How Jethro Tull influenced the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’
In 1977, few songs were as inescapable as the Eagles track ‘Hotel California’. Despite being twice the length of a standard single, ‘Hotel California’ was still a number-one smash. The album that took its name from the track was also a number-one seller, going on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time. The Eagles were huge in the late 1970s, but they had some help getting there.
The band had some direct assistance from the likes of Jackson Browne, who wrote most of their debut single, ‘Take It Easy’, and Kenny Rodgers, who produced Don Henley’s pre-Eagles band, Shiloh. They also sought help from Bob Seger, who mentored Glenn Frey and featured him as a backup singer on ‘Rambin’ Gamblin’ Man’, and Linda Ronstadt, who hired both Henley and Frey to be a part of her backing band in the early 1970s. But they also had some help from British progressive rock giants Jethro Tull.
While being interviewed by Songfacts in 2009, band leader Ian Anderson was asked if there was any connection between ‘Hotel California’ and Jethro Tull’s ‘We Used To Know’ from their 1969 album Stand Up. Anderson confirmed the connection and even remembered sharing the stage with the Eagles for a short time. “It was a piece of music that we were playing around the time… I believe it was late ’71, maybe early ’72, when we were on tour, and we had a support band who had been signed up for the tour, and subsequently, before the tour began, had a hit single,” Anderson remembered. “The song, I believe, called ‘Take It Easy.’ And they were indeed the Eagles.”
“We didn’t interact with them very much because they were countrified, laid-back polite rock, and we were a bit wacky and English and doing weird stuff,” he added. “And I don’t think they liked us, and we didn’t much like them. There was no communication, really, at all. Just a polite observance of each other’s space when it came to sound checks and show time. But they probably heard us play the song because that would have featured in the sets back then, and maybe it was just something they kind of picked up on subconsciously and introduced that chord sequence into their famous song’ Hotel California’ sometime later.”
Anderson stopped short of accusing the Eagles of ripping him off. “But, you know, it’s not plagiarism. It’s just the same chord sequence,” Anderson claimed. “It’s in a different time signature, different key, different context. And it’s a very, very fine song that they wrote, so I can’t feel anything other than a sense of happiness for their sake. And I feel flattered that they came across that chord sequence.”
“But it’s difficult to find a chord sequence that hasn’t been used and hasn’t been the focus of lots of pieces of music,” Anderson concluded. “Its harmonic progression is almost a mathematical certainty – you’re gonna crop up with the same thing sooner or later if you sit strumming a few chords on a guitar. There’s certainly no bitterness or any sense of plagiarism attached to my view on it, although I do sometimes allude, in a joking way, to accepting it as a kind of tribute. It’s a bit like this tribute Rolex that I’m wearing.”
Check out both ‘We Used to Know’ and ‘Hotel California’ and see if you can spot some similarities.
