When The Eagles Turned Desperado...And Unveiled Their Masterpiece

"They've made a fuckin' cowboy album!" This was the less-than-enthusiastic reaction of Atlantic label boss Jerry Greenberg, whose lbel was distributing Assylum records at the time, upon hearing what the new golden boys of the Asylum label had been up to for about a month in London. He certainly didn't expect an entire album based on old West outlaws and their similarities to current rock stars. Asylum head honcho David Geffen was barely more impressed. Of course, one issue was coolness. Looking like hippies on their first album, he could sell this music to hippies and housewives alike, but now these guys were playing dress up on the cover material and singing about bank robbers in the 1880s? History almost proved Greenberg, who maintained that coboy records wouldn't sell, and Geffen right, at least at first, because Desperado didn't repeat the success of the Eagles' debut album. Both singles stiffed (more on that later) and the album took a year and a half to go gold. Was it a mistake to make that "fuckin' cowboy album"?  

I had a real 'two roads diverged in a yellow wood' moment when I picked up my first Eagles album. My record store (well, one of my record stores) had a 'cheaper and last items' section which I browsed through, as usual. This was at the beginning of my life as a student and thus at the beginning of me slowly building a classic rock collection. So I stumbled on two Eagles discs, probably thrown out to make way for the remasters that were coming up. One was The Long Run. The other one was, obviously, Desperado. I decided I could take one, but not both. On one hand we had the simple black album cover, on the other the old west outlaws. 

I'd like to think that my love for Westerns, instilled to me by my father's love for Westerns made me choose Desperado and its cowboy chic, but it's just as likely that I checked the back covers and the titles on The Long Run made me wonder. "The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks"? "Teenage Jail"? "Those Shoes"? Yeah, no, I take the cowboys there, thank you very much. Needless to say, I made the good choice. I doubt I would have become an Eagles fan based on The Long Road, as a matter of fact. It's still the worst of all Eagles albums and probably the worst of all the big, heavily awaited releases ever. Yuck. Desperado, though? Hear me out on this, folks, because it just might be the Eagles' masterpiece. 

There's a persistent myth about the Eagles, often brought up in connection with Desperado and its artwork, that the Eagles weren't really country, that they were a bunch of fakers who would do this ridiculous dress-up but were, as Michael Murphy would say, "city slicker lickers, they gotta a lot of licks slicker than you and me". But that is, as a lot of things concerning the band, a mix of self-mythologizing gone wrong and a lot of half-assed assumptions by observers. "We're the Eagles from Los Angeles" might have been their slogan, but the Eagles came from everywhere in the U.S. 

Randall Herman Meisner was born the son of a sharecropper in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. You can't get any more country than that. Donald Hugh Henley grew up in a small town in northeast Texas. Sounds pretty country to me. Bernard Michael Leadon III was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, though he was the frst to adop California as his home state. The only real faker of the crew was, of course, Glenn Frey, who was born and grew up in Detroit and idolized local hero Bob Seger. Frey, notably, went into sensitive folk-rock, then country-rock, because he saw a career opportunity there. But yeah, I'd say two and a half cowboys out of four is pretty damn enough. 

Whether you agreed with the album's premise of likening 1970s rock stars to 1880 outlaws, or thought it was silly, you can not accuse the Eagles of not committing to it. I never realized until some Glenn Frey banter in a live show, how smartly they go about it. Take "A Certain Kind Of Fool" for example. Listening to it like that, with the Wild West artwork and everything, you would of course figure it's about a young guy buying a gun, becoming a gunfighter and "a wanted man" on the poster on a store front - but it never openly says that the object, "so shiny and new in his hand", was a gun - it might just as well be a guitar, and the poster is a concert poster.

This kind of double meaning applies to a whole number of songs: When Bernie Leadon sings in "Twenty-One" that "they say a man should have a stock and trade / but me I find another way", is he talking abut turning outlaw or turning rock'n'roll singer? The guys coming into town and causing havoc while getting a little "Out Of Control" could be cowhands raising hell after their payday, or a rock'n'roll band partying, right?! The old, short (and now replaced) Allmusic review complained that "none of the songs fit the storyline", but there was no storyline per se to follow - and they did almost entirely follow the thematic concept of the record.  

Desperado was also the big coming out party for Don Henley and a harbinger for things to come, with all that implies. On the debut he was hardly noticable, as a singer or songwriter. He had half a song credit to his name, even if - another harbnger to come - it was on hit sngle "Witchy Woman" that he also sung. But for his second slated lead vocal they had to wheel out a Jackson Browne tune, as if Henley couldn't write a second quality tune. Well, that would change, quickly. Henley is credited on eight of the eleven songs on Desperado, and sings lead on four of them - most of all Eagles in both cases. And while the Henley-Frey combo might not be as renowned as Lennon-McCartney or Richards-Jagger, that writing team was born here, and there is no denying its efficacity. Unsurprisingy, the two big songs that everyone knows off this album were both Henley-Frey compositions. Tellingly, these weren't the two singles off the album, because "Desperado" was never issued as such. 

More proof that, despite "Witchy Woman", the Eagles were at this time seen as a band with a clear lead singer in Glenn Frey, so Asylum would ty to mirror the band's debut album and issue a Frey-sung uptempo tune à la "Take It Easy" ("Outlaw Man") and a Frey-sung ballad à la "Peaceful, Easy Feeling" ("Tequila Sunrise"). Also: check out the album cover, on which the two most prominent guys are Leadon and Meisner, with Frey half-blocked out by Meisner and Henley having half of his face hidden by the shadow of his cowboy hat. This would obviously be the last time that Henley would be obscured on something Eagles-related. Henley seemingly had the greatest affinity for the cowboy material, yet it's still quite a leap to go from a single co-credit on the debut to co-writing two-thirds of an album. Naturally, Henley profited from this, as his songwriting credits, number of lead vocals and influence on the group's fortune grew massively, almost as a direct result from Desperado. 

On the nine original tracks (not couting the two "Doolin-Dalton" reprise songs), I don't see a single duffer. The weakest is probably "Out Of Control", and even that one hints at the harder rock direction the band would soon afterwards veer into. Despite Glyn Johns' excellent work on Desperado the band - well, mainly Glenn Frey and Don Henley - were growing tired of Johns and his rules (no drugs in the studio! how dare he?) and production (deemed too soft by the two), but the switch to Bill Szymchyk halfway through follow-up On The Border didn't yield an album as satisfying as Desperado. As a matter of fact, none of them did. Sure, they got bigger and ridiculously successful, but for me they never bettered Desperado, even on Hotel California which comes closest. 

Desperado deserves a listen from those who never gave a fuck about the Eagles, or a second listen from those who have written off the Eagles due to the played-to-death-radio-hits. It will also be the first of a series of albums about America in the 19th Century that I plan to post. And be back tomorrow for a Desperado-themed bonus...