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CLEARWATER - Don Henley kicked off his summer solo tour at Ruth Eckerd Hall on Saturday with a career retrospective focusing largely on his work without his Eagles bandmates.
Henley, who handles drumming duties for the Eagles, spent the show at center stage, armed only with a guitar, microphone or tambourine. His slightly raspy voice was in top form, ranging from smooth to sweet to soulful.
Dressed in an untucked plaid shirt and drab olive pants, Henley started out with Dirty Laundry, bringing the 2,100-plus fans in the soldout theater to their feet.
After three solo tunes, a fan yelled out a request for Hotel California, and he answered: "Let me take care of this right now. Do you really think I'm going to do a concert and not do Hotel California?"
He did, however, make the crowd wait until the end before performing the 1970s classic, along with Life in the Fast Lane.
On the way there, he unleashed a slew of solo hits true to their recorded versions: Sunset Grill, his paeon to small towns; The End of the Innocence, an anthem to disillusionment; and Heart of the Matter, a romantic ballad that dissects the emotions that linger after a relationship ends.
Halfway through the set, Henley covered two songs by Paul Simon and Randy Newman, who he said were a couple of his favorite songwriters. Before playing Newman's Political Science, a campy number that proposes blowing up every country on earth except Australia, which would be turned into a theme park, he said, "I like to envision this as a duet by Bush and Cheney . . . Broadway style, with top hats and canes."
He followed that with Simon's American Tune, which laments the crushing of American idealism.
There were no surprises in this show. The band, featuring Stuart Smith on guitar, who also toured with Eagles, and Rob Ladd on drums, displayed the polished musicianship and perfectly blended backing harmonies one would expect to accompany an artist of Henley's stature.
And Henley gave the people what they wanted: reliable readings of numbers they knew and could sing along with.
Quirky folk guitarist Jill Sobule, promoting her new album, The Folk Years, opened the show with a 20-minute. She clearly won over the audience, most of whom seemed unfamiliar with her, with her sweet-voiced love songs that alternated between achingly tender, goofy and vicious.