The Eagles came together in August of 1971. Within nine months the band had progressed to the point where it could take its place beside the top American groups as its first single, "Take It Easy," Became an instant hit in May of 1972. Manager David Geffen chose to break the group slowly in concert, booking the Eagles as an opening act on tours with mainstream rockers like Jethro Tull, Joe Cocker and Yes."'Take It Easy' was a pretty good single and it got some airplay," recalls Meisner, "but I didn't feel particularly successful. Opening shows was still opening a show. People yell and say weird things while you're playing soft music."

Frey, the most success oriented of all the Eagles, concurred. "We realized that we weren't the Beatles, it wasn't mass hysteria. Then we started to cool out. 'Take It Easy' would be the seventh song in a nine song set and nobody would pay any attention to the first six songs. Then we'd play ‘Take It Easy' and people would say 'oh yeah that’s who they are.'"

It’s then that you realize that longevity and keeping your band together is ultimately what makes it. It takes ten years to ride that overnight sensation to the point where it rains money. All we want to do is make good songs and savor those lyrics."

If the band needed further proof of its sudden ascendance, "Take It Easy" was followed by a second hit from Eagles, "Witchy Woman," then an incredible third hit, "Peaceful Easy Feeling." When the album was certified gold (for sales of 500,000 copies) it was clear that the Eagles were a major force.

The group seemed to take all this in stride. The band was sure of one thing-they wanted to present an anti-hip image. In fact they wanted to present this image so badly it became a kind of super hipness based on indifference. "It's just the songs with us," insisted Don Henley at the time "No gimmicks, no flashy clothes, no glitter."

There was a subtle shift developing in the band though, surrounding Henley. The moody drummer barely contributed to the debut album but soon allied himself with Glenn Frey and began to figure ( more prominently. Gradually, Henley and Frey began to take over the group, aligning themselves against Leadon and Meisner. This alliance apparently went as far back as the band's third rehearsal together. Frey saw that Leadon's bluegrass leanings and Meisner's strong identity with Poco went against the grain of his own designs for the group. Henley read Frey's attitude and told him "You and me are going to have to run things." As the band continued, this alliance became more apparent, to the consternation of Leadon and Meisner. who'd been the big guns at first.

Frey and Henley hung out together so much that Jackson Browne started calling them "the odd couple" But the two were intent on coming up with a blockbuster concept that would prove the sudden popularity of Eagles was no fluke.

The band continued to improve as they toured after the first album, and on at least one occasion the bluegrass angle of the band was emphasized in concert when Bernie Leadon's brother Tommy was asked to jam with the band onstage.

Meanwhile the concept for Desperado, the second record, was brewing. The germ of the idea look hold in 1970, during Frey's Longbranch Pennywhistle days with J.D. Souther, when Frey was given a book about the old west as a birthday gift by Jackson Browne and another songwriter friend, Ned Doheney. "It contained the story of Bill Dalton and Bill Doolin," says Frey. Dalton had two brothers who were bank robbers, and their whole gang except one was killed while they were trying to rob two banks at the same time. Bill Dalton was working in the California State Legislature when he heard of his brothers' deaths. He quit his job, went to Kansas and teamed up with the only surviving member of his brothers' gang to carry on their work."

Frey liked the story and thought about it in terms of a songwriting project. "About a year later, Jackson and J.D. Souther and I got this idea of doing an album based on an outlaw and we started to work in this L.A. studio we could use for free. We saw the analogy between outlaws and a rock and roll band. We wrote the song 'Doolin Dalton' one night, kicked it around, and never got much done on it until that outlaw concept got to be a serious thing. Then Henley helped the three of us finish it up." Before that, Henley and Frey had written "Desperado" together. It became a working title for the album. Frey notes that the idea was never originally intended for the Eagles, and in fact predated the group. "A lot of people amongst our friends have been talking about it for years. J.D., Jackson, and Ned Doheney, all of us have been discussing that for a while. The Eagles were just the ones to finally do it."

The concept seemed a natural follow-up to the Eagles because the success of the first album made them identify with the outlaws. "We didn't necessarily mean outlaws but living on the road we live outside the laws of normality," Henley explains. Frey agrees but takes it a step further. "I feel like I'm breaking the law all the time," he insists. "What we live and what we do is a kind of fantasy. It's essentially the story of what happened to us from the time we got together to when we had three hit singles and went on the road."

