![]() ![]() It's probably worth bearing in mind Frey's words: "We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it”. The chords he strummed followed a pattern closer to flamenco than to rock, but played on the off-beat, which gave the song its working title of Mexican Reggae when Frey and Henley granted it the nod.Īs for the words the pair added, they describe a weary traveller who's lured into a "lovely place" of grotesque characters: it's glamorous and creepy and it seems he can never escape.Ī lot of imagination has been exerted in the last four decades trying to decode the song's images, or to assemble them into something coherent. Susan and son flew immediately to a rented beach house in Malibu Don joined them and that evening duly began recording a suggestion for a song.Ī snake in an apparently idyllic garden is the kind of on-the-nose image that would have fitted right in with what his rhythm track was to become. ![]() It was a short call: "We're moving." Relaxing in their garden, she had noticed that the blanket she was lying on with the baby was next to a nest of rattlesnakes. He had been doing this at home in Los Angeles' Topanga Canyon, but while on tour he took a call from his wife Susan, who had recently given birth. The Eagles were not yet at the point of communicating via lawyers, but they were referring to one another by surname.Īnother Eagles guitarist, Don Felder, was tasked with recording instrumental snatches onto tape and submitting them to Frey and Henley in hope of their approval. The senior Eagles, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, quietly tolerated Walsh's destruction but when it was their turn to write about what life on the road meant to them, the result was much less literal - and it made an enormous fortune rather than costing a small one.ĭon Henley had been playing with the phrase "Hotel California" for some time, but to become a song, it had to go through the regimented process the band had adopted by the mid-1970s. ![]() In the official history of the band, Walsh recalls a single night at Chicago's Astor Towers in which he and Blues Brothers star John Belushi managed a $28,000 ( £22,000) damage bill.Īmong other bands, misuse of the hospitality industry was part of the legend - think of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham roaring down the corridors of Los Angeles' Continental Hyatt on a Harley Davidson he'd got for his birthday, or The Who's drummer Keith Moon, on his own birthday, ploughing a Lincoln Continental into the swimming pool of Flint Michigan's Holiday Inn. ![]() "I live in hotels, tear out the walls," he confesses: "I have accountants pay for it all." In Life's Been Good, sometime Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh describes the process bluntly. Rock stars of the 1970s were not kind to hotels. What is the spooky title track all about, asks Alan Connor. “ Michael Jackson's Thriller has been overtaken as the all-time best-selling album in the US by the Eagles' greatest hits, and that band's album Hotel California is at number three. In 2018, the BBC published an article regarding the meaning behind the classic track: I was interesting learning about the making of the track and where its inspiration came from. There are a few articles that are worth sourcing. Still widely played on radio, the single reached the top spot in the U.S. Such a strong start to a remarkable album! Written by band members Don Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, with a great lead vocal from Henley, the song is instantly recognisable. Opening with Hotel California, New Kid in Town and Life in the Fast Lane, one is hooked right away. So vivid are the lyrics, there are all sort of scenes and scenarios that race through the mind! The album itself is one of the best-selling of all time. Of all the tracks ever released, I think that I would go back to Hotel California and shoot something. It is a shame that there was not a huge and ambitious music video made for it. Taken from the Hotel California album of 1976, I think the song is one of the best ever released. To mark its forty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to spend time with a song I have written about before. Eagles’ Hotel California was released as a single on 22nd February, 1977. ![]()
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