Katie Allen
Associate Specialist
Lot 50
Eagles: Gary Burden's handwritten notes and script for the Desperado music video shoot, late 1972, Qty
20 – 30 June 2025, 12:00 PDT
Online, Los AngelesUS$3,000 - US$5,000
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Fred Lawton
Cataloguer
Claire Tole-Moir
Head of Department
Eagles: Gary Burden's handwritten notes and script for the Desperado music video shoot,
late 1972,
approx. 10 pages of handwritten notes in black marker on lined paper in Burden's hand, together with printed pages with annotations including details of scenes, cast and crew, accompanied by a printed script,
each page 14 x 8 1/2in, (Qty)
approx. 10 pages of handwritten notes in black marker on lined paper in Burden's hand, together with printed pages with annotations including details of scenes, cast and crew, accompanied by a printed script,
each page 14 x 8 1/2in, (Qty)
Footnotes
These are the notes Gary Burden pitched to David Geffen for the Desperado shoot. The shoot took place at the Paramount Ranch. It was expensive, therefore to justify the cost, a promotional film for the album was also made at the same time. The film was shot on Super-8, and was sepia-tinted. Don Henley described the promotional film, like the album itself, as "a commentary on [their] loss of innocence with regard to how the music business really worked".
Desperado:
Burden commented; "I wanted to make a dramatic visual image that would fit the conceptual music they had put together, drawing a comparison between the guitar player in the '70s and the gunslinger in the 1870s. It was a story of four guys who come to town, decide to stop working, and take the easy way by becoming outlaws. They rob the bank but are killed in the process. The band's roadies, their manager, and their record producer were playing the posse coming after these outlaws. Boyd Elder, a friend of ours and an artist from Texas, was riding through the scene, galloping on a horse. Everybody was shouting".
Henry Diltz said, "It was really like being there, like being back there in the old west, except, instead of the old Matthew Brady box-camera I had my Nikon motor drive and my Minolta super-8 camera."
Burden continues; "The photos of the band look like they really were taken back in the 1800's, standing there with these wild looks on their faces. When the actual gunfight happened the first time they came backing up out of the bank emptying their rifles and six guns, the roadies were running down the street at them all firing and yelling and rolling in the dirt as if shot. It was just amazing. We made a huge tableau of an entire gunfight of these guys totally transformed into outlaws. I had a friend filming 16mm of the whole action sequence. Every little boy wants to have gunfights as cowboys, soldiers or gangsters. This cover shoot was an opportunity for all of us to act out, in a huge way, with cool historically accurate costumes and real guns with blank movie loads (Loud and flames coming out). The first day we filmed people were drawing on each other and firing so many rounds we ran out of ammo. The next day I had ten cases of ammo and we shot so much there was a cloud of smoke hanging over the set and the fire department came thinking there was a fire."
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