So the band decided to make the record an open-ended cooperative project involving all their songwriting friends. Two songs were roughed out to begin with. "Bernie Leadon had 'Twenty One' already written," adds Frey, "and there we had the start of our album. We just took it from there. "We wanted a romantic outlaw like Robin Hood," HenIey notes, "and Jackson, J.D. and David Blue all contributed to the final concept."

Of course the group recorded in London with Glyn Johns again, this time at Island studios, so the other songwriters weren't present during the recording itself. "We had all worked out the storyline together," Frey explains. "The instrumentation and the arrangements had been together for some time, the only thing missing was the lyrics. We all took a hand in that. We'd talk on the phone, or whenever we saw each other we'd discuss lyrical ideas."

What emerged from the Desperado sessions was a masterpiece, one of the best albums of the 1970's and without question the artistic highpoint of the original Eagles, meticulously written, performed and produced. The spirit of this record comes across with terrifying clarity even years later---indeed, the grim warnings of the record serve as a kind of morbid prophecy of what would happen to the Eagles.

The opening track is "Doolin Dalton," the original inspiration for the concept written by Frey, Henley, Browne and Souther. Here it opens the album with foreboding acoustic guitar and harmonica, sounding like an epitaph from the start. When Henley sings the words the effect is chilling. The story from the old west book is compacted into the second verse, but the opening verse talks about easy money and faithless women and drowning the pain in red eye whiskey, details that could as easily be applied to a rock band. The hero is listless and goes on the road, a pretty direct analogy to the Eagles themselves.

Leadon's "Twenty One" follows in beautiful bluegrass abandon, and here the outlaw analogy is dropped in favor of a directly autobiographical tribute to the carefree life of a young musician just starting out. Henley/Frey's hard rocker, "Out of Control," follows with the meanest, sickest rock the Eagles had yet recorded-searing, distorted guitar passages and a vibrant Chuck Berry inspired chord pattern that perfectly fit the song's gambling, drinking and womanizing lyrics.

Frey maintains that "Out of Control" was fitted to the original concept, part of a continuing story that winds into the next tune, "Tequila Sunrise." "In 'Out of Control,' " Frey explains, "the young guy goes to town and wants to be one of the big guys and wants to impress the big guys and goes into a bar and drinks himself into a frenzy. He kind of hallucinates a love affair with the barmaid. He starts yelling and stuff and finally gets into a fight at the end of the song. And then 'Tequila Sunrise follows that beginning with the hangover--the naked heart and the naked head--his first emotional scars as he awakens to a beautiful sunrise. Even though we opted for the name of the ever popular drink, it really has nothing to do with that drink--it is about a hangover from tequila and how you feel the next day. Then comes 'Desperado' about how you'd better let somebody love you.

The title song is probably the most beautiful song the Eagles have ever come up with, so self-revealing it should make even their severest critics admit that the band is capable of conveying real emotion. The point at which an aimless search for thrills becomes desperate, hopelessly running from a destiny that gains on you every step of the way, is the complete emotional identification of the outlaw with the itinerant rocker. The tender sentiment of the words here are revealed even more deeply in the cover version of the song by Linda Ronstadt, in what may well be the most moving and powerful performance of her career. You know when you hear her sing the song that she applies it to the very men who wrote it.

"Certain Kind of Fool," another song central to the album's concept, opens up the second side. Meisner's high, foreboding vocal gives the song chilling impact, but the lyrics, written with Frey and Henley, really pin down the outlaw/rock star analogy. The song tells the story of how the young thrill seeker decides to become a gunslinger, buys a weapon and practices on it until he knows he can stand with the best, then goes out in search of fame but ends up pursued by the demons of his own ambition. Ostensibly the song refers to the fledgling outlaw's experience learning how to use a gun, but the words never explicitly state this, so they could as easily be applied to a guitar as a six-shooter. "When a kid sees a guitar in a shop window today," explains Frey, "he sees it the same way the outlaw in the old west saw the gun. It's the mark of a new kind of man, a way he can make a fortune and a name for himself while thumbing his nose at the things society wants him to be."

