Saturday Morning Soundtrack #66: "Hotel California" by The Eagles (1977)

With some new responsibilities on my plate Saturday Morning Soundtrack is going to be switching over to a new schedule. It'll really be more like "Every Second Saturday Morning Soundtrack" with me offering up the same semi-coherent fanatical ruminations on my favorite rock and roll songs on the second and fourth Saturday of each month (plus some special occasions).


Today I'm looking at arguably the best rock song of all time. In fact, I almost didn't pick the song because it was too well known, too obvious a choice. But at the end of the day, I still love this song, and its iconic guitar solos provided too good to pass up!

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Saturday Morning Soundtrack @ Youtube

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"Hotel California" by The Eagles (1977)

Back when I was a kid, back before the days where you could pretty much look up anything you wanted on the internet and find the answer, my friends and I would sit around listening to "Hotel California," trying to figure out what the song meant. There have been many interpretations of this song. In fact, certain meanings have become urban legend (the song even has its own page at snopes.com).

I had always heard that the song was about drug addiction (and that the "Hotel California" was the Betty Ford clinic). For others, the song was supposedly satanic, its ominous lyrics and sound a tribute to the devil, the "Hotel" being a church for Satan worshipers ("you just can't kill the Beast"). Still others thought that "Hotel California" was about a lunatic asylum where you can "check out any time you like, but you can never leave." Probably the most ridiculously literal interpretation is that the song is about an inn where the owners are secretly cannibals.

It's pretty well established what the song is about now, but before I go on and put a giant pin in the balloon of my childhood imagination, let me say this: It's wonderful that the song prompts so many interpretations. Good art does that. And while I'm not a big believer in the whole "death of the author" thing (yeah, we get it, critics are important too!), I do think it's important to acknoweldge that the author is never there with the consumer, can't explain what forces prompted the creation of the art in question. And so, while Henley may know what the song is "about," it doesn't really make his answer any more "right" than any of the other answers.

Well . . . except maybe that cannibalism one . . . that's just crazy.

As it turns out, the allegory of this song is much larger and less specific. In 2007, thirty years after the song charted, Don Henley did a lot of talking about the song's meaning, first to the Daily Mail, where he called the wild interpretations of the song "amazing" and offered this clarification: "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." He would later tell the the television news program 60 Minutes that all the intepretation was "so boring" and elaborate on the darker side of fame:

"It's a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and about excess in America which was something we knew about," said Henley. 

And so there you have it. Henley's always seemed a little prickly about the song, though the definitive (and funniest) Henley response was in an interview with The Plain Dealer. When informed that wine is not a "spirit," Henley goes off.

Thanks for the tutorial and, no, you're not the first to bring this to my attention—and you're not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor. Believe me, I've consumed enough alcoholic beverages in my time to know how they are made and what the proper nomenclature is. But that line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It's a sociopolitical statement. My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes.

Wow, Don, you mad, bro? (In Henley's defense, it is a completely asinine question.) 

Former Eagle and co-writer of the song, Don Felder (the "other" Don) is a little more celebratory in his discussion of the song, and he offers a more vivid picture of what the song means to him in an interview with Songfacts.com. 

As you're driving in Los Angeles at night, you can see the glow of the energy and the lights of Hollywood and Los Angeles for 100 miles out in the desert. And on the horizon, as you're driving in, all of these images start coming into your mind of the propaganda and advertisement you've experienced about California. In other words, the movie stars, the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, bikinis, palm trees, all those images that you see and that people think of when they think of California start running through your mind. You're anticipating that. That's all you know of California.

Felder's description is almost as vivid as the song itself. And the music industry of Los Angeles in the 1970s--its hedonism, and opulence, and greed, its sex and drugs, its money wars and materialism and culture of excess--is something the band knew a lot about. For the most part, the band members were all from the Midwest, and so their arrival in Los Angeles marked a loss of innocence. 

The real Hotel California isn't a place at all here (though there is, coincidentally, a Hotel California in Baja, California), instead its a way of life, a metaphorical prison with gilded bars where, as the song says, you can check out but there's no escape.

It's sort of the anti-Beach Boys look at California.

Still, despite how much fun it is to interpret the hell out of this song (and despite the fact that it should be very gratifying to know that people remain intrigued and entranced by the song), Henley makes a valid point: all this talk of "meaning" can be a little reductive, and it's easy to see why that would be frustrating. With so much mystery surrounding the lyrics, it's easy to overlook just how full they are with wonderful sensory details--the sights, smells, and sounds of this mystical courtyard at the end of a dark desert highway, its pungent flowers and ringing mission bells. It's also easy to overlook the music itself, that cool-of-the-evening drum rhythm, the foreboding organ riff, and the epic guitar back-and-forth between Felder and Joe Walsh (5:30 to the end). I know it's just arpeggiated chords, but it's perfect--the whole song is--and it's what keeps me coming back to this album year after year. I'll say it again, you can never leave "Hotel California." That musical excellence is also one of the reasons why this song jumped to the top of the charts in 1977 (despite the fact that conventional wisdom says it should have been too long for radio play) and has remained popular ever since.

Back in high school, we didn't just love this song. My friends and I were in a band, and we tried our hardest to cover this song. That was about as successful as you might imagine, but to us it didn't matter because "Hotel California," in spite of its dark overtones and warnings, was also some place far away from suburban Pennsylvania, and that made it magic.

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So what do you think? Did I get it right or miss the mark? Please, feel free to weigh in using the comments below. And, if you would like to write a Guest Entry for the "Saturday Morning Soundtrack" series where you creatively respond to one of your favorite rock songs, don't hesitate to contact me with queries.