FEATURE:
You Can Check-Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave!
Eagles’ Hotel California at Forty-Five
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WITH a B-side of Pretty Maids All in a Row…
Eagles’ Hotel California was released as a single on 22nd February, 1977. To mark its forty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to spend time with a song I have written about before. Taken from the Hotel California album of 1976, I think the song is one of the best ever released. It is a shame that there was not a huge and ambitious music video made for it. Of all the tracks ever released, I think that I would go back to Hotel California and shoot something. So vivid are the lyrics, there are all sort of scenes and scenarios that race through the mind! The album itself is one of the best-selling of all time. Opening with Hotel California, New Kid in Town and Life in the Fast Lane, one is hooked right away. Such a strong start to a remarkable album! Written by band members Don Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, with a great lead vocal from Henley, the song is instantly recognisable. Still widely played on radio, the single reached the top spot in the U.S. There are a few articles that are worth sourcing. I was interesting learning about the making of the track and where its inspiration came from. In 2018, the BBC published an article regarding the meaning behind the classic track:
“Michael Jackson's Thriller has been overtaken as the all-time best-selling album in the US by the Eagles' greatest hits, and that band's album Hotel California is at number three. What is the spooky title track all about, asks Alan Connor.
Rock stars of the 1970s were not kind to hotels.
In Life's Been Good, sometime Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh describes the process bluntly. "I live in hotels, tear out the walls," he confesses: "I have accountants pay for it all."
"It all" being a small fortune. In the official history of the band, Walsh recalls a single night at Chicago's Astor Towers in which he and Blues Brothers star John Belushi managed a $28,000 ( £22,000) damage bill.
Among other bands, misuse of the hospitality industry was part of the legend - think of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham roaring down the corridors of Los Angeles' Continental Hyatt on a Harley Davidson he'd got for his birthday, or The Who's drummer Keith Moon, on his own birthday, ploughing a Lincoln Continental into the swimming pool of Flint Michigan's Holiday Inn.
The senior Eagles, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, quietly tolerated Walsh's destruction but when it was their turn to write about what life on the road meant to them, the result was much less literal - and it made an enormous fortune rather than costing a small one.
Don Henley had been playing with the phrase "Hotel California" for some time, but to become a song, it had to go through the regimented process the band had adopted by the mid-1970s. The Eagles were not yet at the point of communicating via lawyers, but they were referring to one another by surname.
Another Eagles guitarist, Don Felder, was tasked with recording instrumental snatches onto tape and submitting them to Frey and Henley in hope of their approval. He had been doing this at home in Los Angeles' Topanga Canyon, but while on tour he took a call from his wife Susan, who had recently given birth.
It was a short call: "We're moving." Relaxing in their garden, she had noticed that the blanket she was lying on with the baby was next to a nest of rattlesnakes. Susan and son flew immediately to a rented beach house in Malibu; Don joined them and that evening duly began recording a suggestion for a song.
A snake in an apparently idyllic garden is the kind of on-the-nose image that would have fitted right in with what his rhythm track was to become. The chords he strummed followed a pattern closer to flamenco than to rock, but played on the off-beat, which gave the song its working title of Mexican Reggae when Frey and Henley granted it the nod.
As for the words the pair added, they describe a weary traveller who's lured into a "lovely place" of grotesque characters: it's glamorous and creepy and it seems he can never escape.
A lot of imagination has been exerted in the last four decades trying to decode the song's images, or to assemble them into something coherent. It's probably worth bearing in mind Frey's words: "We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it”.
There are a couple of other features that provide further detail when it comes to a song that is so engrossing and memorable. American Songwriter revisited the meaning of Hotel California in a great feature last year:
“So what is the true meaning of Hotel California?
The same narrative arc found in The Magus, going from sincere idealism and earnest curiosity to a sense of darkness and despondence, runs parallel to so much. Like coming of age and the loss of innocence. Or the sparkling allure of golden age California’s dashing but dangerous lifestyle of cash and drugs. Or the energetically revolutionary but eventually fleeting spirit of the 1960s. And maybe even the entire American experience.
