Did Steely Dan influence ‘Hotel California’ by the Eagles?
The Eagles can claim a long list of classics, but none are as famous as ‘Hotel California’, the 1977 soft rock masterpiece that captures the surreal and hazy essence of 1970s Los Angeles. Whilst there are many notable aspects of the hit, perhaps the most fascinating is its reference to one of the era’s other most successful groups, Steely Dan.
Sometimes deemed a feud, and in others, a one-sided relationship that saw the Eagles laud Steely Dan with the feeling not reciprocated, the reasons why the Eagles referenced the ‘Do It Again’ band have long been the source of discussion. Notably, it was Steely Dan, the sneering jazz aficionados, who started the conversation. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen explicitly mention the Eagles in the 1976 song ‘Everything You Did’ with the words: “Turn up the Eagles, the neighbours are listening”. Whether this was meant as an insult is open to interpretation. However, it must be noted that the piece discusses an unfaithful lover.
Then, fuelling rumours of a feud, in the 1977 track ‘Hotel California’, the Eagles included the line: “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast”, which is a subtle reference to Steely Dan. But why did they do this? Again, different reasons exist.
“Apparently, Walter Becker’s girlfriend loved the Eagles, and she played them all the time,” the late Eagles member Glenn Frey is quoted as saying in Gavin Edwards’ Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed. “I think it drove him nuts. So, the story goes that they were having a fight one day, and that was the genesis of the line,” he added.
Originally the ‘Hotel California’ line contained Steely Dan’s full name. According to Frey, it was then altered for greater impact: “We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, so ‘Dan’ got changed to ‘knives,’ which is still, you know, a penile metaphor.”
Elsewhere, when speaking to Uncle Joe Benson on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show, Frey explained that their strange reference to Steely Dan was The Eagles endeavouring to emulate Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s opaque songwriting style. “One of the things that impressed us about Steely Dan was that they would say anything in their songs, and it didn’t have to necessarily make sense,” he said. “They called it ‘joke sculpture.’ When we thought of this song ‘Hotel California,’ we started thinking that it would be very cinematic to do it like sort of The Twilight Zone– you just have one line that says there’s a guy on the highway, the next line says there’s a hotel in the distance, then there’s a woman there, then he walks in. It’s just like all one-shots just strung together, and you sort of draw your own conclusions from it.”
Following this, Frey recalled that he and bandmate Don Henley “were sort of trying to expand our lyrical horizons and just take on something in the realm of the bizarre, as Steely Dan had done”. Mystery solved? Perhaps not yet.
