I gave a copy to Randy, to Joe and to Don Henley. “I did a quick mix of it, put it on a cassette with the other 16 songs, gave a copy of it to everybody in the band and said, ‘If anybody’s interested in writing or finishing one of these songs for the record, let me know’. "So I pretty much overdubbed everything that you hear on the record now on this little four-track studio, except for a couple of Walsh licks at the end.”įelder recorded this demo of the song a full year before the band recorded the album. “This was the first album with Joe and I where we could do some harmony guitar stuff and trade off solos, and I wanted to write something that would have some interesting guitar stuff on it," says Felder. Often voted the best guitar solo of all time – duking it out with Stairway To Heaven for the top spot, usually – it’s mostly Felder’s work. Hotel California was to mainstream US radio what Bohemian Rhapsody was to the UK variety – the ostensibly overlong number that broke the mould and forced programmers to indulge the artists’ creative whims despite the restrictive (three-minute) format. And I was sitting on the couch on a July day – in cut-off shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops – playing guitar and just goofing around in this rented beach house in Malibu. "We’d just come off One Of These Nights, which was a very successful record for us, but we were under the gun to come up with a lot of ideas, so I had put together a reel of say 16 or 17 song sketches – in this little reel-to-reel four-track TEAC tape recorder in my back bedroom. “I had rented a house on the beach in Malibu that summer and we were writing songs for what was going to become the Hotel California album," guitarist and songwriter Don Felder told Guitarist Magazine of the song's creation.
If Rumours detailed the breakdown of relations within the Mac, Hotel California dissected the demise of the hippie dream, dismantling the notion of LA as some sun-kissed Utopia. It might have been the epitome of carefree freeway rock, but Hotel California was a dark affair, and certainly melancholy for a mega-seller (to date, the album has sold 32 million copies and counting). You want punk? These five “middle-class kids from the Midwest” ( Don Henley) came not to pursue the west coast myth but to bury it.
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