The one album Don Henley said made Eagles look bad: “Immature and hokey”
There has never been anyone that took rock and roll as seriously as Don Henley seemed to take it.
As much as people liked to get into the business to have fun and maybe even get into a bit of trouble along the way, Henley never took the blue-collar approach of the business for granted, and half the time he wanted to make the kind of songs that he could still be proud of years after the fact. So when one of them didn’t hold up, it was about more than a few embarrassing tunes. In his case, it made a lot of his back catalogue look a lot worse by comparison.
But when he first struck out on his own, Henley at least had a better handle than he did when Eagles first formed. There are plenty of times where a band has to compromise for their vision, but since Henley’s name would be on the front of every single record he put out, he wasn’t going to settle for a couple of songs that didn’t cut it the same way that he would tolerate someone else’s material.
He could share the blame with his bandmates on occasion, but outside of a few cough-ups here and there, there are hardly any moments on his records that don’t feel fully realised. The End of the Innocence might not be to everyone’s liking, but when listening to every track, there’s never a single line that feels like it could be improved in any way. So when someone has that track record, it’s strange to go back to their salad days in the early 1970s.
That’s not to say that the band’s first few records were automatically bad by comparison. Sure, they’re not exactly at the same level as Hotel California, but listening to their debut, ‘Take it Easy’ and ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ are still fantastic songs, and when they got Don Felder in the mix, they got to rock a little bit more on tracks like ‘Already Gone’. But somewhere in between is Desperado, and that’s something that Henley still hadn’t forgiven himself for years down the line.
Admittedly, the album wasn’t horrible from back to front. After all, the band did have their roots in country music, so making an album that was nothing but an homage to the outlaws does at least scan properly as a decent idea. That message might be great when you’re in your 20s, but when Henley started making his blockbuster hits like ‘The Boys of Summer’, it was hard for him to reconcile with those early tunes.
Compared to what he was saying later, he felt that the outlaw persona ended up being a bit too melodramatic for the time, saying, “I’m not a priest or anything, but I don’t believe in making public spectacles, especially if you’re in a rock ‘n’ roll band in a public place. We have a bad enough reputation in rock ‘n’ roll as it is. The whole rock musician-as-outlaw thing seems pretty immature and hokey to me now.”
He may have been chastising the more outrageous artists who tried to call themselves “dangerous” in the 1980s, but it’s not like there isn’t a certain appeal when it comes to that kind of work. Anyone can fall in love with the story of someone that’s from the wrong side of the tracks that has a heart of gold, and even in the case of Henley, hearing him sing songs like ‘Desperado’ may have just been something that he needed a few more years to truly inhabit correctly.
So while it may not have been a good look for him when he was still in his 20s, Desperado was about more than the band playing dressup by donning a few spurs. They wanted to make an impact, and had they not made this first attempt, maybe Hotel California wouldn’t have been the juggernaut that it ultimately turned out to be.
