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[Andrew Shaw-Kitch speaks.. from his blog..
check it out ..
structureseinplay.blogspot.com .. i
assure you he's smarter then how ye doin it..
Desperadi..how ye doin it.? i'm survivin..
where the bad bitches at?. where ya hidin?.]
The first context in which I came to know the Eagles' song "Desperado" was not at all fair to the classic seventies anti-ballad, a song that gave title to their 1973 album of the same name. In "The Checks" Elaine dates a man who needs a personal moment in any situation where the song comes on. They are sitting in a car at the end of a date on the verge of a tender moment when "Desperado" emerges from the radio; Elaine tries to say something and he interrupts her and stares off transfixed. When she tries to share his love of the song he refuses to. She instead decides to make hers what is possibly the stupidest hit the Eagles ever had: "Witchy Woman." The joke here, while very clever, is quite simple: a man, by the intent listening of a song manages to miss its meaning entirely; by falling under the spell of a song that declares "you better let somebody love you," he fails to let somebody love him; and Elaine, by taking an Eagles song as hers to get even with her "Desperado" becomes a "Witchy Woman" with "raven hair and ruby lips." The songs become defined by their listeners; by taking mediocre, sentimental poetry seriously they require more of the very advice initially received. Consequently for the first twenty years of my life I had no respect for the song beyond its potential as a punchline, until I encountered a cover version of the song on a CD my friend lent to me.
The Langley School Music Project was recordings from a Canadian Education experiment that introduced elementary students to the playing and singing of pop songs. In the version of "Desperado" a girl who sounds nine years old belts the song out alone over the teacher's piano. 1970s bizarre utopian ideas are refracted through some indescribable Eagles crystal, and the song suddenly meant something more to me than just irony.
To get at this meaning, how the character of the singer is re-done by the re-doing of the song, it would be productive to look at what the song means in its original recording by the Eagles. At this point in rock and roll and alternative country an established artist coming out of the sixties was either making a change and embracing the smoother, less confrontational sound of the seventies epitomized by the Eagles—Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond, Fleetwood Mac—or he was cartoonishly sticking to the rebellious, youthful image he had embodied for a decade—the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin—or he had grown up and remained an artist—John Lennon, the Kinks. Or he was dead. It could very easily be read as a patronizing message, or even an intervention, to Townes Van Zandt or Gram Parsons to say
Now it seems to me some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones you can't get.
"Desperado," advises Don Henley, "you ain't gettin' younger," so you better grow up. However, if sung by a third grader, an entirely different meaning comes out of it: a precocious little girl who has seen too many movies is singing across the playground to the nine-year-old object of her affection—a little boy who is still convinced that girls have cooties and would rather throw mud balls at them and climb fences and wrestle and skateboard. "These things that are pleasin' you / Can hurt you somehow." She watches day after day, singing, "Why don't you come to your senses? / You've been out riding fences for so long now." At any age—10, 20, 50, 60—someone can tell you to go to the next stage, to claim "your pain and your hunger are driving you home."
At the age of 23 I began to write a book about Seinfeld and to love Linda Ronstadt and the "Desperado" became me, being called by 27-year-old Ronstadt to "come down from my fences," the heights of my outlandish youth, and "open the gate," return home, and prepare my own adult life. This version came out right after the Eagles', and the complexity was not much deeper.
The last re-do, though, I encountered last, and was recorded thirty years later, showing the song was not a fad or a cliché, but a classic. If anything at this point it would be unhip to cover the song, but Johnny Cash gives it new weight, new dignity, and expands the meaning again. This is the man who was the Desperado his whole life—he has been there, he was asked "Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?" and the man in black laughed. The song becomes a discussion of the ironies of freedom.
Don't you draw the queen of diamonds
She'll beat you if she's able
The queen of hearts is always your best bet
First we see someone advised to choose the card he draws, as though this were literally possible. The card game is a metaphor for life, but then a metaphor for life—"your best bet"—is used back on the card game metaphor. Choice and acceptance become confused once you choose to accept the lack of choice. The symbols of his liberty become the very things that bind and destroy him.
Freedom, Oh freedom
That's just some people talking
Your prison is walking through this world alone.
When you look back on your life and you realize you never had anyone else there can be no re-do. "You better let somebody love you before it's too late."
