The 1995 song Don Henley called “the best video” he made
When Don Henley was first experiencing fame with the Eagles during the 1970s, the importance of having striking visuals to accompany every single was virtually non-existent.
With no such thing as MTV to broadcast them on, bands and artists weren’t making music videos as a matter of habit, or considering it to be an essential part of the marketing and publicity process. If a band wanted to impress their audience in a visual way, it would have to be done through promotional photographs, live performances and album artwork, but video was certainly not the most common option taken by acts at this time.
You’d be lucky to get as much as a simple three-camera teaser clip of the band miming a live performance broadcast on terrestrial television, let alone a high-production short film, but by the time the band had decided to call it quits in 1980, things were on the cusp of changing dramatically, with music videos becoming more of a common art form for artists to explore.
During a 2026 interview with Buddy Magazine, Henley spoke about how he became accustomed to exploring the form, and while he wasn’t making visually striking masterpieces when he first embarked on his solo career away from his old band, by the mid-1990s, he had fully embraced the need to accompany singles with a video and was going all in on the production.
Henley proclaimed that his personal favourite video that he ever worked on was 1995’s ‘The Garden of Allah’, which was a standalone single used to promote the release of his greatest hits album, Actual Miles. Shot in black and white and featuring striking visuals that reflect the themes of evil that Henley explores in the lyrics, it’s a far more adventurous affair than anything he was making at the start of his solo career, and understandable as to why he would have considered it his masterpiece in this sense.
He continued, explaining the context behind the song and its title, which, much like his Eagles hit ‘Hotel California’, takes its name from a place where one could lay their head for the night. “Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, there was a hotel at the corner of Sunset and Crescent,” Henley said. “It was run by a Russian woman, and her name was Alla Nazimova.”
Elaborating further, he also corrected the misconception about the song’s perceived connection to religion. “People think it has something to do with Islam, and it doesn’t,” he continued. “It’s this woman, she called the hotel the Garden of Allah, and there used to be wild parties there. Marlene Dietrich would swim nude, and her first Technicolour movie was 1936’s Garden of Allah.”
“Kirk Douglas is in the video, and he remembers the place. Charlie Chaplin hung out there. It was sort of the equivalent of the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
Don Henley
So why was the song about evil, and why were the visuals so rooted in this theme? Essentially, Henley was attempting to warn people of the ills of the entertainment industry, their obsession with image and fashion, and how society has stooped so low in this regard that Satan himself is no longer able to find a purpose to punish people, since they’re doing it all themselves.
The visuals look a little dated now, but you can see why Henley would have been absolutely thrilled to have produced something of this quality at the time, and you can bet that he had a blast making it as the perfect accompaniment to his bitter and scathing social commentary.
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