Don Henley on the album Eagles lost their innocence: “The Biz had made us cynical”
Breaking into the music business is never for the faint of heart. As much as it might be fun trying to make the greatest music you can and hoping there’s a market out there for it, there’s a slew of lawyers, executives, and industry lifers who claim that they know better than you and will do whatever they can to put you in a neat little box. Once people see how the sausage is made, it doesn’t become nearly as fun anymore, and Don Henley thought Desperado was the purest example of the Eagles losing that spark.
Because in the early days of the California rockers’ lives, it felt like everything was being done for the love of the music. Henley and Glenn Frey could have been completely happy making beautiful tunes with Linda Ronstadt for the rest of their lives, but Henley was the one convinced that his future was reaching somewhere beyond just a sideman.
And can you really blame him? The guy had one of the most in-demand voices in rock history, and regardless of the number of soft moments in his catalogue, it’s hard to argue that Henley was bound to be a star no matter what he touched. When ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Witchy Woman’ started tearing up the charts, though, the mindset wasn’t joy. It was fear.
For a bunch of kids making noise in the California rock scene, suddenly having them making one of the anthems of the early 1970s wasn’t sitting well with them. Almost as a way of going in the exact opposite direction, Desperado was a conceptual piece talking about the nasty situations a lot of good ol’ boys get into both in the days of the Old West and the modern age of the music industry.
The angle was transparently flimsy, as far as Henley could tell, but it did make for some great singles, such as ‘Desperado’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’. Despite the album going over about as well as someone sincerely trying to start a hair metal act in 1994, Henley did think that making the finer details of the record was a bold look at how far they had come in just a few years.
When talking about doing the cover shots, Henley thought that there was a lot of truth to their images as rough-and-tumble outlaws, telling Rolling Stone, “It was a commentary on our loss of innocence with regard to how the music business really worked. The harsh realities of ‘the Biz’ had already made us cynical.”
He wasn’t fooling around either, looking at the back cover of the record. Considering the entire cover shot involves all of the Eagles bound up like corpses while the roadies look on in pity, this was more than just about their love growing stale. It was realising that they were not in it for the long haul and that nothing was going to stop it.
Still, that didn’t mean that they ran out of things to say, either, with Hotel California being an even better exploration of what it means to be lost in a world that’s more than a little bit crooked called Hollywood. The music business does look enticing, but most fans should take a hard look at this album to realise just how cynical the group had become.
