The Vinyl of the Day is ‘Desperado’ by The Eagles, 1973. The Eagles’ second album (and their only album that has a photo of the band on the front cover), Glenn Frey wanted the band to be looked at as more serious artists, and he floated the idea of them doing a ‘concept album’. They were having difficulty coming up with a unifying concept, until Jackson Browne (who was friends with and working with them) had an inspiration from a book on gunfighters of the Wild West given to him by Ned Doheny for his 21st birthday, and Browne showed them the book and suggested the theme.
From Wikipedia;
Jackson Browne himself credited the song "Desperado" written by Frey and Henley as the origin of the outlaw theme of the album. Bernie Leadon said that Frey liked the idea of an analogy between outlaw gangs and rock-and-roll: "Glenn sat everybody down and mapped out which characters in the gang could have songs written about them, or encouraged us to write songs about this concept.” As Frey said of the album in an interview in 1973: "It has its moments where it definitely draws some parallels between rock-and-roll and being an outlaw. Outside the laws of normality, I guess. I mean, I feel like I'm breaking a law all the time. What we live and what we do is kind of a fantasy." Henley also said that the album was to be their "big artistic commentary on the evils of fame and success, with a cowboy metaphor."However, he admitted: "The metaphor was probably a little bullshit. We were in L.A. staying up all night, smoking dope, living the California life, and I suppose we thought it was as radical as cowboys in the old West. We were really rebelling against the music business, not society." The other songs in the album quickly came together after the theme had been decided. Even though Desperado is sometimes described as a concept album, it does not have a specific narrative, and the songs do not necessarily fit in with the theme explicitly."Desperado" was the first song Frey and Henley wrote together, marking the beginning of their songwriting partnership. Henley noted: "That’s when we became a team."
Released just a year after their debut album, "Desperado" is a continuation of what the Eagles did better than anyone, make country rock for the masses. Surprisingly, at it’s release the album did not sell well, and was actually considered a 'bomb' according to Glenn Frey himself in the fantastic documentary 'History of the Eagles'! This LP begins the Eagles legend as it shows their debut album was not a fluke, and could be improved upon. In Desperado we have rockers and ballads and epics, and even if it wasn’t really a fully realized ‘concept’ album, all the songs thread together nicely with a rugged Western Outlaw rawhide ‘chord’. The varied talents of the band are all on display; Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and their bandmates all contribute and bring the Los Angeles music scene of the 1970s to a crescendo. The songs feel authentic and are imbued with a raw energy, without ‘70s overproduction.
Even though the album wasn’t an immediate success, over the years it has been rightly recognized for not only it’s songwork, but also from where the image of the Eagles as a ‘country-rock’ fusion band was cemented. ‘Desperado’ and the sound and image of the Eagles were an enormous, groundshaking influence on country music, inspiring country artists to break the established format and creating the ‘new country’ sound — although not one person I knew at the time, or for years afterwards, ever thought of them as ‘country’, just a great rock band. And the Eagles are arguably the most influential and inspirational act to country music still today.
AllMusic Review by William Ruhlmann
If Don Henley was the sole member of the Eagles underrepresented on their debut album, Eagles, with only two lead vocals and one co-songwriting credit, he made up for it on their follow-up, the "concept" album Desperado. The concept had to do with Old West outlaws, but it had no specific narrative. On Eagles, the group had already begun to marry itself to a Southwest sound and lyrical references, from the Indian-style introduction of "Witchy Woman" to the Winslow, AZ, address in "Take It Easy." All of this became more overt on Desperado, and it may be that Henley, who hailed from Northeast Texas, had the greatest affinity for the subject matter. In any case, he had co-writing credits on eight of the 11 selections and sang such key tracks as "Doolin-Dalton" and the title song. What would become recognizable as Henley's lyrical touch was apparent on those songs, which bore a serious, world-weary tone. Henley had begun co-writing with Glenn Frey, and they contributed the album's strongest material, which included the first single, "Tequila Sunrise," and "Desperado" (strangely never released as a single). But where Eagles seemed deliberately to balance the band's many musical styles and the talents of the band's members, Desperado, despite its overarching theme, often seemed a collection of disparate tracks -- "Out of Control" was a raucous rocker, while "Desperado" was a painfully slow ballad backed by strings -- with other bandmembers' contributions tacked on rather than integrated. Randy Meisner was down to two co-writing credits and one lead vocal ("Certain Kind of Fool"), while Bernie Leadon's two songs, "Twenty-One" and "Bitter Creek," seemed to come from a different record entirely. The result was an album that was simultaneously more ambitious and serious-minded than its predecessor and also slighter and less consistent.
Wikipedia;
On the back of the album is an image of all four members of the band together with Jackson Browne and J. D. Souther lying dead and bound on the ground, with a posse including the producer Glyn Johns (far right in a white hat), manager John Hartmann, road manager Tommy Nixon, artist Boyd Elder (later responsible for the skull artwork of Eagles' later albums), roadies, and Gary Burden (far left) standing over them. The photo is meant to be an reenactment of the historical image of the capture and death of the Dalton Gang. Jackson Browne said that the image on the back cover with the musicians lying dead is when the "whole thing really comes together"