Which Hollywood hotel inspired the Eagles song ‘Hotel California’?
While the Eagles might be one of the biggest bands to come out of the 1970s, their best-known song arguably transcends even them. The unsettling ode to LA decadence that is ‘Hotel California’ is a staple of classic rock radio and likely on the playlist of more bars worldwide than pretty much any other track out there.
It’s also more of a team effort than most Eagles hits, with Don Felder coming up with the basic chord structure before the group’s primary songwriting duo, Glenn Fray and Don Henley, added lyrics and brought it home. In Felder’s eyes, it’s a paean to “LA at night”, and the city runs through the heart of the song just as it ran through the veins of the five Eagles who’d travelled thousands of miles west to reach it.
More than any specific place, the hotel of the title serves as a metaphor for the life of luxurious excess that Los Angeles promises to those who are drawn to the city, only to trap them in that life when they want to get out. The last line of the final verse, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” is a particularly haunting expression of this idea. It makes the place sound like a kind of asylum for fame-seekers and drug addicts.
However, according to Henley, the choice of metaphor was precise and deliberate. “We were enamoured with hotels,” he explained to Cameron Crowe in 2003. “I was particularly keen on the mission style of early California. I thought there was a certain mystery and romance about it.” One particular hotel at the heart of Eagles territory in West Hollywood was built in that very style while perfectly encapsulating this sense of mystery and romance.
What’s the name of the hotel, then?
The band had already made it big by the time they wrote ‘Hotel California’, and the song hits a certain exhaustion and disillusionment with a lifestyle of fame and fortune. Nevertheless, they drew on their experiences in famous haunts around Hollywood, including Dan Tana’s restaurant and the iconic Troubadour club next door.
And the area’s most famous place to stay. “The Beverly Hills Hotel had become something of a focal point,” Henley revealed. It was this establishment that gave him the idea to base a song around a hotel in the first place.
While the Beverly Hills Hotel certainly wasn’t the only port-of-call in Henley’s mind when writing the lyrics for ‘Hotel California’, the fictional establishments in films like Psycho and the Grand Hotel made their presence felt, too. Yet, it was his starting point. Much like it was a starting point for Beverly Hills and Hollywood becoming a destination for music and movie stars from across the United States.
The hotel opened on May 12th, 1912, the very same month that the first major Hollywood film studios were founded. Back then, the area was a desert village on the outskirts of the small regional city of Los Angeles. It was ripe for exploitation by a growing industry that was about to explode.
By the 1970s, Hollywood had become a behemoth that virtually monopolised the world of mass entertainment. Its Golden Age was behind it, and the city of lights had lost its shine. The Beverly Hills Hotel was still standing, just as it is today, and had housed everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Marilyn Monroe.
Since then, the hotel has become more famous for who’s died there than anything else, from English actor Peter Finch in 1977 to photographer Helmut Newton in 2004. And for its controversial ownership by the Sultan of Brunei.
Both of these claims to fame appear symptomatic of the veil falling from Hollywood’s dreamscape, revealing a nightmare for many of its inhabitants. That’s exactly the theme that the Eagles seek to address so prophetically with their allegorical ‘Hotel California’.
