By late 1976, the American Dream was beginning to fray at the seams, and the Eagles were on hand to document the dishevelment. Having established themselves with four albums of breezy country-rock, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and co. exchanged Laurel Canyon vibes for a sound that was darker, sleeker, and infinitely more cynical.
The result was Hotel California, a lavishly produced monument to 1970s decadence, paranoia, and the ugly side of fame. With new recruit Joe Walsh’s guitar giving the band a sharper edge, it remains a masterpiece of stadium-sized storytelling. Here’s our track-by-track breakdown.
Hotel California
Take evocative lines stuffed full of images (‘mirrors on the ceiling’, ‘the Mercedes bends’); a ‘Mexican reggae’ rhythm, the immortal Bm-F#-A-E-D-G-Em-F# chord sequence, the guitar duel to end all guitar duels, and a glimpse inside a place where you are trapped eternally, and you have history in the making.
Asked what it’s actually about, Henley mused: “[These are] the same themes that run through all of our work: loss of innocence, the cost of naiveté, the perils of fame, of excess; exploration of the dark underbelly of the American dream, idealism realised and idealism thwarted, illusion versus reality, the difficulties of balancing loving relationships and work, trying to square the conflicting relationship between business and art; the corruption in politics, the fading away of the sixties dream of ‘peace, love and understanding’.”
Pretty much what you thought, right?
New Kid In Town
After the epic dimensions of Hotel California and its six-plus minutes of decayed magnificence, some downtime is required, and New Kid In Town is that. As mellow as Peaceful Easy Feeling and as warm as Tequila Sunrise, it takes your pulse down to manageable levels.
A JD Souther co-write, this track was released as this album’s first single and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The public had been yearning for one of their heroes’ mellower hits for some time, and with New Kid In Town they got one, no matter what its theme was. It’s still a precision-engineered song of great beauty.
Life In The Fast Lane
Supposedly based on something Frey said to his drug dealer while powering along the freeway in a highly tuned car, Life In The Fast Lane represents the other side of the Eagles – the take-no-prisoners buccaneers of rock’n’roll who lived life at a frenetic pace. The finger-twisting guitar riff that Walsh busts out at the beginning says it all.
As Henley remembered: “I said: ‘What in the hell is that? We’ve got to figure out some way to make a song out of that!’ But we really couldn’t sing over that riff, so Glenn came up with the idea of what is a traditional blues or R&B staple – the ‘one chord’ song.”
That makes the song sound simple, but it’s actually far from simple. The Henley/Meisner rhythm section delivered a slinky performance here. As Henley noted succinctly: “It was a real bitch for me to learn how to do that syncopated bass-drum part and sing the melody at the same time.”
Wasted Time
A superior Henley/Frey collaboration, with the former emoting like there’s no tomorrow through the introspective lyrics, Wasted Time laments the end of a relationship in effective terms. Musically, it’s a nicely arranged and dynamic ballad led by piano and strings, plus the occasional well-judged bass guitar thud. Lyrically, Henley uses second-person to address someone for whom the years have passed and finds themselves (presumably ‘herself’) alone unexpectedly.
The singer also raises the question of whether the time invested in the doomed relationship was time poorly spent, a thought that’s left unresolved as the song marches majestically to its end: ‘So you can get on with your search, baby, and I can get on with mine / Maybe someday we will find that it wasn’t really wasted time.’ As a slightly hopeful conclusion, it’s a different tack to the apocalyptic finale of Hotel California – and also a way to end side one of the vinyl album that isn’t entirely bleak.
Wasted Time (Reprise)
Just 83 seconds long, this slight revisit of Wasted Time is a cinematic strings version of that wonderful melody, and positioned in an interesting spot on the LP. Jim Ed Norman, later the head of Warner Brothers, was a renowned string arranger and did sterling work on this little piece, both revisiting the previous track and providing a between-sides continuity that had a real function in the pre-CD era.
Still, an option would have been to place this track at the end of side two, after The Last Resort, in doing so echoing the slick reprise that completes the Desperado album. Knowing the Eagles, this option was almost certainly discussed, but in fact this little slice of soundtrack-alike melodrama sits perfectly ahead of Victim Of Love – perhaps because that song begins with a single guitar-chord stab, in stark contrast to the movie-house whimsy of this slick bit of orchestration.
Victim Of Love
For those familiar with AC/DC’s Back In Black (who isn’t?) – not as far-fetched a comparison as you might think, and released only three and a half years after Hotel California – the intro of Victim Of Love might ring a bell. It’s a chugging slab of heaviness, and if we’re honest a little plodding across its four minutes.
While Henley’s questioning lyrics with ‘What kind of love have you got?’ raise an interesting point, the song never strays far from its original premise. It’s not exactly a clunker– there isn’t a bad song on this remarkable album. However, it doesn’t come close to matching – musically, lyrically or otherwise – anything on side one, even though its wailing guitar solos give it a bit of much-needed atmosphere.
Pretty Maids All In A Row
After a slow, 30-second intro, this lugubrious piano ballad is sung by Walsh in his distinctive nasal twang. Co-written by the musician Joe Vitale, it’s a decent, if glacially slow, paean to nostalgia. ‘Why do we give up our hearts to the past, and why must we grow up so fast?’ Walsh asks, in a sentiment that would resonate with even more listeners if the song itself were a touch more dynamic.
It fades at a shade under four minutes with the Eagles’ trademark close-harmony ‘Ooh’s, leaving us with the impression that true love tends not to flourish long in the world of Hotel California. Still, if it’s an economical song arrangement that focuses on thoughtful spaces that you’re after, look no further. Pretty Maids All In A Row is an example of less definitely being more.
Try And Love Again
Written and sung by Meisner, this tale of a love affair centres on heartbreak (‘The thoughts will linger on of the lady and her song… it might take years to see through all these tears’) but resolves to a form of optimism (‘I really wanna know, would I lose or win, if I try and love again?’). It’s a pleasant stroll through shimmering guitar chords, aided by Meisner’s own melodic, Motown-style bass line, and chiming textures that walk us to the close.
If that description sounds a little bland, that’s intentional. Hotel California is very much an album of two sides – side one is all fire and venom, side two is adequate but pales slightly in comparison to the early big hitters. None of that affected the astonishing quality of tracks one to four, or indeed the album’s staggering commercial performance, fortunately, and we’d be the first to admit that a weak Eagles song is still stronger than many others’ best.
The Last Resort
Side two of Hotel California redeems itself – to an extent – with the earworm melody that Henley deploys throughout this slowly blossoming final track, as well as the ambitious build, the dramatic dropout in the mid-section and the return to glory of the final three minutes. Producer Szymczyk and his engineering team, as well as strings arranger Norman, ultimately delivered a strong finish here, with the bigger themes of the album implied in its full-leaded, sombre outro.
What’s Henley singing about, though? Judging by the lines: ‘We satisfy our endless needs, and justify our bloody deeds/In the name of destiny, and in the name of God’, he has serious concerns on his mind – ecological, religious and socio-political. It’s the most accomplished bit of songwriting on side two by some way, and proof that for a songwriting task that requires talent and effort, Henley is rarely equalled.