Surprisingly, Eagles’ album Hotel California retains its hold, nearly 50 years after its release.
Okay, not surprisingly.
(See relevant sidebar: Mojo Nixon’s “Don Henley Must Die…)
… And its deathless lyric:
Don Henley must die
Don’t let him get back together with Glenn Frey
Anyone even obliquely aware of pop music history has a thought about this one.
Not only about the album, but:
- The ambitious title track, the group’s rolling internecine drama before, during, and after HC’s making, its main songwriters
- The headspace they occupied during the album’s conception.
- Their refutation of the country rock style they had a strong hand in popularizing (made explicit by replacing Bernie Leadon with Joe Walsh.)
And the fact that they purposely left the article off of their name. Which has nothing to do with any of this, but still smacks of artistic hubris.
Bernie loved it. Glenn didn’t see it. And the focus groups hated it.
Suffice to say, they and their masterpiece engender feelings.
Take Thomas Ryan, self-professed reviewer, percussionist, and obsessive vintage vinyl collector.
He has a hot take. He has a lengthy hot take.
He disliked the title song so much, he spends nearly three pages of his well-researched and opinionated tome, American Hit Radio, railing about the group.
How he loathes the song and the LP it appeared on – while (unfortunately for him) admiring the thing as a piece of recorded media.
A typical excerpt:
“Whenever it comes on the radio, I usually crank up the volume like some deranged madman and bathe myself in the egotistical misanthropy that it educes.”
Thomas Ryan – American Hit Radio, 1995
Wow. Rereading the quote, I realize I may have to delete it, as it’s too well-written. But it also nails the overriding point of view many of your more ‘discerning’ listeners hold.
While the structure and technical design of the album is impressive, its monomaniacal mean-spiritedness is off-putting.
A little bile can cleanse the palate, but unrelieved cynicism and a complete lack of humor coming from very well-compensated artists apparently living opulently, if not happily, in the exact milieu they tear to pieces smacks, nay, reeks, of high hypocrisy.
I’m not here to discuss Hotel California or “Hotel California“ (he types with straight face).
At least, it’s not the main point. What I want to do in the second edition of:
Album Tracks:
Your One-Stop Compendium of All Things Pop Music-y Not Released as a Single, Mostly From an Era of Which the Author Has the Most Familiarity With…
(we’re still workshopping the title)
…is discuss what I think is the both a dry run, as well as a path toward an alternate history, for the epic that divides us as a nation.
If you’ll allow me to be a little grandiose, it’s similar to how Pafko at the Wall prefaces and provides counterpoint to the rest of DeLillo’s Underworld.
I give you: Eagles’ previous album, One of These Nights, Side 1, Track 3:
“Hollywood Waltz.”
As stated on the tin, the tune is a waltz. It’s also about as elegiac as you can get.
I have a less-than-defining autumnal playlist (that just returned to my listening rotation; any suggestions as to other candidates that might fit into it are welcome) into which ‘HW’ seamlessly slides.
Things should be elegiac in the fall:
The summer hangover causes one to reflect on the last three months of excess and the downing of way too many double IPAs; the dark well of winter looms; you start dreading the horrors of Christmas shopping.
‘Wait a sec, Stob,’ you say:
“The song explicitly states that its setting is springtime. Moreover, acacias bloom in late winter and early spring.”
“Doesn’t this invalidate your entire premise?”
I maintain the opposite: every detail of the song except the aforementioned season screams fall, with its regretful tone and phrases full of grief and misplaced longing.
You don’t pack up and leave right around Easter.
You do it in October to avoid spending the holidays together, awkward and unfulfilled.
Members of the jury, I submit that “Hollywood Waltz”s creators stuck “springtime” in there because “fall time” sounds ridiculous. And “autumn” is too supple a word to open a verse. Yet another example of meter overriding meaning. Your witness.
Moving quickly on. I hope we can agree that the leading lady of “Hollywood Waltz” plays the part of Southern California as a whole, a more finely tuned stand-in than hotels, last resorts, or fast lanes.
She looks another year older’ says more about the region than the whole of “Pretty Maids All in a Row’.”
