An Eagles album cover almost caused a devastating forest fire: “He wanted to be a cowboy”
Think of the great and the good of rock ‘n’ roll, and there is a good chance that they all have a little bit of bad in them. The whole promise of the genre was to rebel against one’s parents, and that meant that danger was never far away from the icons of the musical landscape. The Eagles, however, are probably one of the last bands people think of when considering the rock and roll outlaw.
As opposed to the sexual energy coming from Led Zeppelin, the dangerous deviance of The Rolling Stones, or the terrifying sounds of Black Sabbath, Glenn Frey and Don Henley were writing odes to the simple life that almost anyone could relate to on some level. They were palatable and parent-friendly, even if they did douse their music with hefty doses of sex and drugs. After working out their first record, though, Frey and Henley started looking to the dark side of life for inspiration.
Having become fascinated with a book on gunslingers from their friend JD Souther, Frey dreamed up an idea for a concept album entitled Desperado, relating the rock star living as a modern outlaw. When explaining the concept, Frey drew many different parallels to the modern musician and what those gunslingers stood for, recalling in History of the Eagles, “We live outside the laws of normality. Same with records and bank robberies, you usually heard of these guys before you ever saw them”.
While the record boasted the best material of their early career, like the title track and ‘Tequila Sunrise’, the band had a heavier mindset to making the cover. To capture the spirit of an outlaw, artist Gary Burden figured that the band should pick out their different outlaw persona, remarking, “I thought that every member of the band had at least a little cowboy in them. Don Henley was from the South, he was a real cowboy. Glenn Frey was from Detroit, but he wanted to be a cowboy”.
Renting out a lot for the day, the band shot various scenes of them in cowboy garb, each packing a toy pistol filled with blanks. It’s the stuff of dreams for countless children, playing outlaws as they run around a fake town and begin shooting guns at one another for fun. Although the whole thing was meant to be in good fun, the authorities had to be called after one infamous shoot.
During the day, Burden thought it would be a good idea for the band to have a mock shootout outside of a saloon, with every band member firing an array of blanks into the building. While Burden got excellent results, he didn’t consider the fire department, saying, “We had fired so many blanks that the fire department showed up because they thought it was a fire”.
Things could have gone very wrong for the group, as they narrowly avoided a devastating forest fire. The hot shells landing on the dry floor is the kind of accident that can lead to catastrophe.
Considering the arid environment just outside the grounds, the smoke in the air could have easily caused a forest fire if the band hadn’t stopped at the right time. From there, the group eventually took a few promo shots in the style of the Doolin-Dalton gang. Souther, who was at the shoot alongside them, thought the shots were perfect, saying, “There’s a lot of truth in that shot, where there’s the Eagles, Jackson [Browne] and myself are all dead. No one ever gets tired of looking at the corpse of a bad boy”.
Regardless of how much fun they had the day of the shoot, the album wasn’t received warmly by the critics. While the band’s label bosses were thrilled to have the new album on their roster, Frey remembers hearing about their change in style, with one representative complaining that “they made a fucking cowboy record”.
It didn’t take long for time to turn around on the record, though, with Linda Ronstadt’s cover version of ‘Desperado’ bringing the record back into the public consciousness. The Eagles may be considered one of the kings of dad rock now, but for those few days on the photoshoot, they were every bit the outlaw that they dreamed of being.