"Certain Kind of Fool" is followed by the second version of "Doolin-Dalton" on the record, a forty-eight second instrumental version of the tune with Bernie Leadon's crackling banjo plucking carrying it along. The interlude has an almost cinematic effect on the album breaking to David Blue’s Outlaw Man," offering the chance for a musical break into harder rock in between the softer songs "Certain Kind of Fool" and "Saturday Night," a pretty, lilting song lamenting the

passing of youthful innocence.

Leadon’s "Bitter Creek" sharply focuses the chilling options offered to the outlaw. The foreboding guitar intro blocks against a hissing tambourine as the somber, dirge-like lyrics play out: their warning. This is the Eagles in their Carlo Castaneda Teachings of Don Juan mode, considering the lessons about life that "the old man' (father? brujo? medicine man?) told of and which were further amplified with peyote visions. Man writers have scoffed at this aspect of the Eagles’. vision but it is one point where the band, at least at this stage in its history, was dead serious. During the interview sessions that followed Desperado's release members of the group could be seen slinking around the Atlantic records offices in New York telling tales of their latest peyote excursions with the innocent wonder of kids off the street. The calculation and cynicism that have since become associated with the group were not yet evident.

"Bitter Creek" was exactly what the old man was warning the outlaw against. The "river of life" is an ancient and powerful symbol and warning against being swept away by its current were certainly not out of place when applied to a newly successful rock band. The lyrics tell of the limitless riches that are there for the taking, all the trappings of conventional wealth and power as the world knows it. The hero can't wait to show the old man who warned him against temptation that he made it big on his own terms. The irony in this explicit "take the money and run" philosophy is meant be directly understood. The Eagles seem to be saying here that the outlaw's fate is predetermined in a moral sense and that no matter how hard he tries to overcome it, his ruin is certain. This is frank and disturbing admission for someone on the brink of stardom, and Leadon's tense, powerful solo at the song's end underscores the emotional devastation such a realization can bring. In Leadon's case it was a matter of staring it in the face and laughing. Before too much longer, though he would leave the Eagles.

The album closes with the third and final version of "Doolin-Dalton" coupled in a medley with "Desperado" Here there's even less ambiguity about who the outlaws are supposed to be. Henley sings the first line solo, then gets sparse acoustic guitar accompaniment through the rest of a verse comparable in dramatic tension and powerful imagery to the best work of the Band's Robbie Robertson. It's sunset, they've assembled for the showdown, but here Henley announces that the stage has been set, then addresses the audience as bloodthirsty bystanders" who he tells to find their seats. The analogy to a concert is neatly drawn, Henley's paranoid answer to Robertson's "Stage Fright." The uncannily Robertson-like solo, nine rickety electric changes of notes, completes the analogy.

"Desperado will probably last a lot longer than any of our other albums," Henley has said. "It keeps growing. It came out of our first album success and three hit singles, our reaction and revelations about what we were doing, about the rock business, about how temporal it all is." will probably last a lot longer than any of our other albums," Henley has said. "It keeps growing. It came out of our first album success and three hit singles, our reaction and revelations about what we were doing, about the rock business, about how temporal it all is."

Henley seemed worried that the Eagles would somehow vanish at a certain point, as if it were a Promethean task to continue from the blockbuster success of the first album without faltering. He and Frey were worried about how they might react to the big time, but they were also worried about how

the big time might react to them. "Desperado is putting it up front," Frey challenged. "We know what happens along about the third or fourth album. People start talking about how the music hasn't changed and you're doing the same thing over and over. So we said it first, that we know the whole trip-that you're going to love us and screw us and then leave us."

Of course that can work both ways. Frey was known as a lady killer in towns where these desperados would play, fulfilling the "Doolin-Dalton' prophecy about "faithless love." He knew what could become of him. "In the end," he sadly notes "a rock star becomes so different that he can never go back to being the way he used to be."

After Desperado the Eagles started to try and bring their image to the public. The first album could have just as easily been made by a studio group, and in the sense that the L.A. country rock scene is interchangeable, it virtually was a studio group (Linda Ronstadt's back-up band). The touring after that record consisted of fairly anonymous warm-up gigs. But with a second album as powerful as Desperado the band could no longer afford to play coy. "We purposely underplayed that album," Frey maintains, "because we didn't want to hype it. A lot of people didn't pick up on the duality of the Desperado metaphor but I didn't hold that against them because we also wanted to have ten good songs that would stand on their own."