“Victim of Love’” and its labored double entendres is merely a plodding aggrandizement of ‘For too many lovers who used her and ran.’ Also: compare and contrast “New Kid in Town” with ‘To look for another to love the same way.’
One’s padded and meandering; the other, not.
Whomever conjured up ‘HW’ line ‘With all of her faults’ knocked it clear out of the stadium. To braid the double meaning of someone’s shortcomings with the ever-present statewide worry of catastrophic plate tectonic activity within one line in a pop song?
Well, that’s major league scribbling. The group doesn’t come anywhere near it again.
It’s the chorus that lifts ‘HW’ over Hotel California. It doesn’t slip into easy disillusionment. It’s hopeful, even as it clearly suggests underlying despair, and comes to its point with a plain request: give her this dance and learn how to love her. No ‘red men’ or ‘white man’s burden,’ no Manifest Destiny rebukes (when was the last time anyone had anything good to say about Manifest Destiny anyway?) of the sort that stain ‘The Last Resort.’ It makes you feel as if there’s a possibility that we can get out of this ditch instead of wallowing in the sewer water.
Finally, the outro leads us away, stately and sad without being bathetic. It doesn’t hang around too long, and leaves us wanting a little more. Even Henley’s vamp at the end of ‘…Waltz’ is more fun and more emotive than the wordless keening he tacks to the endless end of ‘TLR.’
Eagles, with “Hollywood Waltz” created a humanistic lament about the place they lived and thrived in, its foibles and imperfections. It was lovely. It was compact and well-defined. They then looked at what they’d done and decided to expand it. They mixed in some sour profundities, larded on the weary disgust, documented various crimes and unseemly behaviors, topped the whole thing off with nihilistic nonsense.
They had the perfect glass of milk.
They could have been satisfied, and gone on to something less corrosive.
Instead, they took the whole gallon jug, let it curdle, then complained about the taste.*
*The above metaphor is brought to you by Overwriters International, a grammar app that takes your clear, precise phrasing and transforms it into fanciful incoherence.
Now available in the App Store.
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Honestly, I’ve never heard “Hollywood Waltz” (I’m more partial to “The Long Run” as an Eagles LP than to “Hotel California “) but after reading this, I will have to. Thanks, Stob!
(My autumnal song also has a Henley connection— and it’s not “The Boys of Summer,” which to me is fully a winter song. It’s “The End of the Innocence.” Something about Bruce Hornsby’s work on it always connotes the chill of October and November to me.)
I put ‘The End of the Innocence’ in my winter playlist, although you’ve got me reconsidering. I do have problem figuring out the difference between songs that are ‘fall’ as opposed to ‘winter.’ I guess fall songs should be elegiac without the feeling of doom. Most of my winter playlist comprises death tunes, bad weather tunes, irretrievably broken or broken up tunes, and tunes with no hope. Still, there’s overlap and songs that could go one way or the other. Ah, the sweet pain of carefully curating one’s music library.
I agree, fall music is minor key melancholy that skews toward pretty rather than pathological.
For winter, I separate into day and night music. One is cold but bright (think Bjork’s Vespertine); the other is dark and desolate (think The Knife’s Silent Shout). Needless to say, the difference between them is like…oil and water? No, that’s not it…
Thoughts:
-I enjoyed the use of lard as a verb.
-I don’t know the song “Hollywood Waltz”, but I should change that.
-There must be something about LA, because there are a lot of artists from other parts of the country that write songs about the place after moving there.
-You don’t have to give AI credit for writing…it doesn’t give credit to all of the writing that it learned from.
This last point is brilliant.
You got me thinking, Link, about what cities have been sung about the most.
I did a quick search and found something cool. Celebrity Cruises maps out all the places that were sung about in charting songs (U.S. and U.K.) from the 60s on. https://www.celebritycruises.com/music-mapped/
Not sure if that data is current or not. It looks like it was created around 2019. The top destinations are 1. New York 2. London 3. L.A. 4. California 5. Hollywood. You assertion was pretty on target.
How very cool! I wonder what “charting songs” were to them? I see Indiana doesn’t show “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” by Tom Petty. It reached #14 on the HOT100…perhaps, like Tom Breihan, they only condsider top 10 songs?
Either way, still a nice gee wiz!
