The Battle of Criteria Studios: the band that almost sabotaged ‘Hotel California’
Every musician needs a certain setup when they’re writing or recording their music. A fact that almost dismantled the entirety of the Eagles’ masterpiece, Hotel California.
Recorded between Criteria and Record Plant studios, Hotel California was a blend of firsts and lasts for the Eagles. Aside from the obvious with Joe Walsh and Randy Meisner, the title track is what they built around, including loss in a general sense – from excess, the American dream, and the end of counterculture.
“The word, ‘California,’ carries with it all kinds of connotations, powerful imagery, mystique, etc., that fires the imaginations of people in all corners of the globe,” Don Henley told Rolling Stone. “There’s a built-in mythology that comes with that word, an American cultural mythology that has been created by both the film and the music industry.”
As such, ‘Hotel California’ captures all of this disillusionment with a fictional hotel that entraps its visitors. Like the counterculture scene and much of what Henley described, the hotel is somewhere that masks as paradise and yet holds all of society’s fallacies. It’s somewhere that’s real and yet painfully not real, making you feel it’s the best place you could be until you realise all isn’t what it seems.
And this became the vision for the rest of the record. Using LA as “a microcosm of the whole United States,” the band sought to spotlight all of the country’s mishaps and shortcomings. All while capturing the feeling of being too far gone – something that once seemed great has been charred by its own systems, and there’s no going back, unless we go through some intense grassroots-level changes.
As you can imagine, anchoring such a hefty concept was a challenge. Made even more difficult by their experience at Criteria studios, when they’d needed the right conditions to get into the right headspace. Little did they know, Black Sabbath recording at the same studio at the same time would end up being the bane of their life – their noises coming through so loudly they had to stop multiple times and wait it out.
Tony Iommi recalls this in his book Iron Man, saying, “Off we went to the Criteria Studios in Miami. We’d heard that The Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles used it. In fact, the Eagles were recording Hotel California while we were there. They sometimes had to stop because of us, because we were too loud and it was leaking through into their studio: ‘Wrrooaarr!’”
But before you view the Eagles and Sabbath as the quintessential ends of good and evil, it wasn’t quite like that. In fact, Sabbath was just as affected by some of the Eagles’ practices at Criteria, Geezer Butler recalling one moment when they’d left some cocaine that needed cleaning up. Henley once said cocaine was his “writing tool”, which removes any suspicion that it was for purely recreational purposes. But it didn’t stop their musical comrades from feeling a little huffy.
“Before we could even start recording, we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board,” Butler concluded. “I think they’d left about a pound of cocaine in the board.”
