The Eagles solo Don Henley insisted on being perfect
For Don Henley, success wasn’t something that people expected as soon as they wrote a catchy tune.
Eagles could have gone the way of Neil Young and made spotty records for decades at a time, but the thought of a single harmony not being right or a tune not being completely perfect was half the reason why Henley lost sleep at night during their prime. He needed to make sure that they were pushing themselves as far as they could to get the right sounds, and that usually meant going outside their comfort zone to get everything to sound right on the money.
If you listen to all of them in context, though, a lot of those harmonies almost sound too perfect to be sung by human voices. ‘Seven Bridges Road’ is still one of the finest vocal performances in rock and roll history, and even when they were going on their reunion tours, those moments in the rehearsal room when everything locks in vocally on tracks like ‘Desperado’ are what gave them the chills before they even went onstage.
But after Desperado fell on its face on the charts, Henley didn’t want to be sitting around trying to make the same thing over again. They had to hone their skills a bit more, and while the conceptual masterpiece about rock and roll gunslingers did feel a little bit silly, he did start to have an idea for what the band could talk about when riding through the streets of Los Angeles with Don Felder’s instrumental tape in his car.
Felder had always contributed tapes of guitar licks that didn’t always have the best places for someone to insert their voice, but this instrumental of wanted sounded like Spanish music caught Henley’s ear. He could see the story already forming about a version of the ‘Sunshine State’ that was ripped straight out of The Twilight Zone, and while it would take a lot of fine-tuning, ‘Hotel California’ was the kind of tune that all of them could build the rest of their career on top of.
That is, until they got to the guitar solo. Despite being one of the finest solos of all time, the idea was never about trying to get everything note-perfect in the beginning. All Felder wanted was an excuse to write something that would compliment two guitarists after Joe Walsh joined the group, but after laying down the scratch track and throwing in new ideas in the studio, Felder remembered getting a call from Henley saying that he needed to be a bit more faithful to what he already played.
As far as the drummer could tell, the solo on the demo was perfect, and he needed to copy that almost note-for-note, saying, “Don Henley opens the door and comes walking back in and stands there for a minute and goes, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, well, we’re recording the solos on the end of this record and he says, ‘That’s not right. You had to do it just like the demo.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what that was.’”
It’s probably a strange feeling trying to learn from yourself half the time you’re in the studio, but the beginning of that solo really helped set the scene for the rest of the song. Because when listening to the final verse about Henley saying that no one could ever leave the hotel, hearing the beginning of Felder’s solo building to those harmonised guitars at the end almost feels like diving down the rabbit hole where all of the forgotten celebrities from California have come to rest.
It was bound to be a pain in the ass going back to the old demo tape, but what Felder was doing wasn’t about simply learning the whole thing over again. Eagles had hit on something that was almost cinematic in its presentation, so they were never going to settle for a guitar solo that was merely good. They needed the cherry on top, and by having Felder and Walsh play together, that made one of the highlights of their career.
