“Drippy ballad”: The 1977 single the Eagles thought would flop
Hit songs might seem elusive, but most of them follow a formula. It might be a vague and variable formula, but it certainly doesn’t involve extensive runtimes, tricky triads, bizarre compositional quirks and impenetrable themes. As a band, the Eagles knew this well.
After all, you don’t sell over 200 million records if you don’t know your way around a chart pleaser, but they didn’t always adhere to their own hit-making policies. They were often swayed by an unruly desire just to make good, meaningful music.
They had points to prove beyond commercial success. In fact, a study of commercialism itself was one of their main motives. “On just about every album we made, there was some kind of commentary on the music business, and on American culture in general,” Don Henley once explained.
Perhaps their most complete yet confounding exhibition of this was ‘Hotel California’. It was a song that always seemed destined to falter, resigned to the fate of a little-known fan favourite that never saw the light of the charts, but somehow it soared to establish an unlikely position in the pantheon of American culture.
Not only did it commit the controversial act of critiquing the American dream – a bold move that doesn’t always sneak by the masses, let alone the powers that be – but it also defied typical American songwriting standards, too. “‘Hotel California’ is six minutes, the intro is a minute long, it stops in the middle with no drums, and you’ve got a two-minute guitar solo at the end. It’s the absolute wrong format for a single,” Don Felder admitted.
Henley, however, begged to differ. Upon hearing the finished recording for the first time at the Record Plant, he proclaimed in a flash, “That’s gonna be our single”. Everyone else seemed less certain. Felder was most uncertain of all. Sure, he agreed it was a great song, but with their record label demanding hits after the group had spent over a year recording the album, he figured it was far too risky to release something as unconventional as this strange oddity.
“I’ve never been so delighted to have been wrong in my whole life,” he eventually told Music Radar, some 16 million single sales later. This roving epic that looks at the dying “spirit” of the 1960s, and dissects how that fading dream becomes a metaphysical hotel from which society can’t check out – set to slowly fade in a Kafkaesque dystopia where the promise of ‘the good old days’ slowly imprisons the future – went on to define the band: somehow America’s biggest group, despite being able to wander into a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles unnoticed.
“In the ’70s, everything had to be three, three and a half minutes long. The intro had to be under 30 seconds, so the disc jockeys didn’t talk too long before the singing started. It either had to be a rock ‘n’ roll danceable song or a drippy ballad,” Felder explained. ‘Hotel California’ was none of those things. Half a century later, it’s still unclear exactly what it is. But that didn’t seem to matter, because it was simply ‘good’. Now, around the globe, it may well be America’s leading classic rock anthem.
A similar fate also befell America’s leading pop song of the 20th century…
It’s not always the case that competency and quality defy the odds to upend the commercial traits of pop culture, but other notable examples may well have given Henley his confidence. Take, for instance, the most played song of the 20th century: ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin‘ Feelin” by The Righteous Brothers.
The BMI claim that this Phil Spector hit was played more than eight million times on US radio and TV. So, it comes with an irony that Felder would most certainly appreciate that The Righteous Brothers themselves had their doubts about the mammoth pop song.
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Bill Medley recalled, “We had no idea if it would be a hit. It was too slow, too long.” It is, as Felder might claim, also pretty “drippy”, too. Add to that the fact that the song landed “right in the middle of The Beatles and the British Invasion”, and you can understand what the Brothers didn’t give themselves much chance.
The track begins so slowly that, in fact, when Barry Mann first heard it, he thought it was being incorrectly played at the wrong speed.
But maybe that is why it instantly arrests the attention of the listener. And maybe that’s why ‘Hotel California’ proved so captivating, too. Love it or loathe it, you can’t look past the fact that the Eagles classic is an entity all of its own. There’s no other song quite like it. And that’s why it’s a hit.
