(Credits: Far Out / The Eagles / Don Henley)
Sat 28 March 2026 22:45, UK
The best pieces of the Eagles’ career always come back to the relationship between Don Henley and Glenn Frey.
They clicked instantly when they first became a songwriting team, and even if it took them a while to become one of the biggest bands in the world, there was no one else who could touch those soaring harmonies whenever they performed. But even if they had a lot of great musical willpower behind their biggest hits, it’s not like they were seeing eye-to-eye on absolutely everything they touched.
If anything, Henley was the perfectionist who was always concerned with everything sounding perfect. All good rock and roll needs to be imperfect to some degree, but when looking through a lot of those early records, the frontman did admit to cringing a little bit when looking at the songs that didn’t stand the test of time. They were definitely wet behind the ears in many respects, and when looking at Desperado, the band seemed to want to grow up a little too quickly when looking at their track record.
No one would have had the guts to make their second studio album a major Western opus centred around musicians being looked at as outlaws, but it’s not like Henley and Frey didn’t have the tunes to back it up. The rest of the world didn’t think so, but ‘Tequila Sunrise’ and the title track are still some of the greatest tunes in their catalogue, solely for the fact that they are nothing but pure beauty from back to front.
The rockers on the album may not have had the same punch that they should have, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t kick out the jams when they wanted to. ‘Already Gone’ on the next record introduced Don Felder to the lineup in style, and when looking through the rest of the record, they were starting to nail the balance of intense songs and ballads whenever they sequenced their record. But when delving into their leftovers, ‘James Dean’ never seemed to have the same resonance with everyone.
If you were to have asked Frey, the song seemed like the perfect inclusion to put on Desperado, saying, “James Dean was the first rock ‘n’ roll casualty. He’s the guy who trademarked blue jeans, white shirts, and a light spring jacket. Jimmy Dean, he’s my first hero, that first angry young man, rebel without a cause.” It definitely checks out as an Eagles tune, but Henley felt that the band didn’t need to be celebrating the kind of guy who was the poster child for living fast and dying young.
He wanted the chance to add some more depth to it, and he felt that ‘James Dean’ wasn’t the kind of song he could relate to, saying, “I sat there and listened to the guys talk about James Dean. They had evidently studied him and knew much more about him than I did. I had seen most of Dean’s movies, but I somehow missed the whole icon thing. The mythology never quite reached my part of East Texas, but I pitched in and ended up with a writing credit.”
Which probably explains why Frey ended up being the one who ended up singing the thing. He was the student of Dean alongside his writing pals Jackson Browne and JD Souther, and when listening to his nasally cadence singing, he does a much better job of selling the picture of some adolescent punk that has stars in his eyes, watching Rebel Without a Cause and thinking that he could make the same kind of moves that Dean could.
But that kind of division was also what made Frey and Henley so special when they worked together. They were the odd couple of the group for a while, but no matter how high-strung they got trying to make every song perfect, there wasn’t a single piece of their work where they weren’t going to give 100%, even if it meant going along with a song that wasn’t exactly to their taste.
