"Desperado": The Eagles sing the Old West

There’s no mileage in messing about with a concept album: it is very much a “go big, or go home” kind of endeavour. By that measure, Desperado is a great concept album, at once magnificent and ridiculous (when the time came to send promo copies to radio stations in some key US markets, they were delivered by stagecoach). The concept, as such, was not subtle. Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner appeared on the sepia-filtered front cover dressed as Old West gunslingers; on the rear cover, they - plus JD Souther and Jackson Browne - were trussed corpses, gloated over by a posse including the Eagles’ tour manager, Tommy Nixon, and the producer of Desperado, Glyn Johns. (Though Desperado was recorded in London, the photo session took place at the more thematically congruent location of the Paramount Movie Ranch in Santa Monica, setting for The Cisco Kid and Gunsmoke, among other productions.)

The idea came together during a jam between Frey, Henley, Souther and Jackson Browne after a Tim Hardin show. Frey was keen to develop a concept album about anti-heroes for the Eagles in the hope of the band being taken more seriously; Browne showed him a book on gunfighters and the seed of a theme was planted. It was neither the first nor the last time that rock’n’roll musicians would attempt to position themselves as spiritual heirs of the cowboys of yore: even Elton John had done it on 1970’s Tumbleweed Connection, and among the many things for which Desperado would ultimately prove answerable is Bon Jovi’s “Wanted: Dead Or Alive”. 

The macabre tableau on the rear cover of Desperado was a visual accompaniment/ introduction to the album’s opening track. The picture of the Eagles, Souther and Browne as dead outlaws was a homage to, if not quite a recreation of, famous posthumous portraits of the Dalton Gang, who robbed banks and bailed up trains across the Old West until they pushed their luck beyond its limits in Coffeyville, Kansas, in 1892. 

About 80 years later, the Eagles opened their second album with “Doolin-Dalton”. A co-write with Browne and Souther, it is musically and lyrically a fanfare for what follows. A knelling acoustic guitar and keening harmonica introduce the idea of the itinerant brigand as existential anti-hero, wallowing somewhat in the seedy glamour of it all. 

On which subject, it is incredible to reflect, at this distance, that the Eagles seem not to have understood - to expand the over-arching metaphor to incorporate the California gold rushes - what a mighty treasure they had unearthed. “Desperado” is - if Spotify metrics are any guide - one of the Eagles’ five best-loved songs, even before cover versions are counted. At the time, “Desperado” wasn’t even released as a single. The record company were baffled by it, and indeed by the album in general. The band were unhappy with it, feeling like Glyn Johns had rushed them through the recording. The musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra who filled out the Billy Sherrill-style string parts were bored by it, irritably playing chess between takes. As late as 2015, Henley said he still wished he could re-do the lead vocal. It is pretty clear that Henley sings “Desperado” as a memo to its own narrator, who is clearly the glass-half- empty type. At heart, “Desperado” is - like Henley’s later solo hit “Boys Of Summer” - a song about getting old, lonely and frightened. Although the title track is one of the Eagles' signature songs, it was never released as a single.

There were two singles released from Desperado, neither of which made much impact. Where “Tequila Sunrise” is concerned, it’s not difficult to understand why it was overlooked. While sweet enough, it’s slight, a little too easy of listening for its own good, and it forms part of the case often made against the Eagles that they succeeded by diluting more potent country fare to make it sufficiently palatable for mainstream rock audiences. 

The second single, “Outlaw Man”, was written by David Blue, a New York songwriter and contemporary of Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan. Blue’s original - produced by Graham Nash - had something of the arched- eyebrow pastiche about it, troweling the schtick on ironically thick (“In one hand I've a bible/In the other I've got a gun", etcetera). The Eagles played “Outlaw Man” a great deal straighter. Glenn Frey delivers the lead vocal from way back in the mix, as if  haunting the song rather than singing it-and removes the reference to a “’56 Chevrolet”, such vehicles being an anachronism to the milieu the Eagles were attempting to resurrect. Although, if we’re getting picky, so are Allman Brothers-style shifts from swampy boogie to breezy country rock wig-outs, such as the Eagles execute here.

Desperado was the last Asylum Records album to be distributed in North America by Atlantic Records, prior to Asylum's mid-1973 merger with Elektra Records by Asylum's, Elektra's and Atlantic's parent company, Warner Communications.