Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon started writing this song when he was a member of The Flying Burrito Brothers. Once Bernie joined the Eagles, he and Don Henley finished the song in Eagles fashion. It was one of the first songs Henley wrote.
Leadon and Henley wrote this about a number of women they had met. It is not meant to portray the woman as devilish, but as more of a seductress.
The Eagles was the group's first album. It was produced by Glyn Johns, an Englishman who had previously worked with The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. They recorded it at Olympic Studios in London in just three weeks; the group became far less efficient over time - their 1979 album The Long Run took more than two years to make.
According to the liner notes for The Very Best of the Eagles, the song originated with guitarist Bernie Leadon playing a "strange, minor-key riff that sounded sort of like a Hollywood movie version of Indian music." The song's lyrics didn't develop until Henley went down with a flu and high fever while he was reading a book about Zelda Fitzgerald. "I think that figured into the mix somehow - along with amorphous images of girls I had met at the Whisky and the Troubadour," he recalled.
