The 1976 Eagles song Don Henley thought never reached its full potential: “It’s fairly pedestrian”
Every album by the Eagles was about more than just combining country music and rock and roll.
Throughout their time together, Don Henley and Glenn Frey set out to make songs that would serve as a dissection of American culture, whether it was talking about the tragedy that comes with celebrity culture or the corruption of businesses that don’t care about the common man. Even though many of the band’s greatest themes were brought to the forefront on Hotel California, Henley thought that one track didn’t reach the potential that it should have had.
As the band entered the studio to cut the record, they knew they had to develop something good. Being on a hot streak with their previous album, One of These Nights, Frey said that the critics would most likely pass judgment on them for the next record, which led to sessions that didn’t have any room for filler material anymore.
Having the genesis of the project’s themes, thanks to a mysterious guitar track from Don Felder, the group would put together the title track as the mission statement for the album, which Henley would recall was about a journey from innocence to experience. Although the band made their definitive statement as the lead-off track, that would only be the beginning of their cultural observations.
What made Hotel California hit differently from a lot of classic rock records of the era was how cynical it was underneath all the radio-friendly hooks. By the mid-1970s, the idealism of the hippie movement had curdled into excess, cocaine, and millionaires living behind gated walls in Los Angeles, and Henley wrote about it with the kind of weary perspective of someone watching the dream collapse from the inside.
Across songs like ‘New Kid in Town’ and ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, they were taking a look at the kind of music that he saw around them, either taking note of their excessive lifestyle or keeping tabs on the kind of artists that would ultimately replace them when they would be considered yesterday’s news.
As the album slows to a halt, ‘The Last Resort’ would be one of Henley’s finest compositions. Spreading over seven minutes, Henley talks about preserving what’s important for the environment, telling the harrowing tale of how natives gave up their land to settlers, calling this newfound territory paradise, while the rest of the natives have to fend for themselves.
While Frey would consider the song one of Henley’s finest moments, there were still some imperfections as far as the drummer was concerned. Although the piece still had everything that Henley wanted to say, he felt that the production across most of the track could have been much better than it ultimately became.
When discussing the work in The Very Best of the Eagles, Henley would explain, “I still think, though, that the song was never fully realised, musically speaking. It’s fairly pedestrian from a musical point of view. But lyrically, it’s not bad. The song is a reaffirmation of the age-old idea that everything in the universe is connected and that there are consequences, downstream, for everything we do.”
Part of the reason ‘The Last Resort’ still holds up decades later is that Henley wasn’t really writing about one specific moment in American history. Every generation thinks it has discovered paradise somewhere untouched, only to commercialise it into oblivion soon afterwards. Even musically, the restrained arrangement almost suits the lyrics better than Henley gave it credit for.
Even though the track would bring Hotel California to a roaring finish, Henley would get another shot at recording it when putting together the live album Hell Freezes Over years later. While most of the arrangement has stayed the same, the best improvement was Henley’s vocal performance, which suited the piece much better as time passed. Since the song is all about the dangers of history repeating itself, Henley looks back at the sad state of the world and cautions the next generation not to make the same mistakes he had made.
