Devil’s Advocate
Where Beatmag defends the indefensible.
Thomas H Green speaks out on behalf of ‘Hotel California’
From Oasis singing, “All my dreams are made, chained to the mirror and the razor blade,” to Leonard Cohen recognizing that, “Everybody knows that you live forever, when you’ve done a line or two,” pop lyricists have acknowledged the mixed blessings of icing your head with showbiz sherbert. And that’s only a part of it – the drugs, the sex, and the debauchery have been integral to the rock myth almost as long as the music itself.
Whether it’s David Essex’ fictional alter ego Jim Maclaine blowing a dog’s mind with acid in ‘Startdust’ or W.A.S.P.’s Chris Holmes floating about his swimming pool wasted, swigging vodka while his mum ticks him off in Penelope Spheeris’ ‘The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years’, rock’n'roll patently leads people off society’s beaten track.
Nowhere sums up the bacchanalian shallowness of rock’n'roll nirvana better than Los Angeles, an idyll of Western depravity for over a century. This is where they invented big hair and blowing coke up your arse, where venal A&R men will sell your soul for 50 cents, where the girls are silicone simple and the toxic sun sets red as blood. It’s also the glorious centre of Hollywood celebrity culture, the town where the bassist from Slint can afford a hillside mansion with a swimming pool. It’s the modern teenager’s aspirational dream in all its terrifying darkness and blistering white line light. And, for me, The Eagles song ‘Hotel California’, a scalpel-sharp allegory set amidst LA’s desert highways, flash cars and mirrored ceilings, sums up the relationship hedonists have with excess better than any other song.
To most, ‘Hotel California’ is an overlong country-tinged rock dirge that haunts way too many jukeboxes in way too many tacky bars. It’s the antithesis of cool, conjuring images of hairy musos, of Linda Ronstadt’s backing band stinking up the pop charts of April 1977 while the likes of The Pistols, The Clash and The Damned were already tearing up the rulebook. ‘Hotel California’ is, indeed, all the above but it is also much more. Familiarity bred contempt in me too, and for many years ‘Hotel California’ was just background noise, one of those unavoidable songs that are best ignored.
But at some point in the mid-’90s it began to eat away at me and I purchased a vinyl copy of the album of the same name. I played it through a couple of times and, although there are a couple of other acceptable numbers on it, the title track was the one I’d endlessly return to. As the rave lifestyle of an itinerant club journalist meant day and night, weekday and weekend ceased to have meaning; as the party continued whatever the excuse wherever possible with whoever possible for as long as possible; as people fell by the wayside damaged and still I partied on, so the song’s elegy for the impossible dream of hedonism in all it’s black-hearted pleasure-slick beauty resonated crystal clear. Onto the turntable the song would go in smoky rooms with curtains closed against daylight, soundtracking the tightrope-walk between psyche-sapping pleasure and irretrievable damage…
“So I called up the Captain, ‘Please bring me my wine.’ He said, ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.’ And still those voices are calling from far away, wake you up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say… Welcome to the Hotel California.”
Without wishing to become embroiled in cod-academic Eng.Lit lyric dissection, the verse quoted seems to be about a longing for the days when drug-mayhem was an adventure tempered with innocence. Hedonism, particularly of the druggy kind, is a strange thing, because we love how it makes us feel but it has the capability to destroy us. Some would say that it inevitably destroys us. Many have to leave it behind to save their very souls, but when they have done so a part of them always pines for it. To paraphrase juvenile Doors manager Danny Sugarman on being forced to turn his back on drink’n'drugs at the end of his autobiography ‘Wonderland Avenue’ – something’s missing but at least he’s going to live.
The whole book is an elegy for ‘the good old days’. It’s the same for all rock biogs, from Anthony Kiedis’ ‘Scar Tissue’ to Motley Crue’s ‘The Dirt’: whatever quality the music maintains, the narrative adventure runs out once they give up hedonism. Those who live hard look back with affection at the times when they were mischievous outlaws discovering the possibilities offered by the Pandora’s box they’d opened.
They don’t idolise the days when they sat endlessly in darkened hotel rooms with mirror’n'razor or syringe, trying to recapture that feeling. ‘Hotel California’ is about sitting on the cusp between the two states, teetering.
“Last thing I remember, I was running for the door, I had to find the passage back to the place I was before,” it continues. All advanced caners have been there, looking from the top of the narcotic mountain wondering, now everyone’s gone home and dawn reveals a fuzz of bottles and ashtrays, how the Hell they’re going clamber down without hurting themselves.
Singer and lyricist Don Henley sings the whole song in a broken, wistful tone, seasoned with dry cynicism. He effectively attempted the same some years later in one of his solo works, a more direct ode to vanished youth called ‘The Boys Of Summer’. ‘Hotel California’ longs for something lost but, like many great song lyrics, it isn’t specific – the listener draws their own conclusions. It is the songwriting equivalent of Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’, contrasting his final helicopter-buzzed coke paranoia with his lush days as Mafia top dog. It is the 1970s version of Danny the Dealer’s “they’re selling Beatles wigs in Woolworths” speech at the end of ‘Withnail and I’. It is all these things laid out over a rhythm that, when listened to afresh, is an unlikely fusion of Byrds-ian folk rock and mild reggae skank.
‘Hotel California’ is so complex and, from some perspectives, pretentious, that most musicians have left it well alone. It trails duff cultural baggage. The Orb, attempted a dubious cover under the name Jam On The Mutha and the Gipsy Kings also created a sparkling Latino version, but the best tributes have been less direct – songs marinated in its decadent essence such as Scissor Sisters’ ‘Return To Oz’ and S.P.O.O.K.S.’ underrated ‘Karma Hotel.
Finally, ‘Hotel California’ has one of the great pay-off lines – “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” It resonates with the notion that one door is always open and what we see beckoning from that doorway depends on our own experience. For some it might be the door back to a true Hell of addiction, for others, there’s merely a rogue-ish imp grinning mischievously and beckoning them in for a few hours frontline good time. Then the music explodes into the legendary guitar solo by Don Felder and Joe Walsh. Whether you buy into any of what I’ve written here, there’s a moment halfway through the guitar solo that contains one of the best noises in the history of popular music. It’s a sound like a whiplash punctuated by a hi-hat and cymbal. It sends a shiver down my spine every time I hear it and never fails to put a smile on my face.
So there you have it. I love ‘Hotel California’. It’s my favourite song.
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