The Eagles song which marked the “beginning” of Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s partnership
‘Desperado’ was a landmark song for the Eagles, not just because it became one of their best-known tracks, despite never being released as a single, but because it was the beginning of one of rock’s most powerful songwriting partnerships.
It’s a song that suffers from the ‘Hotel California’ effect when it comes to its meaning – some people are sure it’s just about a cowboy refusing to fall in love, whereas others are convinced it’s about the perils of stardom in the vein of ‘Life In The Fast Lane’.
Whatever your interpretation, it’s a nod to the country music notion that cowboys were tough on the exterior but suffered inside, drawing unsubtle parallels to rockstars’ lives as the music industry’s lone gunslingers. ‘Desperado’ marked the arrival of that trope in rock, one which would later be seen on songs like Bon Jovi’s ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ and Aerosmith’s ‘Back in the Saddle’.
Don Henley had first started playing with parts of the song in the late ’60s, but it wasn’t fully formed until Glenn Frey came along – the first of many songs the pair would co-write.
As Henley explained in the liner notes on The Very Best of the Eagles, Frey had come over to write one day when he showed him the unfinished tune he’d been working on for years. “I said [to Glenn], ‘When I play it and sing it, I think of Ray Charles and Stephen Foster,” he explained. “It’s really a southern gothic thing, but we can easily make it more western.’”
Frey immediately understood his vision, and as Henley wrote: “Leapt right on it, filled in the blanks and brought structure. And that was the beginning of our songwriting partnership – that’s when we became a team.”
The southern theme they both loved endured throughout the album, which was tinged with an old western theme inspired by The Dalton Gang, a film about an infamous group of outlaws.
Despite conjuring the magic and danger of the great western film, British producer Glyn Johns recorded the album in Notting Hill, London. Their work in the studio to capture a southern gothic feel was so effective popular western director Sam Peckinpah expressed interest in making a film based on the Desperado album – although it never came to be.
The song was also recorded by Linda Ronstadt on 1973’s Don’t Cry Now a few months after the Eagles album was released. Both Henley and Frey toured as part of her backing band in 1971 and were encouraged by her to leave to form the group alongside Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner.
