The unexpected original title for Eagles classic ‘Hotel California’
Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon, the three principal songwriters of Eagles, rose to fame and glory in the early 1970s with a popular brand of country-infused rock music. With chart-busting hits like ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘One of These Nights’, the group became one of the most beloved and successful musical acts on a global scale by 1975.
Despite the band’s unmitigated success following 1975’s One of These Nights, Leadon decided to leave the band to shirk the limelight for a while. It has long been believed that he left because he was dissatisfied with the band’s gradual departure from country to pop rock. However, Leadon denied that this was the case in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone.
“That’s an oversimplification,” he retorted. “It implies that I had no interest in rock or blues or anything but country rock. That’s just not the case. I didn’t just play Fender Telecaster. I played a Gibson Les Paul, and I enjoyed rock ‘n’ roll. That’s evident from the early albums.”
Following Leadon’s exit, the Eagles brought in Joe Walsh, previously of James Gang, as a replacement. With the new configuration, the band soared to new peaks with their fifth album, Hotel California. The release was buoyed in the charts by its eponymous single, which reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Walsh, the band’s new recruit, was responsible for the song’s memorable dual-guitar descending arpeggio part towards the song’s close but didn’t receive songwriting credits on the release. Instead, the credits were shared by the primary songwriters, Don Felder, Henley and Frey.
Henley, who helped develop the concept and the broader theme explored across the album, once described its meaning. “It’s basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about,” he told 60 Minutes in 2002.
Contributing to a Rolling Stone feature in 2005, Henley added: “We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest. ‘Hotel California’ was our interpretation of the high life in LA.”
The generally positive tone of the song’s instrumentals is juxtaposed with the more harrowing nature of the lyrics. Even hearing the chorus, the track appears genial, but in the closing verses, the hotel takes on an ominous tone with a final warning: “‘Relax,’ said the night man, ‘We are programmed to receive / You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave'”.
The metaphorical hotel is so deeply ingrained in the lyrics that it would appear strange to name the song anything other than ‘Hotel California’, but it wasn’t the first choice. In Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Don Henley and Glenn Frey, which was featured as part of the extensive liner notes for Eagles: The Very Best Of, it was revealed that the song’s original name had been ‘Mexican Reggae’. Presumably, this pertains to the track’s funky rhythm rather than its lyrical content.
Listen to the Eagles classic below.
