(Credit: Alamy)

Wed 29 October 2025 18:30, UK

It wasn’t going to take Don Henley to see how the sausage was really made in the music industry.

Most people can spend their entire lives hoping that they can join the elite in the industry and make their entire job feel like one big party, but there’s a lot more that goes into a band than making great songs and praying that they find a fanbase. It means a lot of hours of hard work to get everything right, but right as the Eagles were taking off, Henley could sense things changing.

But before the California rockers even became rock and roll legends, they had already been read the riot act by half of their contemporaries. They were practically a supergroup from the local California rock scene, but when they presented their music to David Geffen, they weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms. He wanted to sign the band, but they had to spend some time cutting their teeth in Aspen, Colorado, before they were even ready to hit the studio.

And even when getting Glyn Johns to work with them, the producer wasn’t sure they even had what it took until he heard their harmonies. He knew that version of country music would sell to millions, and with their debut, they at least had fertile ground to stand on. Everything seemed to be looking up, but Henley couldn’t help but look back on the last few months of his life with a mix of both guilt and confusion.

No one prepares anyone to become one of the biggest acts in the world, and when looking back at the countless number of kids trying to make it in California, it was strange for Henley to think that they were the ones to get chosen for superstardom. So if they had such a hard time trying to make sense of it all, the next best thing was for them to channel all of that energy into the album Desperado.

While the outlaw/musician storyline was a bit on-the-nose for a few fans, the true moment they could let out their feelings was with the short film they made alongside the album. All they needed was a photo shoot with them in cowboy garb, but judging by the original back cover of the album with all of the band members dead on the ground with their crew looking down on them, they definitely had more on their minds than playing the grown-up version of cops and robbers.

For Henley, this was their way of letting off steam after being treated as a commodity in the industry rather than an actual person, saying, “The film was also a metaphor for the transitory nature of fame (or notoriety): the ephemerality of success, callow youth, life. It was a commentary on our loss of innocence with regard to how the music business really worked. The harsh realities of ‘The Biz’ had already made us cynical.”

But if they were already frustrated with the business at that point, it was nothing compared to what happened after Hotel California. The beast is only interested in bands that are doing well, and when they suddenly made one of the biggest-selling albums of the decade, The Long Run was bound to be the moment where things started to fall apart, since everyone was burned the hell out on cocaine.

Judging by how quickly they dissolved after that, though, it’s hard not to look at Desperado as a hauntingly prophetic album from the time. Yes, they wanted to become the biggest act in the world, but they started to realise really quickly that doing so comes with losing a little piece of your soul along the way.

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