While Tom Petty clearly knew a hit song when he heard one (considering he had plenty of them), there was at least one time when his musical intuition failed him…which he later regretted.
Released as the lead single from Don Henley‘s second solo studio album, Building the Perfect Beast, “Boys of Summer” peaked at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US and #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay chart. But before Henley sang on the track, Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell wrote the music with his bandmate Petty in mind.
“I used to have a 4-track machine in my house and I had just gotten a drum machine,” Campbell explained in a Songfacts interview. “It’s when the Roger Linn drum machine first came out. I was playing around with that and came up with a rhythm. I made the demo on my little 4-track and I showed it to Tom, but at the time, the record we were working on, Southern Accents, it didn’t really sound like anything that would fit into the album.”
“The producer we were working with at the time, Jimmy Iovine, called me up one day and said he had spoken with Don, who I’d never met, and said that he was looking for songs,” Campbell continued.
“He gave me his number and I called him up and played it for him and he called me the next day and said he put it on in his car and had written these words and wanted to record it,” he recalled. “That’s kind of how it started. Basically, he wanted to recreate the demo as close as we could. We ended up changing the key for the voice. We actually cut it in one key, did the whole record with overdubs and everything, and then he decided to change the key like a half step up or something, we had to do the whole record again, but it turned out pretty good.”
During an appearance on Brian Koppelman‘s podcast The Moment, Campbell elaborated on the moment he played what would become “Boys of Summer” for Henley.
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“It was just me and him,” Campbell said. “We sat at a big table. He sat at the other end like the judge, totally quiet and didn’t bat an eye — just listened with his eyes closed. And then he said, ‘Okay, maybe I can do something with that.'”
Campbell wasn’t sure if Henley was really interested in the song or not, until the former Eagles member called him on the phone.
“He’s like, ‘Oh, I just wrote the best song of my life to your music,'” Campbell said. “‘Really? I’d like to hear that.'”
Henley’s optimism was right on target: “Boys of Summer” won him a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Decades later, as anyone who’s ever listened to classic rock radio knows, “Boys of Summer” is still a classic. Rolling Stone even ranked the song at #423 on a list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
Nobody was more surprised by the song’s popularity than Petty, who told Campbell, “‘Boy, you know, you were really lucky with that,'” the guitarist remembered. “‘I wish I would have had the presence of mind to not let that get away.’ That was a real ‘brother’ moment we had.”
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