The Don Henley song Tom Petty will always regret rejecting: “You were really lucky”
Throughout their respective careers, Don Henley and Tom Petty wrote enough great songs between them that you’d think they wouldn’t have much time to care or feel regret about the things they failed to achieve. However, given that they were seemingly always at the top of their game, you’d also expect the pair to hold themselves to a high standard and always want to deliver to the best of their abilities, making the failures and lost opportunities stick out like a sore thumb.
Henley and Petty may not have crossed paths on many occasions throughout their careers, but you’d like to assume that the two are more than aware of each other’s talents and importance to the canon of rock music and that they hold a fair amount of mutual respect for one another. However, that also didn’t mean that they couldn’t constantly compete for the same audience or, indeed, continually vie for one another.
With Henley emerging as one of the two principal songwriters of the Eagles during the 1970s and operating within a soft-rock and country-adjacent sound, the evolution from this sound into the heartland rock that Petty was known for pushing towards the back end of the decade and into the ‘80s can be said to have some sort of lineage of influence. Those who adored what Eagles may have done on their classic records the decade before would almost certainly have been able to find something to appreciate in Petty’s music, and that’s probably why Petty’s Heartbreakers bandmate Mike Campbell thought he could push a certain song he wrote in his direction.
In 1984, Campbell penned a demo that he brought to the studio while working with Petty. After playing it back to the bandleader, Petty immediately dismissed it. Leaving Campbell at a crossroads and unsure what to do with the song, producer Jimmy Iovine had the smart idea of getting the songwriter to present it to another close friend of his who had been struggling to find an audience since the breakup of his band.
Of course, once it was handed over to Henley, the lyrics came along, and the track became the now-timeless classic ‘The Boys of Summer’, which proved to be an enormous success for the former Eagles drummer. He’d lost an unprecedented amount of traction in the years since Eagles’ demise, but the success of the track saw him reach number five in the US charts and earned Henley a Grammy Award for ‘Best Male Rock Vocal Performance’ in 1986.
This could all have been Petty’s success though, and because he didn’t see the potential in the demo version, he passed up on the potential to have had a huge success with the song. Would Petty have been dismayed at this idea? Probably not, but the thought that a song so ubiquitous could have had his name on it is probably something he took with him to the grave.
Campbell would later share an amusing anecdote about travelling in the car with Petty and hearing the song come on the radio, which proved that Petty did, in fact, have some remorse about refusing the track. In an attempt to avoid any awkwardness, he changed stations, only for it to be played on the next station that they tuned into. Petty turned to Campbell at this point and expressed his regrets about passing up on the opportunity: “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”.
