The bizarre story of how the best Eagles album stalled on the charts
The Eagles feel like a band with an extensive back catalogue, and, to me, they should be a Neil Young or Fleetwood Mac type act. The kind with separate eras that their fandom tears itself apart defending, swearing that some B-sides collections are better than the studio albums. In general, they should have a discography you can dive into like Scrooge McDuck and a sea of coins. However, the Eagles aren’t actually that kind of band.
Rather shockingly, they released only seven records over their legendary career run. At the very least, they started out quite absurdly prolific, their first six albums released in the seven-year period between 1972 and 1979, before a 29-year break between 1979’s The Long Run and 2007’s Long Road Out of Eden. Given the famously bad blood that flowed between basically every member of the band. though, it’s kind of a miracle we got that much.
During that time, the Eagles basically spent their entire lifespan as one of the world’s biggest bands, almost becoming a byword for rock megastardom and excess in the process. However, did you know that for a moment in their early days, it looked for all the world like the band would be nothing more than a flash in the pan, a one-hit wonder? It’s true, and one can tell with a cursory look at the chart placements of all their albums.
Now, to be clear, the chart placements only tell half the story. Each of their albums has since gone on to sell a truly ludicrous number of copies. What they can do is tell us the kind of momentum they had at the time of release. While pretty much every record of theirs spent many weeks perched atop every album chat going, one of them stalled at a quite frankly absurd number 41 upon release. What’s worse, it wasn’t even their self-titled, 1972 debut album. It was their beloved second album, the following year’s masterpiece, Desperado.
Why did Desperado by the Eagles stall on the charts?
This sounds ridiculous, especially from a 2025 perspective. Desperado is arguably second only to Hotel California as the most famous and cherished Eagles studio album. Even if the Party City Red Dead Redemption vibes of the cover give less “badass outlaw” and more Seven Brides for Seven Brothers realness, it contains a fistful of the band’s best songs, has since sold millions of copies and was probably their critical high point.
Yet, it stalled. This caused some serious alarm bells within the group since their debut album had sold strongly on the back of three hit singles. ‘Take It Easy’, ‘Witchy Woman’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ each spent time in the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100, with ‘Witchy Woman’ even hitting the top ten. With commercial success and all the momentum in the world, the band decided to craft their second album much differently.
From the start, they went into the studio somewhat self-consciously trying to create a capital C and capital R, Classic Record. One that would rid them of their reputation as lightweight pop sellouts and earn them the critical respect they felt they deserved. This led to the old Wild West theme that reaches every aspect of the album, from its title and its songs to its instrumentation, and to, yes, its cover.
The first negative omen came when they presented the album to Jerry Greenberg, the president of their label, Atlantic Records. Reportedly, he took one listen to the album and said “Jeez, they’ve made a fucking cowboy album?!” The other nail in the coffin was a poor choice of lead single. ‘Tequila Sunrise’ is a fine song, to be clear. However, they had the absolutely majestic title track staring them in the face and didn’t bother releasing it.
That’s not just hindsight doing the talking, either. Later in 1973, The Rolling Stones had the biggest hit of the year with ‘Angie’, a deeply sad, piano-driven acoustic ballad built around a gothic Americana chord structure. The Eagles must have looked at ‘Desperado’, their own deeply sad, piano-driven acoustic ballad built around a gothic Americana chord structure, and sighed. Then, they probably tried to murder each other.
However, one U-turn into more straightforward rock heroics with their follow-up album On The Border (presumably with a pit stop to burn all their leftover stetsons), and the band were back on top. They even had their first number one hit single off that album with ‘Best of My Love’. There’s a happy ending to the story of Desperado as well, when you think about it. After all, it stalled on the charts, but it has long since been anointed their classic, indispensable album.
Above everything else, that’s exactly the album the Eagles were trying to make.