You start with nothing. It all looks so good! Then you get everything. And you get crushed under the weight of everything’s excess. What was it all for to begin with?
So “Hotel California” is a sort of broad allegory for rising and falling? Maybe.
Here is what the band members themselves have said about the song’s meaning:
The band members themselves have offered a variety of different explanations for the meaning of “Hotel California.” They’ve said it’s a socio-political statement. They’ve said it’s about darkness and light. And they’ve said it’s about the self-destruction that comes from greed and hedonism.
But of course, all of those things are hard to put your finger right on. And maybe that is why the song has been interpreted in so many different ways over the years. When art so perfectly reflects the experience of life, it can be about everything and one specific thing at the same time, depending on the consumer of the art. Like a sort of lyrical Rorschach test.
The song’s true meaning, like life itself, is elusive. And maybe that is exactly the point.
What does “Hotel California” have to say about modern times?
Even if the exact meaning of “Hotel California” is subject to some degree of individual interpretation, there are certain themes deeply imbued in the song. Chief among them is the danger of excess.
California. America. Rock and Roll. The 1960s. Even The Eagles themselves. All have suffered from excess in some way, whether it be drugs, wealth, success, and even a desire for change.
As it is today, we find ourselves locked in a time of extremes. No middle ground. No moderation.
If “Hotel California” has anything to tell us about modern times, maybe it’s that we need to take things down a notch. Don’t get too high and don’t get too low. Focus on the little things in life. The things that matter most”.
Apologies if there is any repetition regarding the information sourced about Hotel California. LOUDER spoke wot Don Felder last year about he helped to write the song which is, perhaps, the best-known from the Eagles:
“When I first joined the band, my high school band mate Bernie Leadon told me, ‘If you want to wrote songs with Don [Henley] and Glenn [Frey], just make musical beds for them, don’t try to give them full songs with lyrics, because that’s their job’. So ahead of making what turned out to be the Hotel California album, I wrote 15 or 16 demo songs, based on that approach.
"Two of them ended up on the record, one of which was Victim Of Love, and the other which became the title track. Truthfully, at the time, Hotel California was just another song on the cassette. I didn’t necessarily think it was the best song, but Don called me up after a few days living with the music and said, ‘I really like that one that sounds like Mexican reggae’, and I knew which one he meant.
"So we started kicking around ideas for it. Glenn came up with the original concept of Hotel California, and then Henley sat down and wrote those fantastic lyrics. His lyrics are like little photographs, which, much like reading a book rather than watching a movie, allows you to draw pictures in your mind. ‘On a dark desert highway’, that’s five words, but it already puts a picture in your head: ‘Cold wind in my hair’, you can feel it, you can see it."
"The guitar solo was straight from my demo. Joe Walsh and I had played together on [1976 live album] You Can’t Argue With A Sick Mind, before he joined the Eagles, and so I wanted to write something that would incorporate how he and I played together. It was just a guide solo, but by the time we got to make the Hotel California record, Don Henley had been living with that music for over a year, and he wanted the solo done note-for-note, so the solo on the song is identical to what was on the demo.
"To be honest, I thought the song was too long. In the ’70s AM radio wouldn’t play songs longer than 3 minutes and 30 seconds, but Hotel California has one minute of music before Don even starts singing, and a two minute guitar solo at the end. It was just the wrong format. But Henley insisted the record company put it out as a single. And I’ve never been so delighted to have been proved so wrong.
"It’s an honour and unexpected surprise to have been part of writing, producing and playing on a record that has had such global success. About four or five years ago I played a show for the United Nations at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, to an audience of about 500 people, including presidents and heads of state. I played Hotel California and no matter what language people spoke, or what country they were from, everyone sang the entire song. That’s when I saw that the song truly had a global impact”.
On 22nd February, Eagles’ Hotel California turns forty-five. Anthemic, epic and absolutely exceptional, Hotel California is a song we will be talking about for years to come. For its anniversary, go and find the song, turn it up and sing along. I think that it is impossible not be fall in love…
WITH this classic cut.