I find it absolutely incredible to this day that "Bitter Creek" did not become The Eagles' biggest hit, or their defining moment. It just sits prettily, forgotten, like sunken treasure, in its faded-postcard sepia surroundings in their 1973 LP Desperado. The dust has never cleared on this their finest pearl, undiscovered by many.
From the moment I heard the group for the first time, I was searching for a song like "Bitter Creek" - but I realised this only in retrospect. When I finally found the song at least a decade or so later, I must say - it seems like they spent all their time as a group trying to record a song like that, but succeeded once and once only. And what a success it is! It is their finest hour, Bernie Leadon's crowning glory as a songwriter. People say all kinds of things about "Hotel California" and think The Eagles did nothing more. After you've heard "Bitter Creek", you might think they should have stopped right then because they'd certainly achieved the essence of their "Eagle-ness" right there. They had crossed the frontier; they never should have tasted the fool's gold they did with their later LPs. "Hotel California" is, in comparison (not to put it too harshly) just too vapid.
In one of the live performances, Bernie says, "let's go out in the desert for a while..." No song I've ever heard evokes an American desert like "Bitter Creek" - it's a photograph, a 5 minute movie if you like, of Arizona. In its stone-hard guitar jangle, you can feel the sweat on your brow, the choking aridity in your throat, the bruises of cycads, the taste of grit and gravel in your bloody caked lips and teeth, metal spurs clanking on hard, unforgiving stone, the hiss of a rattlesnake at your heel, and the shadow of your nemesis towering behind you as he chases you down. The song effortlessly evokes all the best westerns - The Searchers, High Noon, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Gunfighter, Bad Day at Black Rock, Shane - and any others you can think of - all of them.
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One of the things rock groups did in the early days was record "concept albums".
A concept album isn't too hard to understand - it's just an album in which all songs contribute to the theme ("concept") of the album; sometimes there is a slim story running through which will typically reach its denouement at the last song but one, and the last song would be a kind of epilogue to the whole thing.
Of course this meant many things about the quality of such an album. The group might feel free to be a bit lax about writing bonafide songs; there would be unfinished bits sometimes strung together; or it would seem like an album of hastily assembled segues, not accomplished songs. This is indeed the quality of many a "concept album", it must be admitted.
Not so about Desperado. It is a creative tour-de-force. It is so finely honed that in Randy Meisner's "Certain Kind of Fool", it is absolutely impossible to discern whether the lyric is about a cowboy outlaw, or a rock musician. This is pivotal, because the "theme" or concept of this particular concept album is the life of an outlaw/rock star. It is hard to tell where (or indeed whether) the one ends and the other begins. The concept is developed quite consummately and evocatively, zoning right in and turning the spotlight on the potent and deadly toxin that both the outlaw and the rock star share - the absolute unwariness of the (inevitable) moment when the dream turns sour. It used to be fun once, but something happened, and now there's no way out.
"Certain Kind of Fool" ends with the absolutely amazing line "It wasn't for the money - at least it didn't start that way.....it wasn't for the running, but now he's running everyday.."
"Desperado" gets further into the skin of the whole concept, opening out a raw wound that never heals - "your prison is walking through this world all alone"; "you're losing all your highs and lows, ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?".
"Bitter Creek" takes the tale where it was galloping along to right from the start - to bitterness which needs to play out its song in defiance, even if it is the end of all song. It is, undoubtedly, the end of all things in the tale.
Am I really reading too much? Sometimes dreams turn sour and then trap us with their manipulation, their slavery of us. This is especially true of an outlaw who starts believing in his fragile fortune far too long to be able to escape when it lets him down; and for the rock star too, who believes his own words and lifestyle so much that he finds out, much too late, that he's been worshipping himself and that he is now trapped by what he's made of himself.
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The bitter irony and legacy of "Bitter Creek", of course, is that it proved to be prophetic, by hindsight - the experience of The Eagles as a group with the pot of gold they made for themselves with their music. The un-self-conscious, free-wheeling creative promise of the Desperado LP gave way to the mixed feelings of their next LP, 1974's ominously titled On The Border. One of These Nights (1975) brought them closer commercially to their gold, while the music got less interesting; the rot had well and truly set in. When their commercial peak arrived - 1976's much-Grammied trans-Atlantic international hit LP Hotel California, it caught them off-guard and totally by surprise. The musical creativity was conspicuously missing, though the band had not realised it. The dream had turned sour, but they didn't know it then. They had become superstars, but found the creative tap root empty, the emotional roller-coaster ride ultimately deadening; the bottom fell out of it all. They laboured over-cautiously and feverishly a few years over their next LP The Long Run (1979) by when they had to admit they'd had enough not just of their own music but of each other too; they were finished as a creative unit.
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The musicianship on "Bitter Creek", and also every track on Desperado is so un-self conscious that it is an absolute, rare delight. It's amazing what musicians can do when they really have nothing to prove. You hear nothing, on "Bitter Creek", of the leaden, tired, utterly ordinary groove you hear, on say, a track like "Victim of Love" (on the Hotel California LP) Ironically, when I finally heard "Bitter Creek" for the first time (in 1991), it was clear to me that this was what I had always believed The Eagles had been capable of; that they had promised much and delivered little on their other efforts.
Desperado was the last LP on which only the original four played, and looking back, it was their finest hour as a group. Of course I must say this is a minority view; by popular consent, everybody's favourite Eagles LP is Hotel California, and everyone's favourite Eagles song, "Hotel California". But I stopped running to the beat of that particular drummer long ago.....and I would urge you, listener, to do the same.....
The song says it well...."an old man told me.....tried to scold me.....'oh son, don't wade too deep....in bitter creek.'" Wish The Eagles might have listened to themselves back in 1973......
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Here's the entire Desperado LP in one video. "Bitter Creek" is the last but one song.
Once I was young and so unsure
I'd try any ill to find the cure
An old man told me
Tryin' to scold me
'oh, son, don't wade too deep in bitter creek....'
Out where the desert meets the sky
where I go when I wanna hide
Oh, peyote
She tried to show me
You know there ain't no cause to weep
At bitter creek
We're gonna hit the road for one last time
We can walk right in and steal 'em blind
All that money
No more runnin'
I can't wait to see the old man's face
When I win the race
Desperado (1973)
