The Eagles song Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason can no longer listen to
When visiting the ethereal soundscapes of Pink Floyd, one name stands proud as the rhythmic backbone of the legendary group: Nick Mason. The founding drummer’s masterful beat-keeping has left an immortal legacy far transcending the progressive rock era it helped define. Like Ringo Starr, Mason has oft doubted his talent over the years under the blinding light of his bandmates. Beyond his crucial role as mediator amid frequent spats, however, his drumming style added essential character to Pink Floyd’s music.
In a 2015 interview with The Drummer’s Journal, Mason answered: “I still feel that. I’m still learning to live with it,” when asked whether he really felt insufficient as a drummer. “It’s hard to know now, but if I’d had lessons, there’s an argument to say that I wouldn’t have played the way I did. The upside is I’m grateful to have developed my own style,” he added. Like so many drummers before and after him, Mason discovered that there’s much more to the art of drumming than virtuosity.
In many of Pink Floyd’s biggest hits, Mason used a less is more approach to attain a greater command of intensity. In a 2020 interview feature with the NME, Mason picked out ‘Comfortably Numb’ as a prime example of this and the track he “can’t get out of my head”.
“If you’re recording in a studio, by the time you’ve finished the track, for the rest of that night, you’re going to have it rowing through your brain endlessly,” Mason opined. “It doesn’t really matter whether it’s something you really like or something you’re just trying to find a drum part for. The opening verse of ‘Comfortably Numb’ has a very, very sparse drum part, so you’re always trying to… not replay it exactly, but replay it with the same weight. There are lots of beats missing from it, that’s one of the great things about it, it doesn’t immediately start up a pattern that continues throughout the whole piece.”
Later in the feature, Mason discussed another song that became an earworm at one point in his life. Picking out the “song I can no longer listen to,” the Pink Floyd drummer remembered becoming sick of Eagles’ 1976 smash hit ‘Hotel California’ in the late 1970s.
“It’s a great song, let’s make that clear, I’ve actually recorded it for someone, this terrific tribute band called The Illegal Eagles. We recorded it for a friend’s party,” he remembered. “But it was so popular when [Pink Floyd] were touring America that every car we got into, every radio station was playing it on repeat more or less. Because we were in the car quite often for some hours, it was one of those things where you thought: ‘I really could live without hearing that song again.’ You thought the world was changing, and the Eagles were gonna run it.”
Indeed, ‘Hotel California’ proved to be a huge success story for Eagles, shooting to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 shortly after release. Its dark portrayal of the opulent Hollywood lifestyle remains just as relevant to this day and continues to haunt radio stations around the world to this day.
“It’s basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about,” songwriter Don Henley told 60 Minutes in 2002. Contributing to a Rolling Stone feature in 2005, he added: “We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest. ‘Hotel California’ was our interpretation of the high life in LA.”
Watch Eagles perform ‘Hotel California’ live in 1977 below.
