Heaven, Hell and the novel that shaped ‘Hotel California’
As soon as Don Felder’s chilling acoustic guitar chords open the doors to ‘Hotel California,’ every listener is cast under the spell of the ominous world in which the Eagles found themselves trapped.
‘Hotel California’ is a song whose myth has become larger than the song itself, composed in such a way that there is a cinematic vision seeped into every line. With the immersive opening lines of ”On a dark desert highway / Cool wind in my hair / Warm smell of colitas / Rising up through the air”, our senses are heightened to the vision of freedom and adrenaline conjured, and we can smell the heady colita plant and feel the chill of the air.
As Don Henley sings of seeing the “shimmering light” that lights the highway towards the unknown, we are placed at the centre of danger, sucked into whatever will happen next, as all great stories have the power to do. The song is one of the most heavily-contested in rock history, exhaustively interpreted and parsed through for hidden meanings with an obsessive fervour.
‘Hotel California’ has become its own living, breathing entity, a work of fiction adapted for the grittiness of reality that we continue to reckon with. And, as Glenn Frey shared per the BBC, it is, in fact, based on a novel: 1965’s The Magus by English author John Fowles.
As a writer, Fowles was positioned between modernism and postmodernism and therefore, his work inherently reckoned with the contrasts between the two. The Magus became a postmodern story, written while Fowles was an English teacher on the Peloponnesian island of Spetses, in Attica, Greece. This became the setting of The Magus, with a plot similarly mirroring Fowles’ life: a young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, takes a teaching job on a Greek island and befriends an eccentric, wealthy recluse, Maurice Conchis, after stumbling upon his estate. Nicholas is soon drawn into Conchis’ world of psychological illusions, which become more ominous with time.
The distinction between reality and fantasy becomes clouded in Fowles’ tale of metafiction, becoming a literary thriller that was an instant bestseller. The experimental nature of the plot and Fowles’ writing style particularly resonated with the time’s hippie counterculture and anarchism, weaving philosophy with postmodern questions of life and morality.
The parallels between The Magus and ‘Hotel California’ are evident: an idyllic setting turned sinister, morally grey characters and the destabilising sensation of not knowing the difference between what’s real and figments of one’s imagination. The song, itself, is structured like a novella, as dialogue immerses us into Henley’s thoughts (“And I was thinking to myself, ‘This could be Heaven or this could be Hell’”) and the uncanny nature of where he has ended up, echoed in the chorus.
Considering the descriptions of the song’s overarching theme surrounding the hedonistic environment that Los Angeles encourages, the song can be said to be an allegory for such behaviours. “Well, I always say, it’s a journey from innocence to experience. It’s not really about California; it’s about America,” Henley once explained, on CBS: Mornings in 2016, “It’s about the dark underbelly of the American dream. It’s about excess, it’s about narcissism. It’s about the music business… It can have a million interpretations.”
Most evident in the lines, “They livin’ it up at the Hotel California / What a nice surprise… Bring your alibis,” the Eagles find themselves caught in the trap of fame and excess and, in turn, place themselves in the metaphorical trap of the hotel, emphasising the inescapable control they are subject to. “We are all just prisoners here / Of our own device,” an unknown woman mourns, alluding to the consequences of one’s own actions: a life lived in extravagance, a penchant for greed, a loss of identity.
Each character we encounter in ‘Hotel California’, from the “Captain”, the “night man,” the unnamed woman, to the unidentified voices echoing in the corridor, all possess a haunting duality, representing the two halves of ourselves that grapple with reality versus fiction, and morality versus chaos. They are symbols of demise, lingering as cautionary tales.
As the night man warns the immortal line, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” ‘Hotel California’ adopts an open conclusion that, spolier, is similar to The Magus, which also ends on an ambiguous note. In the case of ‘Hotel California,’ we are left with the winding guitar solo ringing as a descent into the unknown, reckoning with the idea that we cannot escape ourselves.
