Desperado

Frey wanted a second album that would make people take the band seriously, and the idea of anti-heroes became a Western theme after Jackson Browne showed them a book on Wild West gunfighters. Stories of Bill Dalton and Bill Doolin gave Doolin-Dalton. Frey and Henley wrote eight of the eleven songs, and Henley said that was when they became a team. Leadon wrote Twenty-One and Bitter Creek, Meisner co-wrote Certain Kind of Fool and Saturday Night, and Outlaw Man came from David Blue. It was recorded in four weeks at Island Studios in London for 30,000 pounds, with Johns limiting every track to four or five takes. The band carried him out of the control room on their shoulders when he first played it back to them.

Desperado is the only Eagles album with the band on the front cover, dressed as an outlaw gang. The back cover restages the photograph of the dead Dalton Gang, with Browne and JD Souther lying bound on the ground and Johns in a white hat among the posse. It was shot at Paramount Ranch in Malibu Canyon. Atlantic Records president Jerry Greenberg received it poorly, saying they had made a cowboy album. Sam Peckinpah planned a film based on it that was never made.

The album entered the Billboard 200 at 145 and peaked at 41 in its eighth week, the lowest peak of any Eagles album. It was certified gold on 23 September 1974 and double platinum on 20 March 2001, and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000. Paul Gambaccini of Rolling Stone wrote in 1973 that it was not a rock opera or a concept album, just good tunes that happen to fit together. Robert Christgau thought it concept at its most mindless. The writer John Einarson argued it set the tone for the soft country rock that followed.