December 1976 saw the release of the Eagles’ Hotel California album, with its eponymous single released in the following February. This was right in the middle of a seminal time for me in terms of musical flowering (the release of the records straddled my 14th birthday) and it hit the spot just as surely as songs by the likes of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens and David Bowie had in the year or two previously. I loved the way the song told a story (a slightly discomfiting, odd story at that) and how it audaciously included an exquisite and lengthy guitar solo (2 minutes and 12 seconds) that would become the bane of radio producers bred to keep musical offerings short and sweet (the whole song is six and a half minutes long).
Hotel California was the Eagles’ fifth album and they were already the biggest band in America when they embarked on its recording. Sadly, personal relationships in the band had already broken down (a repeating theme in the life of the band, despite which, amazingly, the band endured); nonetheless, personal enmities never stood in the way of the band creating ground-breaking music. Guitarist Don Felder came up with the Hotel California riff, which was then developed by Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Frey’s lyrics were inspired by an attempt to “expand our lyrical horizons and try to take on something in the realm of the bizarre, like Steely Dan had done”.
He certainly nailed it: the brooding imagery around this faded hotel in the middle of nowhere (the hotel in The Shining about sums it up in my head) is magnificently evocative and the lyrics are peppered with killer lines. I cannot conceive of a better line, given the preceding lyrics and leading into the iconic guitar solo, than “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave”. Then again, have there ever been two opening lines – “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair” – so evocative of a place and milieu? I could go on (“some dance to remember, some dance to forget” et al), but let’s instead just enjoy the whole piece and its wonderful duelling guitars at this live performance at Largo, Maryland, in 1977.
