The Eagles album Don Henley called “artsy-fartsy”
The Eagles are not necessarily known to be a complicated band. If you’ve listened to ‘Take It Easy’ only once in your life, it’s pretty safe to say that you’ve gotten the gist of what the song meant, talking about blazing down the road with the wind in your hair. The whole point was to not make anything overly complicated, but Don Henley admitted that Desperado saw the group getting too artsy for its own good.
Before we even touch their second record, it’s important to look at how the Eagles even got to be the biggest band in the world. The California rockers had formed as a result of leaving Linda Ronstadt’s touring act, and their songwriting prowess was already showing promise on singles like ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Witchy Woman’.
Since Henley and Glenn Frey wrote songs independently, lightning was bound to strike once they teamed up. When putting together the beginnings of Desperado, Frey and Henley first thought about collaborating on material, leading to them making epics like the title track and beautiful ballads like ‘Tequila Sunrise’.
Once they started peeling back the layers of their writing, a definite pattern emerged. Each song concerned people on the wrong side of the tracks, inspired by a book on gunslingers that their friend Jackson Browne had recently inherited.
If a few songs like that showed promise, why not write an entire album dedicated to the outlaws of society? As such, Desperado was the first concept that the band ever tried, with every member writing from the perspective of another outlaw, from the overture of the ‘Doolin Dalton’ gang to Randy Meisner singing their origin story on ‘Certain Kind of Fool’.
Their producer Glyn Johns was happy, the band thought they had made a masterpiece, and the public absolutely hated it. While their debut album had sold decent numbers and garnered three singles, their choice to go for an artsy album directly afterwards led to them sinking like a stone on the charts.
According to Henley, that anti-commercial side of the record was completely by design, telling Uncut, “We did have success right off the bat. And then we followed it up with this artsy-fartsy concept album – it was almost as if our reaction to success was, ‘We don’t want to have another LP with hit singles on it!’”.
Not having hit singles isn’t always conducive to a stable career, though, and the next few years would see them trying to get back into the good graces with the public. Whereas Ronstadt eventually turned the song ‘Desperado’ into a hit with her cover version, the Eagles were now interested in making something that was much more immediate, like the rock and roll swagger of ‘Already Gone’.
Or maybe the band just weren’t ready for the conceptual piece yet. If you look at Hotel California, it feels like a version of Desperado exuded properly, all focusing on the theme of losing oneself in the back alleys of Los Angeles. Henley and the band could certainly write stirring anthems like no one else could, but they may have tried to run before they could walk on their second outing.
