The Eagles – Desperado

The Eagles began when Linda Ronstadt and then-manager John Boylan recruited session musicians Glenn Frey and Don Henley in the spring of 1971. Henley had moved to Los Angeles from Texas with his band Shiloh (produced by Kenny Rogers), and Frey had come from Michigan and formed Longbranch Pennywhistle; they had met in 1970 at The Troubadour in Los Angeles and became acquainted through their mutual record label, Amos Records.  Randy Meisner, who had been working with Ricky Nelson‘s backing band, and Bernie Leadon, a veteran of The Flying Burrito Brothers, joined Ronstadt’s group of performers for her summer tour.

The original Eagles played live together only once, backing Ronstadt for a July concert at Disneyland, but all four appeared on her eponymous album.  After the gig with Ronstadt, Henley and Frey asked Leadon and Meisner to form a band, and they soon signed with Asylum Records, the new label started by David Geffen. The name of the band was first suggested by Leadon during a peyote and tequila-influenced group outing in the Mohave Desert, when he recalled reading about the Hopi‘s reverence for the eagle  Steve Martin, a friend of the band from their early days at The Troubadour, recounts in his autobiography that he suggested that they should be referred to as “the Eagles,” but Frey insists that the group’s name is simply “Eagles”.  Geffen and partner Elliot Roberts initially managed the band; they were later replaced by Irving Azoff.

Eagles (1972)

The group’s eponymous debut album was recorded in England in February 1972 with producer Glyn Johns. Released on June 26, 1972, Eagles was a breakthrough success, yielding three Top 40 singles. The first single and lead track, “Take It Easy“, was a song written by Frey with his neighbor and fellow country-folk rocker Jackson Browne. Browne had written the majority of the song, up until the line “I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, such a fine sight to see”, where he got stalled. Frey added the next line, and Browne carried on to finish the song. The song reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and propelled the Eagles to stardom. The single was followed by the bluesy “Witchy Woman” and the soft country rock ballad “Peaceful Easy Feeling“, charting at No. 9 and No. 22 respectively.

Desperado (1973)

Their second album, Desperado, took Old West outlaws for its theme, drawing comparisons between their lifestyles and modern rock stars. This album was the first to showcase the group’s penchant for conceptual song writing. It was during these recording sessions Henley and Frey first began writing together. They co-wrote eight of the album’s eleven songs, including “Tequila Sunrise” and “Desperado“, two of the group’s most popular songs. The bluegrass songs “Twenty-One,” “Doolin-Dalton“, and the ballad “Saturday Night” showcase guitarist Bernie Leadon’s abilities on the banjo, guitar, and mandolin.

The story of the notorious Wild West “Doolin-Dalton” gang is the main thematic focus of the album, as seen in the songs “Doolin-Dalton,” “Desperado”, “Certain Kind of Fool“, Outlaw Man“, and “Bitter Creek”. The album was less successful than the group’s first, reaching only No. 41 on the US pop album charts, and yielding two singles, “Tequila Sunrise”, which reached No. 61 on the Billboard charts, and “Outlaw Man”, which peaked at No. 59.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagles_(band)

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