“A bizarre mix of musical influences”: Why the Eagles initially thought ‘Hotel California’ was strange
Love it or loathe it, ‘Hotel California’ is among the most iconic classic rock songs of all time. Launching Eagles into mainstream rock stardom and quickly becoming their definitive anthem, the song represented the pinnacle of American rock during the 1970s. Nowadays, after the song has been played endlessly by classic rock stations across the world for five decades, ‘Hotel California’ is as middle-of-the-road as it comes. However, when Glenn Frey and Don Henley first introduced the song to their bandmates, it might as well have been written by Martians.
After all, the Eagles had been together for some five years before Frey and Henley landed upon the idea of ‘Hotel California’. That was enough time for the band to fall into something of a routine when it came to songwriting and recording. Admittedly, this method had worked well for the group up until that point, with their Greatest Hits compilation quickly becoming one of the best-selling rock records of all time. However, that routine was also becoming tiresome for the core of the band, and tensions between its members seemed endlessly on the rise.
Looking to break out of the routine and craft a bold new sound for the group, Frey and Henley started working on the early incarnation of ‘Hotel California’. Reportedly, the pair “wanted to write a song that was sort of like an episode of the Twilight Zone,” as Frey once told NBC. The classic sci-fi show forms an unlikely avenue of inspiration for the song, which has been rumoured to be about everything from Satanic cults to heroin usage.
“All of our songs were cinematic,” continued Frey, “but we wanted to open up with [a montage]. It was just one shot to the next – a picture of a guy on the highway, a picture of the hotel, the guy walks in, the door opens, strange people. We take this guy and make him like a character in The Magus, where every time he walks through a door, there’s a new version of reality.” This cinematic quality formed the main storytelling appeal of ‘Hotel California’, which helped to make it such an infallible earworm.
Summarising the songwriting process, Frey shared, “We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it. And then a lot was read into it – a lot more than probably exists.I think we achieved perfect ambiguity.”
That ambiguity, as Frey concedes, did lead to many flawed theories on the potential meaning behind the song. Certainly, the band’s argumentative backdrop did not help proceedings, with many fans viewing the song as an allegory for drug addiction and conflict—both themes that were ever-present within the band’s line-up.
Seemingly, the song only got weirder when the songwriting pair presented it to the rest of the group. Don Felder wrote the music to accompany the lyrics, which was then described as “a bizarre mix of musical influences.” What’s more, the initial draft simply did not suit the voice of Don Henley, with Fedley recalling “He sounded like Barry Gibb in this high voice, which is not a particularly guitar-friendly key, but it was perfect for his voice”.
Despite all the oddity that surrounded the song’s composition, the final product became “the zenith of the Eagles”, according to Frey, “in that what we had to say came together with our learning of how to make records”. Eclipsing virtually every other song the band had written together, ‘Hotel California’ remains their most infamous offering. However, it also set a standard which was hard to maintain. Obsessed with attempting to recreate the sound and success of the song, tensions within the band only seemed to increase, leading the Eagles to finally implode in 1980.
