How Steely Dan inspired the nonsense of The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’
Although ‘Hotel California’ might be largely indecipherable nonsense, this mysticism strangely seems to be a tact that the travel industry has since adopted. Turn on the TV and you’ll no doubt quickly be met with a barrage of non-sequiturs aimed at luring you away on an unaffordable trip to Barbados seemingly so that you can post about it on Instagram. It is, indeed, a very odd mutation of The Eagles’ songwriting ethos. And even those Desperados were inspired on their garbled lyrical pursuit by Steely Dan’s quirky songwriting.
Yes, there’s no doubt about it, ‘Hotel California’ is perhaps the most indecipherable song to ever reach mega-hit status. Like some sort of musical bigfoot, it is paradoxically world-famous, and yet entirely unknown. And I guess that’s the joy of it—ask a thousand people to put their finger on the meaning, and you’ll get a thousand answers (most of them followed by ‘but I don’t really know’, and that includes the band themselves). But this hum-hawing is ironically universal—even the documentarian Louis Theroux comically discussed it with a white supremacist Boer in a moment of levity, asking, “What are they trying to tell you in the words?”
It’s a question so hard to answer that amongst the melee of imagery, you may well miss a fleeting reference to Steely Dan in the line: “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.” It’s certainly a fittingly loose reference, but thankfully Glenn Frey revealed the truth behind it when he spoke to Joe Benson for the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show. Therein Frey explained the vital push towards nonsense that Steely Dan applied: “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.”
Steely Dan might not have purveyed gibberish in their work, but you always got the impression that they didn’t care if you got the joke—being named after a William S. Burroughs reference to a sex toy and once having Chevy Chase as their pre-fame drummer helped to imply that from the get-go. The Eagles decided to twist this into a sort of lyrical collage. While Steely Dan called it ‘joke sculpture’, Frey explains: “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.”
Thus, they sought to encapsulate the spiritual imprisonment of the times without putting too fine a point on it, ultimately offering the whole thing as a sort of meta-punchline. “You just have one line that says there’s a guy on the highway,” Frey explains, “the next line says there’s a hotel in the distance, then there’s a women 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. [We] 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.”
And much like the jazzy band who inspired them, probing at the oddities of society was ultimately what their cut-up lyrics achieved. As Henley states in the History of the Eagles: “The hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor not only for the myth-making of Southern California but for the myth-making that is the ‘American Dream’ because it is a fine line between the American Dream and the American nightmare.”
