Rock and Roll has been around for quite some time now. Over the years, an enormous number of musicians attempted to make a living playing the most thrilling musical genre ever, often lured by tales of glory and fortune.
In rock’n roll history, some bands struggle to take off, while others achieve stardom at lightning speed. Among those fortunate enough to fall into the latter category is the American band Eagles.
The band was formed in 1971 in Los Angeles, CA. Their debut album, Eagles, was released in 1972, and the singles “Take It Easy” and “Witchy Woman” went straight to the top 20 in the US and Canada.
The albums that followed also achieved a fair share of popularity, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 became the best-selling album in the USA, with 38 million copies sold, propelling them to become one of the most successful rock’n roll bands of the 1970s.
Hotel California
If we could encapsulate the band’s talent and creativity in one song, that would be ‘Hotel California’. The song was created as the opening single for the band’s 1976 album of the same name, which became the third best-selling record in the USA.
If you ask ten different fans about the meaning of ‘Hotel California,’ you will receive ten different answers. People will say the song is about a haunted hotel, or dreams during an acid trip, and even about a satanic experience. However, the creators of the song, Don Felder (music), Glenn Frey, and Don Henley (lyrics), had a different story.
– “Hotel California is about materialism and the feeling that no matter how much you possess, it will never be enough”.– California is used as the song’s setting, but it could be anywhere in America and beyond. In 2007, Don Henley said, “I know, it’s so boring. It’s a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream and about excess in America, which was something we were already aware of. It’s a song about a journey from innocence to experience.“
However, the song wasn’t meant to point fingers at others; instead, it zeroed in on the band members themselves.
We often hear that some celebrities struggle to cope with fame and fortune, and this is a universal truth. It is a tale that members of many rock’n roll bands have gone through; one day you have nothing, and then, in the next chapter of your life, you are a millionaire, adored by thousands of fans, and living a life with no limits. Henley chose the theme of the song, pointing out how The Beverly Hills Hotel had become a literal and symbolic focus of their lives at the time.
He said of their personal and professional experience in LA: “We were getting an extensive education, in life, in love, in business. Beverly Hills was still a mythical place to us. In that sense, it became something of a symbol, and the ‘Hotel’ the locus of all that LA had come to mean for us. In a sentence, I’d sum it up as the end of innocence, round one.”
Frey also came up with a story of a person who, fed up with driving long distances in the desert, saw a place to rest and pulled in for the night. However, he entered “a weird world peopled by freaky characters”, and became “quickly spooked by the claustrophobic feeling of being caught in a disturbing web from which he may never escape.”
Frey described the song as a cinematic montage, “just one shot to the next … a picture of a guy on the highway, a picture of the hotel, the guy walks in, the door opens, strange people.”
Frey said he and Henley wanted the song “to open like an episode of the Twilight Zone”, saying: “We take this guy and make him like a character in The Magus, where every time he walks through a door, there’s a new version of reality. We wanted to write a song just like it was a movie.”
Henley wrote most of the lyrics based on Frey’s ideas and also drew inspiration from driving out into the desert, as well as from films and theatre.
Meanwhile, some of the lyrics, such as ‘Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes-Benz / She got a lot of pretty pretty boys she calls friends’, were based on Henley’s break-up with girlfriend Loree Rodkin.
Wild Theories
In those chaotic years before the internet, people could freely write about anything and express their opinions, and responses would take a long time to arrive. It was just natural that different people would come with their perspectives about the lyrics of Hotel California and write about it as if it were the undisputed truth.
In the Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volume 1, Steve Sullivan theorized that the “spirit” that the Hotel California hasn’t had since 1969, refers to the spirit of social activism of the 1960s.
In the 1980s, the Reverand Paul Risley of Cornerstone Church in Wisconsin claimed that ‘Hotel California’ referred to a San Francisco hotel bought by Anton LaVey and converted into his Church of Satan.
The word ‘colitas’ in the song has been interpreted as sexual slang or a nod to marijuana. ‘Colitas’ means ‘little tails’ in Spanish, while in Mexican slang it refers to buds of the cannabis plant.
Other claims suggested that the Hotel California was the Camarillo State Mental Hospital.
Other interpretations of the song include heroin addiction and cannibalism.
It is clear that the writers left the door open for some wild theories about the song’s meaning, but at some point, it just got out of hand.
Henley once said: “Some of the wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about the uneasy balance between art and commerce.”
The jorney to get it right
It took a great deal of dedication to perfect the song. Hotel California was a work of love from every member of the band.
A demo of the song’s instrumental was created by Don Felder in a rented house on Malibu Beach.
Felder’s demo for ‘Hotel California’ had influences from Latin and reggae music, and it intrigued Henley, who said he liked the song that “sounds like a Mexican reggae or Bolero”, giving its first working title, ‘Mexican Reggae’.
They first recorded the song’s riff, but for the vocals, the key was too high for Henley’s voice, so Felder lowered the key from E minor, to B minor.
The second recording had the tempo set too fast, and the song sounded odd. They came back to the studio with a different tune for the instruments and lyrics, and recorded several takes. Five or six of the best ones were selected, and the best parts were mixed together.
Producer Bill Szymczyk said there were 33 edits on the two‑inch master. The final version had a guitar battle between Joe Walsh and Felder.
Henley decided that the song should be a single, but Felder had doubts, and the record company wasn’t sure about releasing a six minute single, which far exceeded that of the songs generally played by radio stations. However, the band took a stand and refused the label’s request to shorten the song.
‘Hotel California’ topped the US charts for a week in May 1977, their fourth song to achieve the feat.
In 2009, the song was certified Platinum by the RIAA for sales of one million digital downloads, and has since sold over 3 million downloads.
In the UK, it reached a peak of number eight.
The hotel on the album cover is the Beverly Hills Hotel, known as the Pink Palace. The photo was taken by photographers David Alexander and John Kosh, who sat in a cherry-picker about 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard to get the shot. However, the rush-hour traffic at the time made the experience rather difficult!
According to Rolling Stone, Julia Phillips, the producer of films Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, wanted to make a movie based on the song’s story. The band members and Phillips met up to discuss the idea. In her book, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, she stated that the band members were difficult to deal with and arrogant.
Rolling Stone reported that the band was not upset at the film being scrapped, as they were not particularly in love with the idea of a movie version.
The most beautiful guitar solo ever.
When I fell in love with ‘Hotel California’ I didn’t know to speak English, so it was, in the first place, the song’s guitar solos that sunk deep into my heart. I always dreamed to become a guitar player but the lack of talent and discipline, prevented me to make this dream come true. But one thing I have learned during the time I spent with my guitar, to admire those who can actually play it.
The iconic closing guitar solo in “Hotel California” was performed by both Don Felder and Joe Walsh (pictured above). Felder wrote the initial chord progression and solo parts, and the famous dual-guitar solo features both guitarists performing what sounds like a ‘duel’, trading lead lines before harmonizing together.
Later in life I understood the song’s lyrics and also fell in love with the ‘Twilight Zone’ feeling of it, making the journey complete. For me, ‘Hotel California’ will always be one of the greatest classic rock ever.
The Classic Machines 
I went to a “songwriters in the round” show in Nashville a few years ago. One of the songwriters was Tony Arata who wrote Garth Brooks’ song “The Dance”. I asked him if it was about someone dying and he said it was up to the listener to decide what it was about. Sounds like the Eagles succeeded in doing the same thing.
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Wow. “Songwriters in the Round”, I bet this event was pretty cool.
We never know what he artist was feeling when writing a song or painting a picture, that is one of the may fascinating aspects of the art.
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