This is a case where we need to trust the tale, not the teller. Its creators were smart and put the thing together with expert, practiced craft.Īs to its meaning, here I may be a little bit dismissive. An intriguing opening verse, an instantly memorable chorus, those vocal harmonies, that endlessly compelling cyclical chord sequence… Hotel California has endured for a reason. Well, it’s a classic, of course – I’m not going to be contrarian about it. It’s not that the band’s pre-Szymczyk work sounds wimpy (for all Glenn Frey’s issues with Glyn Johns’s minimal miking technique for drums, the drum sound on, say, Take it Easy is still great), but Hotel California does perhaps have that extra bit of low end while retaining the crispness in the midrange. Lightly strummed acoustic guitars create a lush but not suffocating pad, the bass is thick without being overhyped and the drum sound is marvellous in its depth and woodiness. There’s so much space around the wide-panned instruments. Their producer, Bill Szymczyk, had ears too.

But note that bassist Randy Meisner chooses that moment to switch from his reggae-ish pattern to straight eights, boosting the tension still further. They complement each other, pick up each other’s cues and ratchet up the tension until, of course, they hit that famous harmonised triplet melody.

They’re not having a contest to outdo each other it’s a tag-team effort. What I find most impressive about the solo is the way the duo really listen to each other and answer each other’s phrases. But before something is played, it has to be conceived, and that’s the hard part. Many guitarists could play what they played, with a bit of practice. Don Felder and Joe Walsh are both excellent technicians, but technique is not really what makes their playing on Hotel California so great. I’ve already mentioned the title track’s famous guitar solo, but it deserves a bit more comment. The band must have known that everyone was watching, and so they began their new album with the strongest one-two punch they had: Hotel California and New Kid in Town. By the time of 1976’s Hotel California, the Eagles had become genuine superstars off the back of their last studio album, One of these Nights, and, especially, their world-dominating best-of, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975. I still remember that feeling and I’ve never totally lost it, so you can, I hope, trust me to be even-handed here. That’s because I remember hearing Hotel California, the song, on the radio for the first time in the car with my parents and my dad telling me there was a good guitar solo coming up, and bam! There it was: possibly the most exciting minute or so of music I’d ever heard, aged seven or eight. I get why so many are so strongly anti-Eagles - and sure, they’re the perfect symbol of the gradual reduction in intensity of meaning and feeling in LA music in the second half of the 1970s - but I can’t share the hatred. Nevertheless, I’ve schooled myself in the history of LA rock ‘n’ roll as best I can from books, documentaries and hundreds (or probably thousands) of hours of listening, so I know what these guys are, who they were before they became the Eagles, what dues they paid and a fair bit about how they behaved once they attained success. The Eagles were a familiar presence on my radio, but not an inescapable one. I didn’t grow up hearing them on the radio every single day, so I don’t share the revulsion born of over-familiarity that a lot of US music fans have for the band. I’m British, so while I feel like I’ve got a pretty good idea what place the Eagles hold in American music culture, it’s not my culture. Let’s start with one of the big daddies of classic rock. I’ll be doing one of these posts every couple of weeks or so. I decided I’d listen to some of these records, to hear those songs in their original context, and see what I made of them. Most of these records are such a pervasive part of our culture, and their songs are on the radio so often, I’ve never felt the need to sit down and listen to the albums those songs originally came from. I was a little surprised to look down a list of the biggest-selling albums ever and realise that there was a good number I’d never really heard.

Eagles album with song wasted time