See Felder talk about his major contribution at the top and see him play the “Hotel California” solo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a clip from CBS’s Sunday Morning. The hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor not only for the myth-making of Southern California, but for the myth-making that is the American Dream, because it is a fine line between the American Dream, and the American nightmare.Īs for those baroque guitar arrangements? For that part of the story, we must turn to Don Felder, who composed the song - after Walsh joined the band to replace Bernie Leadon - in order to showcase the talents of two lead players. On just about every album we made, there was some kind of commentary on the music business, and on American culture in general. Henley’s most trenchant commentary on the song comes from the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, in which he talks frankly about the band’s critical take on their success and the culture that produced and embraced “Hotel California”: As far as I’m concerned, she’s the Norma Desmond of her generation.” Some of the more derogatory parts of ‘Hotel California,’ however, are definitely about Loree Rodkin – ‘Her mind is Tiffany twisted, she got the Mercedes bends/She got a lot of pretty boys that she calls friends’ – that’s about her, and I wouldn’t be crowing if I were Ms. jewelry designer Loree Rodkin, as he later admitted: “There’s some of every girl I’ve ever been with in all my songs they’re combinations of characters, like fiction. “Hotel California” also “hides” a dig at Eagles rivals Steely Dan in the lyrics, “they stab it with their steely knives” and barely conceals Henley’s contempt for his ex-girlfriend, L.A. “Nobody was from California,” Walsh says. I guess you could say it’s a song about loss of innocence” - a feeling, as Joe Walsh says in the interview clip above, that came out of the experience of arriving and trying to make it in L.A. Lyrically, the song deals with traditional or classical themes of conflict: darkness and light, good and evil, youth and age, the spiritual versus the secular. The song, Henley said in a 1995 interview, “sort of captured the zeitgeist of the time, which was a time of great excess in this country and in the music business in particular…. There was, of course, more to the song - the standard interpretation of “Hotel California” as a critique of 1970s excesses has been affirmed by Don Henley and Frey, who wrote most of the lyrics. Its working title was “Mexican Reggae,” a nod to the unusual strumming pattern, which “followed a pattern closer to flamenco than to rock,” Savage writes, “but played on the off-beat.” The forbidding landscape in the song’s lyrics, an “atmosphere of a man in an unfamiliar rural setting, unsure about what he’s witnessing,” came from the 1965 novel The Magus by English author John Fowles, a countercultural favorite, says Glen Frey: “We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it.” In truth, “Hotel California” is neither written in praise of Satan nor America. “Hotel California” has been so closely identified with American culture that “when a US spy plane made an emergency landing in China in 2001,” Mark Savage notes at the BBC, “the crew members were asked to recite the lyrics to prove their nationality.” had no trouble identifying with a band that sang like angels and partied like devils,” writes Marc Eliot. “They reflected the emerging musical style of a 70s post-war America, and the first truly sexually liberated generation…. For the Eagles, hell was the other people in the band, the constant touring, and the incredible amounts of money thrown their way, more curse than blessing, apparently.ĭespite these internal tensions, the Eagles produced a perfect soundtrack for the 70s. By the time they made their last album of the 70s, The Long Run, they felt trapped in a celebrity hell, one that would have to freeze over before they reunited, as Don Henley remarked (hence the title of 1994’s Hell Freezes Over). Hotel California, the album, rocketed the Eagles beyond “success on a frightening level” and into total burnout.
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