If you’re of a certain age (i.e., over fifty), you probably spent many a summer afternoon in the long-ago past listening to the 45 single of “Hotel California” over and over and over. (You might also have enjoyed a mildly illegal form of herbal, hand-rolled cigarette as you listened.) If you did, you’ve probably read a lot of articles about the song, and heard a lot of interviews by Don Henley or Glenn Frey or others about it, to the point that you probably think you know everything about it. You know, for instance, that Henley and Frey wrote the lyrics in a very short period of time (by some accounts, a few hours; by others, over a weekend). You know that the album cover is a photo of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that some people think they see a mysterious figure in the bell tower. And you know that the song is really about Hell, or California-as-Hell, or American hedonism, or…something cool like that.
What you probably don’t know is that song is, primarily, the creation of guitarist Don Felder, who wrote the melody by himself before he even joined the band. As Marty Jourard recounts in his excellent non-fiction book Music Everywhere: The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town:
One afternoon while enjoying his ocean view and no doubt the general situation, Felder sat on his sofa and idly strummed an acoustic twelve-string, eventually refining his musical idea into a carefully crafted guitar arrangement. Using a Teac four-track reel-to-reel recorder, Felder first recorded his Rhythm Ace drum machine playing a cha-cha beat, then added acoustic and electric guitar and bass, then an idea for two solo guitars. Don Henley listened to a cassette mix of this song and more than a dozen others Felder had submitted for consideration and declared this rhythmically complex instrumental the best, giving it a working title of “Mexican Bolero,” and along with Glenn Frey wrote lyrics that transformed Felder’s music demo into “Hotel California,” the title track of the next Eagles album and its first single.
It’s also Felder’s actual guitar playing, along with that of co-lead Joe Walsh, that gives the song its unbelievably haunting tone and its indelible, dark crescendo. I’m not just saying this because Felder, like his childhood friend Tom Petty, is a Gainesville boy like me. Felder is, in fact, one of the most underrated musician/composers in the history of rock-and-roll.
Of course, I don’t mean to denigrate Henley’s and Frey’s brilliant lyrics, gave the song its cachet among the teenage set of the 1970s (and now, even). One thing I’ve noted about “Hotel California” is that is one of those rare examples of a narrative poem (i.e., it tells a continuous story). Also, it’s written in ballad quatrains, with a rhyming scheme of ABCB. How cool is that?
And, yes, I do see a mysterious figure in the bell tower.
Rock on…
Ash Clifton, Writer 