The Big Apple Songs: You Better Hang Up

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A quick note (that’s usually an eighth note or a sixteenth note ): I will not be here this afternoon or tomorrow. I’m going out for the annual faith retreat. I’ll see you Tuesday, or maybe late Monday night. Fear not, you’ll get the full top ten New York City songs. This is the last one on the alphabetical list…and it’s someone else you’d expect in the top ten! You Better Hang Up - Don Henley Yeah, what’s he doing in the alphabetical list? You’ll see that there are plenty of all-time favorites in the top ten…and with only ten slots, someone had to get bumped. After the Eagles broke up, the two “main men” in the band needed new songwriting partners. Glenn Frey went with Jack Tempchin, who wrote the early Eagles hit “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and co-wrote “Already Gone.” Don Henley turned to singer/songwriter and longtime Carole King/James Taylor/Jackson Browne/just about everyone else guitarist Danny Kortchmar. Who won? Well, Frey definitely got the better-known songwriter (Tempchin also wrote Johnny Rivers’ hit “Slow Dancin’ [Swaying to the Music]”), but Henley definitely got a musical kick with picking up Kortchmar. (Can’t use his nickname here because it’s considered a dirty word…but that ought to tell you something about his music. ) In addition to being a co-writer with Henley, Kortchmar (also feels weird calling him that because everyone knows him by his nickname ) wrote one of Henley’s biggest solo successes, “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.” He also wrote this one all by himself. It’s one of those typical stories about how a city boy sees a sexy (and sex-starved) country girl and wants to, ahem, “indulge.” And, of course, it comes with a warning about country men (who usually have a couple of shotguns hanging on a rack in the back of their pickup trucks) as well (“her old man’d love to kill you for the look that’s in your eye”). Henley definitely went a different direction musically in a lot of his post-Eagles material, as this biting song shows. You Better Hang Up Written by Danny Kortchmar Recorded by Don Henley From I Can’t Stand Still, 1982 NYC LYRICS: You’re from New York City where they don’t say no prayers