An American Nightmare: Hotel California & the Eagles' tale of Fame and Fear
Credit- rollingstone.com
The Eagles’ 1976 album Hotel California sets out a story of fame, fear, and the price of wanting everything. If you’ve ever sat down and listened to a couple of the songs from the album, or even the title single then this won’t be a surprise to you. But something you’ll also notice if you sit back and really listen to each of the album’s eight songs, not only will you see that it is an amazing collection of some of the best examples of 1970s rock but you’ll also see just how deep the themes of fame and fear really run.
I want to begin by looking at the first song on the album and the title song: Hotel California. From the very first bar of Don Felder’s 12 string guitar you are transported to another place. The sound of a shaker feels like tingles running up your spine and as members of the band join in and build to the first verse you are already in the moment. The actual music feel of the song is a really interesting mix of reggae and classic rock but it places you in what is really a horror story. The first verse sets the scene like any classic haunted house ghost story. Elements of darkness and mystery are immediately clear in lines like the first: ‘On a dark desert highway’. Later these feelings are only compounded by the description of a faceless woman and disembodied voices coming from deep within the hotel.
Credit- thinkdm.org
The later verses add to this feeling of other-worldliness; Don Henley sings about a woman whose ‘mind is Tiffany-twisted’, who has a group of men to mindlessly dance for her. The characters the song talks of are all without detail and as I said above, faceless. Everything about it, from the more than creepy lyrics: ‘ “Relax” said the Nightman, “we are programmed to receive”/“you can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave” ‘; to the slow build of the band’s sound to the final guitar solo by Don Felder and Joe Walsh, who brings an animalistic quality to the songs final two minutes, creates a chilling picture of being trapped within a horrifying place.
The actual themes of the song, as stated by those who wrote the lyrics (Glenn Frey and Don Henley), surround ideas of how all encompassing the life of the rich and famous in L. A. can be. Henley explained to Rolling Stone that the song deals with “darkness and light, good and evil, youth and age”, adding “I guess you could say it’s a song about loss of innocence.”
New Kid in Town is a much softer song than the albums other two singles and with strong vocal harmonies and the use of a Mexican instrument called the guitarrón mexicano, which was played by the band’s bassist Randy Meisner; the song feels more like some of the bands earlier work that was often called California or Country rock. Having said this, however, the single also clearly fits into the general theme of the album. At its core it is all about when one is at the top it always feels like any day a new kid in town could come around and push you off the top spot. The lyric ‘They will never forget you till somebody new comes along’ for instance is a perfect example of how the difference between being famous and being forgotten are really not too far away.
Credit- sharethefiles.com
The final single off the album: Life in the Fast Lane, tells the story of how destructive a life of fame and fortune can be. More specifically the lyrics talk about a couple made up of a ‘hard-headed man’ who was ‘brutally handsome’ and a woman who ‘was terminally pretty’ and how their desire for ‘everything all the time’ pushes them over the edge and forces them to totally disregard danger. With references to cocaine, pills, ‘outrageous parties’, and the spending of extravagant amounts of money; it is clear that Life in the Fast Lane is more of a warning than an advertisement of the high life.
Glenn Frey reportedly got the idea for the title from a 90 mile an hour ride in his drug dealer’s car along the freeway and once this was paired with Joe Walsh’s opening guitar riff it became a perfect addition to the album.
While it was never actually released as a single from Hotel California and having a slightly different subject matter, The Last Resort is a really interesting song because it still uses feelings of fear and also provides the listener with a warning. It is also much more overtly political than the rest of the album. It was written by Glenn Frey and Don Henley, who also provided lead vocals. At the centre of the song is the idea that humankind often destroys the environment for hedonistic gains; Henley singing ‘And they called it paradise, I don’t know why/Somebody laid the mountains low while the town got high’ adding in a later verse that ‘We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds/ in the name of destiny and in the name of God’. Whether or not you agree with the song's political message it is clearly a lyrically brilliant song. For me the sign of great lyrics is if you can take one line from a song and understand its message; the final line from The Last Resort is that line: ‘You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye’.
Credit- splicetoday.com
While The Last Resort is not explicitly about fame and fortune it is clearly focused on the nightmarish environmental and social damage that a materialistic worldview can create; something which extravagance is often a symptom. The song provides a much softer but equally chilling end to the album that Hotel California opened.
Overall Hotel California, apart from being a wonderful example of 1970s album rock and one of the best selling albums of all time, is also a concept album (as Don Henley said in an interview with a Dutch magazine in 2015), concerned with fame, fortune, and fear of what happiness can open the door to. Perhaps the album in its entirety is best summarised in the way that Henley talked about the titular single; in describing “the myth-making of the American Dream” he said that “it is a fine line between the American Dream and the American nightmare.”