The supposed Satanic messages in the Eagles’ biggest hit
For a long time, the most God-fearing among us decried rock music as the work of the devil. Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and the outlandish, money-fuelled trappings of fame were unthinkable realities to conservative Christians in the West. Understandably, in their righteous rage, they would come for a host of prominent artists, which included soft rock masters the Eagles.
Whilst it wasn’t the KKK who had Don Henley, Don Felder and the band in their crosshairs – as they had done previously with The Beatles – the Californian group were still met with one of the most bizarre aspects of WASP culture in the 1980s. In a manifestation of the decade’s supposed moral crisis, the so-called “Satanic panic”, an obscure preacher from the mid-West claimed that the band’s biggest hit, ‘Hotel California’, contained Satanic backmasking. This is the supposed technique of hiding praises of the antichrist deep within the mix, recorded backwards onto a song meant to be played forward.
The most famous instance of this claim surrounds Led Zeppelin’s 1971 chef d’oeuvre, ‘Stairway to Heaven’. As televangelists were at their peak and most wanton in the 1980s, with the “Satanic panic” as their backdrop, a series of famous musicians came under fire. In 1982, the notorious Paul Crouch claimed on TBN that when playing the Led Zeppelin staple backwards, the “bustle in your headrow” line becomes: “Here’s to my sweet Satan / The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan / He will give those with him 666 / There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan”.
While the Led Zeppelin story is outlandish, the tale of ‘Hotel California’ allegedly containing praise to Lucifer is another matter. It could not be further from the truth. Per the book The Eagles FAQ, one of the backward messages it allegedly contains is, “Yes, Satan, he organised his own religion”.
In the 1980s, the Reverend Paul Risley of Cornerstone Church in Burlington, Wisconsin, claimed that the titular hotel was a reference to the San Francisco inn owned by Satanism founder Anton LaVey, which he transformed into his Church of Satan. He also claimed that the song mentions the exact wine used in Satanic rituals and cites the significance of 1969, the same year that The Satanic Bible was released. The latter line states: “We haven’t had this spirit here / Since 1969”.
Don Felder, one of the songwriters, rejects all of these readings. “I’ve probably heard four or five hundred explanations about what the song’s about, all of which are wrong,” he said. “There’s no Satanic factor or devil-worshipping or any weird stuff like that. It has nothing to do with any of that. Really, it’s just the song about the underbelly industry in Los Angeles, how it can be less than beautiful.”
Echoing Felder’s sentiment, co-songwriter Don Henley expanded on the true meaning of the track in a 1995 interview. He explained that it “sort of captured the zeitgeist of the time, which was a time of great excess in this country and in the music business in particular…lyrically, the song deals with traditional or classical themes of conflict: darkness and light, good and evil, youth and age, the spiritual versus the secular. I guess you could say it’s a song about loss of innocence.”
Listen to ‘Hotel California’ below.