Frey and the others began to see themselves representing something in the rock and roll fashion hierarchy and began to make public statements about it. "As Don Juan teaches, 'follow the path that has heart,' " says Frey. "We wear what we want, what we feel when we perform. We are not into glitter. The Eagles are kind of multifaceted. We are a song-oriented vocal band. It seems that all the guitar and drum solos have already been done. I don't attest to wanting to solo the way Eric Clapton does. Everyone I have seen, with the exception of Duane AlIman, hasn't gotten me off. The music is the stage for us. It is the backdrop, the scenery and the props."

Furthermore, Frey was quick to see himself as a social critic during interviews. He would often offer in progress analysis of the sick '70s. "What is happening right now in what I call the age of chaos," he said, "is that most of the kids want to see something that is totally removed from their day to day existence. They would rather see Alice Cooper or David Bowie simply because they are unlike anything else in their lives. We have an escapist subculture and the demand is already there. You don't really have to create a demand for an Alice Cooper. For music like ours, I don't know whether there is a great demand. We have to work hard at it simply because we may look like kids who would be going to New York City College. Who knows how many kids in the escapist culture want to escape into reality. I think the more insane things get, then the more the kids will want to have emotional types of experiences. Kids are going to wanna get off instead of go crazy. So we are not going to change it."

Frey saw his group in an ideological struggle with the more overtly show business aspects of rock & roll. His perceptions were fairly accurate. In the early '7Os rock music had divided itself into two distinct camps, the heavily theatrical bands and the bands who would theoretically appear onstage in the same kind of clothes they always wore to emphasize that they were musicians more than entertainers. The two camps wasted a lot of time and energy putting each other down. It's no wonder Frey could get pretty defensive on the subject. "I walked down to Max's Kansas City," he said, referring to the Park Avenue South club in Manhattan where Andy Warhol’s crowd hung out and which was headquarters for glitter rock and proto-punk rock fans. "I saw the line waiting outside to see Iggy Pop and it was a walking identity crisis. Those people have not found themselves. It is just another manifestation of fashion--visual. it is funny how everybody seems to say, well did you see somebody instead of did you hear somebody. I don't think we have lost any of our audience (to them). That audience was never ours to begin with. I don't even know whether our audience goes to concerts. I have had flashes that a lot of people that buy our records wouldn't be caught dead in the seething mass of 6,000.

"I hold nothing against any of those artists," Frey insists, perhaps a trifle unconvincingly. "I don't resent their success and on the other hand I don't like their music. I doubt their sincerity. Once again I define everything in terms of what we do. I am not on a bible beater kind of thing where I have to justify my own trip. Anybody who goes on stage to perform is  representing himself the way he want to represent himself, sincerely or insincerely. I'd just rather cultivate my own electricity. It depends upon how famous you wanna get. Visually we are an excellent looking band. Everybody looks good, nice angular, lean California boys. I guess we could look just fabulous if we were to slick it up and appear in outrageous clothes. However, the Eagles won't be wearing glitter this year anyway. 1984 is here A lot of the kids who go to rock concerts are doing what they think they should be doing. It is like after seeing Woodstock. No one has ever gone broke estimating the intelligence of the American people."

Frey's astonishing contempt for such a large section of the rock audience was a direct attack on the other side that marked him as a mortal enemy to a lot of rock and roll fans, including nearly all the established critics, who were bored with musicianship and technique and championed more exotic, rough-edged groups whenever they could. One of the most popular coterie bands in the New York underground was a band that called themselves the New York Dolls. The Dolls were a glitter rock attempt at recreating the spirit of the early Rolling Stones. They tried to look like the Stones, tried (miserably) to play like them, but put a lot of heart and energy into their performances even if the results were often fairly pathetic. The Eagles made the biggest mistake of their career by publicly criticizing the New York Dolls from the stage during a Carnegie Hall concert. One thing most critics cannot tolerate is criticism of their opinions. The Eagles insured themselves a lifetime's worth of bad press for this putdown of the critic's most highly touted band. This is one of the main reasons why the Eagles are at once one of the most popular American groups and the most hated.

Chapter 2  Chapter 4