Songs hotel california
Which is not to say that “Hotel California” was some sort of popular music dead end. The Eagles, scrambling to keep up with musical trends, got noticeably rockier and funkier with their next album, 1979’s “The Long Run.” “Hotel California” was a classic that was also the end of a musical era. Popular music was changing, becoming both more rhythmic and angrier, and suddenly the Eagles seemed a bit stodgy and out of step. Within months after the release of “Hotel California,” the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads put out their first albums - with some of these artists making a point in interviews to thumb their noses at mellow, highly commercial bands like the Eagles. Punk was starting to rumble in England and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Disco was already hustling out of the club scene. (Ironically, much of the album actually was recorded in Florida.)īut even as “Hotel California” was shooting up the charts and selling the first of more than 32 million albums, the sound of popular music was changing - radically. It was very much music of its time and place. Song titles like “Wasted Time” and “Victim of Love” and lyrics like “You call some place paradise - kiss it goodbye” were like an elegy for the malaise of the Jimmy Carter years. Opening up on a “dark desert highway” and fading out at a decadent resort, its songs evoked visions of California for listeners hundreds and thousands of miles away from the Golden State.Īt the same time, the album was bleak and cynical. Songs like “Hotel California,” “Life in the Fast Lane” (the creation of the album was legendarily cocaine-powered), “Pretty Maids All in a Row” and “The Last Resort” touch on archetypes of California life and style. In many ways, “Hotel California” was a concept album about California itself. When it was released in late 1976, it represented the pinnacle of what was known variously as country rock or California rock, a tuneful, smooth, slightly twangy, definitely mellow sound that dominated the mid-’70s, exemplified by the likes of Poco, Buffalo Springfield, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt (who had once employed the Eagles as a backing band). It also sits at a critical turning point in the history of popular music. And its iconic songs play on forever on today’s oldies radio stations and Spotify playlists.īut “Hotel California” is more than a mere classic rock album. The band members would not work together again until 1993, when they reunited to appear in the video for Travis Tritt's cover of "Take It Easy." They reunited for a full-blown tour in 1994, and they've toured and recorded in various lineups ever since.Classic rock doesn’t get much more classic than the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Multi-hit, multiplatinum, it was an essential part of any respectable dorm-room music collection in the late 1970s or early ‘80s. The band finally splintered in 1980 after Glenn Frey and guitarist Don Felder argued onstage in front of a concert audience and nearly came to blows backstage.
The sessions for their next album, The Long Run, took years to complete, and the album was nowhere near the artistic accomplishment that Hotel California represented. Bassist Randy Meisner followed Leadon out the door in 1977, replaced by Timothy B. The band struggled mightily in the wake of the success of Hotel Californa, which would eventually go on to sell 26 million copies in the U.S. Hotel California would also prove the Eagles' artistic peak, scoring a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year, while its title song won Record of the Year and "New Kid in Town" won for Best Vocal Arrangement for Two or More Voices. 11, and the album itself spent eight non-consecutive weeks at the top of the charts.
1 hits with the album's lead single, "New Kid in Town," as well as its title song, "Hotel California." The third single from the project, "Life in the Fast Lane," peaked at No.
In many ways, Hotel California was a world-weary document of the damaging excesses of fame, money and drugs, told first-hand by those who were experiencing them. While the California country-rock scene that gave rise to the Eagles in the early '70s had been relatively innocent and uncorrupted by commercial concerns, their massive success, along with that of Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and more, had turned it into big business. While not strictly a concept album, Hotel California explored lyrical themes of the dark side of the music scene in Los Angeles in the '70s, likening it to the culture at large.