Hotel California

by

Eagles

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The Eagles reached the 80.000.000 mark last year. Eighty million records sold - not just of "Hotel California", of course, but of their entire catalogue.

Still, this album is rightly considered their artistic peak as well as their commercial one. I don't think I've ever heard any piece of popular music as well crafted as the title track...all of the Eagles were amazingly gifted musicians, and to have three guitarists of the caliber of Don Felder, Joe Walsh and Glenn Frey assembled in one band is simply astonishing.

The partiture to "Hotel California" reads a classical chamber piece. At one point eight electric and acoustic guitars are playing at the same time!

Everybody has heard "Hotel California" so many times that they forget what an incredible musical achievement it actually is - but just listen to Don Felder's 16-bar solo immediately after the last verse. That has to be one of the greatest rock guitar solos ever committed to tape.

But "Hotel California" isn't just the title track. "New Kid In Town" and "Life In The Fast Lane", with the instantly recognizable main riff by Joe Walsh, were major hit singles as well - in fact, this album doesn't contain a single weak track. "Wasted Time" is a slow, emotional ballad, and "Victim Of Love" a rock song with a crunching cut-n-shuffle riff. Joe Walsh contributes the beautiful "Pretty Maids All In A Row", and bassist Randy Meisner is the man behind "Try And Love Again", a lovely country rocker with ringing lead guitar work from Glenn Frey.

The album closes with the 7½-minute "The Last Resort", which showcases Don Henley the songwriter at his most acidic, but it is also one of his best vocal performances.

This is perhaps less of a pop album than the Eagles' previous records - some of the songs lack the instantly catchy hit quality of "One Of These Nights" or "Lyin' Eyes" - but the Eagles more than make up for this more "mature" approach to songwriting with their awesome instrumental and vocal skills. I can't imagine a more competent band than the Eagles at their mid-seventies prime, and this is the crown jewel in their musical legacy, one of the best and most succesful "adult" rock records of all time.

The Eagles are a fond weakness, probably as I grew up listening to them, they're inescapable, & very much the plastic whatsits Gram Parsons accused them of. Like CSN&Y and RollingStones post-74, they became businessmen and are definitely the sell-out take on the country-rock fusion that people like Gene Clark & Gram Parsons helped pioneer. The many line-up changes lead them towards MOR, the bland, well-produced rock music that they would be well known for...

But to be fair, the quality of the arrangments & production is great & up there with Steely Dan in Aja/Gaucho-mode (though songwise nowhere near). But to be honest, I'd rather listen to this than hip-hype like The Vines or White Stripes & I can nod knowingly to The Langley Schools Project & Wilco, both of whom have nodded to The Eagles. Or point out that Neil Young, whose On the Beach (1974) is one of the key albums about this kind of Californian indulgence, recognised its authentic quality. It seems part of that cycle of albums that was made within that Californian rock&roll indulgence & so is of academic interest to those who liked such records as Greetings from LA and Dennis Wilson's classic solo-album Pacific Ocean Blue (both of which are much, much greater than this). It also reminds me a bit of Eric Clapton's 461 Ocean Boulevard: perfect music made in & around a mess...

I prefer the earlier Eagles- the eponymous album that covers Gene Clark's Train Leaves Here This Morning & Desperado, which is not that far from The Band and not as plastic as some might accuse The Eagles of being. The Henley-Frey-Meisner-Felder-Walsh line-up here were certainly onto something, from the sybaratic title track to MOR-standards New Kid in Town and Life in the Fast Lane which bask knowingly in the tide of hedonism...it was the 70s, man!

The centrepiece of the album is Wasted Time & the orchestral reprise from Jim Ed Norman, which is a slickly produced Eagles-take on the kind of thing The Stones were at during the early seventies. Victim of Love is more efficient riffage and the kind of music that some people like to drive to; while Pretty Maids All in a Row certainly sounds a bit like Dennis Wilson (it's the piano).Randy Meisner gets a turn on Try and Love Again, which has the best lead vocal here & sets the tone for the epic-closing track The Last Resort. This track reminds me lyrically of Sinatra's Watertown-concept album, or the film Chinatown, & isn't far from the Californian apocalyptic events found in a Warren Zevon song, a Bill Hicks routine, or a Richard Matheson novel. Some people see it as proto-enviromental concerns (come on, The Beach Boys had been making eco-drivel like Don't Go Near the Water & A Day in the Life of a Tree since the early 70s); but I feel it ties in with the opening title track & an end of the line. It's no coincident that acts like Ramones, Sex Pistols & Suicide would release an antidote to all this around this point in time...

Hotel California is often qualified as being one of the biggest selling albums of all time, it is very listenable but really would lay a path to further horrors like Foreigner, Journey & REO Speedwagon. It's a good album, with moments of greatness & an undeniable authenticity; but let's get it straight: it's no On the Beach. It's no No Other. It's no Rumours (or Tusk for that matter!)It's no Greetings from LA. & it's definitely no Pacific Ocean Blue. At heart I want to be The Dude from The Big Lebowski, who has a natural aversion to The Eagles that is too obscence to be repeated here. But it is a fairly harmless sounding album & not the creation of hellspawn that a record like Use Your Illusion or Be Here Now is...