hotel california

The Eagles soared to the top of the charts and had their biggest hit with the Mexican reggae of this wildly misinterpreted allegory of excess and materialism.  Don Felder came up with the idea for 'Hotel California' on the beach and Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote most of the lyrics.  

Felder remembers:  "I had just leased this house out on the beach at Malibu, I guess it was around '74 or '75. I remember sitting in the living room, with all the doors wide open on a spectacular July day. I had this acoustic 12-string and I started tinkling around with it, and those Hotel California chords just kind of oozed out. Every once in a while it seems like the cosmos part and something great just plops in your lap...The one place that I was able to freely create without the iron fist was in my own studio, not in the band and not in the studio with them. It was my one place to really look at this band, no matter what the makeup of the band as far as members.  Having studied how Don plays drums — I play drums — when I’d write tracks I would play drums in my demo studio how I thought Don would play. I would write parts for him. I knew what Glenn was good at, and I’d write guitar parts that he could manage. So, each part I came up with I’d write to fit each member of the band. It was like you had a cast of characters on a sitcom, and you knew the character of each person in the ensemble, and you’d have to write to their strengths. That’s really what I tried to do. If I wrote a complicated drum part, we would never record it, because Don couldn’t play it. He plays very simply, has a great feel, way behind the beat. But he’s not a technician, so you can’t write complicated parts.  When I was writing tracks for the Hotel California record, I wrote for two lead guitar players, Joe (Walsh) and I. I wrote thinking that this was an opportunity for me to write stuff that Joe and I could do together. I wrote bass parts, too. As a matter of a fact, on “One of These Nights” I had to write the bass part and show it to Randy (Meisner), because he was locked in a snow storm in Nebraska, and I was in the studio. So I said, 'OK, I’ll play bass.'   We cut the demo of that song with me playing bass. I wrote all the bass lines, and Randy came in the next day, and I showed him the part. I also wrote the bass part for 'Hotel California'. That bass part comes out of jazz from my time in New York. If you look at stand-up jazz bass players, they all play those sort of root fifth octave lines. That’s really what that is. It’s a jazz approach to playing reggae."

Glenn Frey says:  "The song began as a demo tape, an instrumental by Don Felder. He’d been submitting tapes and song ideas to us since he’d joined the band, always instrumentals, since he didn’t sing. But this particular demo, unlike many of the others, had room for singing. It immediately got our attention. The first working title, the name we gave it, was ‘Mexican Reggae'."

Felder:  "Don Henley and Glenn wrote most of the words. All of us kind of drove into L.A. at night. Nobody was from California, and if you drive into L.A. at night... you can just see this glow on the horizon of lights, and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have, and so it was kind of about that... what we started writing the song about. Coming into L.A.... and from that 'Life in the Fast Lane' came out of it, and 'Wasted Time' and a bunch of other songs."

Henley:  It's a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and about excess in America which was something we knew about...We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest. Hotel California was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles."

Frey:  "That record explores the under belly of success, the darker side of Paradise. Which was sort of what we were experiencing in Los Angeles at that time. So that just sort of became a metaphor for the whole world and for everything you know. And we just decided to make it Hotel California. So with a microcosm of everything else going on around us."

Henley:  "California is just a melting pot for America anyway. It's just a synthesis and it's avant-garde, it's a leader. Whatever happens here usually filters out to the rest of the nation. People make a mistake if they think that Hotel California was just about California-it was a metaphor for the rest of the world. That sounds pretty grandiose but that's what we had in mind when we wrote it. California is in the vanguard, the Fast Lane."

The metaphorical imagery of the lyrics has led to numerous urban legends and speculation about the meaning of the song. Some have said that it referred to a San Francisco hotel purchased by Anton LaVey and converted into the Church of Satan, while other rumors assert it was the Camarillo State Mental Hospital or the Playboy Mansion.  Henley says:  "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."

"Colitas" has been interpreted as a flower or a sexual reference; but it is a Spanish word translated to Henley by the Eagles Mexican-American road manager meaning "Little Buds," and is a reference to marijuana.   The "steely knives" refer to Steely Dan. The bands shared the same manager and had a friendly rivalry. The year before, Steely Dan included the line "Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening" on their song 'Everything You Did'.   The hotel on the album cover is the Beverly Hills Hotel, also known as the Pink Palace. It was taken by photographers David Alexander and John Kosh, who sat in a cherry-picker about sixty feet above Sunset Boulevard to get the shot of the hotel at sunset from above the trees.  On the inner cover the shadowy figure in the window upstair has been claimed to be Anton LaVey, but is actually a woman who was hired for the shoot.

The band spent eight months working on multiple takes.  Henley recalls:  "We just locked ourselves in. We had a refrigerator, a ping pong table, roller skates and a couple cots. We would go in and stay for two or three days at a time."  Don Henley sang lead vocals and played drums; Glenn Frey played 12-string acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and did backing vocals; Don Felder played lead guitar, 12-string electric guitar, and did backing vocals; Joe Walsh also played lead guitar and did backing vocals; Randy Meisner played bass guitar and did backing vocals.    'Hotel California' was an international hit single going to number eight in the UK, six in the Netherlands, five in Norway and New Zealand, and number one in Canada and the US.  It also won the 1977 Grammy for Record Of The Year. The Eagles did not show up to accept the award, as Don Henley did not believe in contests. They watched the ceremony on television while they were rehearsing.  The song has been certified platinum with the addition of one million digital downloads.  








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Hotel California from Krzysztof Pakula on Vimeo.

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dimmer
I had to stop for the night.

There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself
'This could be heaven or this could be Hell'
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face.
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year (any time of year) you can find it here

Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, that she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget

So I called up the Captain,
'Please bring me my wine'
He said, 'we haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty-nine'
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say"

Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face.
They livin' it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise), bring your alibis

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said, 'we are all just prisoners here, of our own device'
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
'Relax' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'







'Hotel California'
full album:

https://www.last.fm/music/Eagles/Hotel+California
https://open.spotify.com/album/2widuo17g5CEC66IbzveRu
https://soundcloud.com/eaglesofficial/sets/hotel-california-40th

Side one
1. "Hotel California"   Don Felder, Don Henley, Glenn Frey Henley 6:30
2. "New Kid in Town"   Henley, Frey, J. D. Souther Frey 5:03
3. "Life in the Fast Lane"   Henley, Frey, Joe Walsh Henley 4:46
4. "Wasted Time"   Henley, Frey Henley 4:55
Side two
1. "Wasted Time (Reprise)"   Henley, Frey, Jim Ed Norman Instrumental 1:22
2. "Victim of Love"   Felder, Henley, Frey, Souther Henley 4:11
3. "Pretty Maids All in a Row"   Walsh, Joe Vitale Walsh 3:58
4. "Try and Love Again"   Randy Meisner Meisner 5:10
5. "The Last Resort"   Henley, Frey Henley 7:28