“Our loss of innocence”: The one 1973 album that made Don Henley hate the music business
Being a part of the music business has always been an extremely mixed blessing for Don Henley.
On one hand, making millions of dollars off of writing songs had to be one of the greatest golden tickets in the world, but the idea of keeping the artist on a never-ending cycle of recording and touring wasn’t going to sit well with any creative person after a while. And despite being one of the greatest vocalists that the 1970s ever spat out, Henley remembered losing his taste for the music industry relatively quickly after the Eagles first came out.
But when you look at the band’s trajectory, there was no real explanation for how they managed to soar immediately after their debut album. The world just seemed to be ready to hear songs like ‘Take it Easy’, and even if the rest of the band loved the idea of making great records for as long as they could, Henley would have been lying if he didn’t admit that he wasn’t a little bit stressed when he became one of the biggest artists of the time right out of the gate.
Success can sometimes be as intimidating as failure whenever someone is trying to make something classic, and while those initial singles did wonders for their pop career, Henley didn’t want to be known as a singles artist. He knew that a lot of what they had done on the first record did have some corny moments to it, and even if he had the foresight to realise when they had made a mistake, Desperado was the first time where the band actually wanted to be taken seriously.
They weren’t all that different from the average country rock act on that first album, but the idea of getting conceptual on their sophomore release was bound to be a gamble. There were a lot of common threads that they had between the outlaw angle and their lives as successful musicians, but if there was anything that Henley learned from that record, it was that the sleaziness of the business was going to be grating.
Most people have to spend years playing the game before they realise that the suits want nothing to do with them, and Henley felt that there was no point in hiding it when they were making a promotional film for the record, saying, “But, like the album, the film was also a metaphor for the transitory nature of fame (or notoriety): the ephemerality of success, callow youth, life. 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.”
And it’s not like the cover art is exactly subtle about it, either. The idea of all of the band members looking like old-time outlaws was definitely novel for the time, but since all of the roadies are looking like law enforcement and the rest of the band are lying down dead on the back cover, it was pretty clear that they knew that some of the biggest names in the industry wanted to use them for all they were worth rather than look at them as people.
It would have been downright comical if it weren’t so accurate, either. Even when the band were making classic tunes like the title track, the public and their label didn’t seem to get the whole thing, and while one of their higher-ups was pissed that they made “a fucking cowboy record”, they were really missing the point of what they were trying to do whenever they made one of those songs.
These were diaries of what it was like to live like the modern version of an outlaw, and even though Henley admitted that some parts of the record didn’t come together like they were supposed to, they just needed some time to grow. Hotel California wasn’t within their grasp just yet, but they did have the power to make some great music while they had a few hits under their belt.
