It’s about life, looking back,” Henley told Howard Stern in 2015.
Recording it wasn’t easy. The track wouldn’t load on Campbell’s LinnDrum machine at first. Once it did, they spent more than a week recording the song when Henley decided he wanted to change the key.
“He was right. The Heartbreakers never did that – if we brought a song that was in A, it goes in A; sing it, make it work,” Campbell said. “We never thought to change the key for the voice but Don did.”
The song further established Henley as a solo star and helped his sophomore album, Building the Perfect Beast, sell three million copies in the U.S.
Later, Campbell was sitting in a car with Petty when “The Boys of Summer” came on the radio.
“And he looks at me and goes, ‘Boy, you know, you were really lucky with that. I wish I would have had the presence of mind to not let that get away,’” Campbell told Brian Koppelman on The Moment Podcast as quoted by Music Radar. “That was a real brother moment we had.”
