I found this article in a magazine called Uncut. Great timing as we're discussing Desperado at the moment!

Snapshot - The Eagles Uncut May 2007

“The reason it worked so well was that 100 years ago these guys would have been outlaws rather than guitar players.” says Henry Diltz of the shoot that produced the famous, grainy shots of the Old West that graced the cover of The Eagles’ Desperado album. “They were restless young men and rock’n’roll kept them out of trouble.”
Diltz and the album’s art director, Gary Burden, took the band to a Hollywood rental store called Western Costumes and kitted them out. Then they bought 1,500 rounds of blank ammunition and headed out on December 18, 1972 to the Paramount ranch in Malibu Canyon.
The original concept was to depict The Eagles ‘gang’ alive on the front cover and dead at the hands of the posse on the back – with pictures of the bank robbery and ensuing shoot-out in which they met their grisly fate displayed across a double spread in the middle. “Then, at the last minute, without telling anybody, David Geffen scrapped the centrefold.” Diltz says. “He was always doing stuff like that to save three cents on the production costs.”
More than three decades on, Uncut presents the Desperado cover shoot – as it was originally intended to be seen.



Henry Diltz: “The gear they got really could have been worn by John Wayne because it came from the same rental place that supplied all the big movies. The band loved those clothes so much, they refused to return some of them, which must have cost David Geffen…”


“We didn’t use any fake blood, but they sure looked plenty dead. That’s Jackson Browne and JD Souther as part of the gang with the four Eagles on the ground. JD had this book about the Old West with real pictures of dead outlaws and we modelled the shot on that.”

“The set was amazing – this old Western street with these fake buildings, but it all looked so real. The band were so into it. They were like a bunch of kids playing at cowboys and they kept it up for two days and nights. They didn’t even stop when it got dark…”

“That’s the band busting out from the bank after the robbery. They fired so many guns, there was a huge cloud of smoke hanging over the set. Someone who lived nearby thought there was a fire and all these fire trucks rolled up with their hoses. We used that pic on a billboard on Sunset Strip.”

“You can just see those guys would have been outlaws if they’d been born in another century. As soon as they put the clothes on, they were there. It was like stepping into a time warp.”

“The gang: JD, Jackson Browne, Randy Meisner, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon. It was as if they really became these gunfighters from the past. I remember Jackson clutching his chest like he’d been shot and then spinning around in the dirt better than you’ve ever seen it in the movies…”