The Eagles’ Hotel California (1977)

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.

The Eagles

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