Whatever algorithm they were using might have missed it.
And yes, no idea what “charting songs” includes. I do like that Chicago has 24 songs.
Thanks, Link! I had another aside about Billy Joel and his ‘con-LA’ songs (‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood’ in particular) that I’ll save for a future word salad. All these artists go there for a reason; why slag it so venomously? It’s not like it’s a hellscape…
It depends on one’s experience and temperament. I had a friend that went out there to follow up on a contact in the film industry, so as to possibly get into scoring, and after one week, he couldn’t get out of there fast enough and vowed never to return.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m NorCalian, so the Southland is the devil I know. I can slag, but for outsider you, your LA hate is verboten!
I think “Hotel California’s” popularity was based mostly on the dual guitar outro. Most of my friends at the time didn’t put much thought into the lyrics except to joke that “you can check in any time you like but you can never leave” was about a Roach Motel.
I’ve never heard “Hollywood Waltz,” or maybe I’ve heard it and it didn’t grab my ear. Listening to it now, I like the faults/waltz rhyme, but there’s not much musically that stands out to me. I’ll give it another try.
As I’ve mentioned over on the mothership, they’re tied with Lou Reed for the most boring concert I’ve ever seen, and Reed was strung out on heroin at the time. Anyway, I’ve been actively disinterested in them since. That may be a poor attitude on my part, but I’m with Thomas Ryan on this one.
And in the words of the prophets, if you don’t got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin’.
Roach motel you say? Can I provide a video for one of my favorite songs of the last 5 years?
https://youtu.be/dwMcbKGc3YU?si=9SeYJoWSt2NtMBVE
Yikes!
Yikes indeed. Song’s good, but that video bugs me.
At least the mantis kept cool and didn’t lose his head.
I see what you did there.
Cockroach vs. mantis aside, Kafka would be proud!
Wittingly or unwittingly, you made a Taika Waititi-inspired pun. He is the director of Eagle vs Shark. Keri Hulme would be proud.
HC is certainly one of the more polarizing songs in the annals of rock history. You admirably shift the attention away from it to an earlier song with a different take altogether, but, as Don stated perhaps prophetically about his own song, there appears to be no leaving that hotel and the hold its had on us for lo these many years. When Tom reviewed it, I believe the TNO comment section ballooned past 600 comments for the first time ever.
Here is what I had to say about it that day. I was way more positive about the song than I remember-
This is echoing what Tom and others have already said, but to me, Eagles is to rock and roll what Thomas Kincaid is to the art world- a well-crafted commercial product marketed to the masses. I liked both for a short time but soon tired of them for the same reasons that they were massively popular. The formula grew old. Now, if Thomas Kincaid had really let himself go and painted, say, a medieval castle being attacked by dwarves, but still in his typical “painter of light” style, then he might have himself the art equivalent of Hotel California. Out of all their hits, this song is by far the most unique and interesting one. The cryptic lyrics alluding to a menacing, inescapable darkness behind it’s glamorous, alluring facade were like nothing else I had ever heard. Then add in the amazing guitar solos at the end, and it left a vivid impression on me as a 12 year old, and probably still would have if I was hearing it for the first time as an adult. I understand why Tom gave it a 4, but this song is an 8 in my book. It’s an Eagles song so it can’t go any higher, unless it’s “Peaceful Easy Feeling”. I’ll make an exception for that and only that.
I still somehow like the song, despite it being one of the rock songs I’ve heard most over these many decades (also, ‘More Than a Feeling’ and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’). Maybe there’s a point where you hear something so much it flips from infinitely overplayed to encoded in your DNA.
I loved everything about this article, and laughed out loud at the images. Well done stob and mt!!
Thanks, thegue! And, of course, to our fearless leader as well. His talent for spicing up boring blocks of text are unparalleled.
Flip that 180° :
It’s the great contributions from our talented Contributing Authors that spice up the otherwise pointless drop-ins and layout. 🙂
Entertaining stuff. Even more of a reminder of how big a gap the Atlantic provides. Whenever I see Eagles brought up here or at the mothership I feel like I can sit back and enjoy the divergent views and opprobrium heaped on them. Over here they’re more of a footnote in musical history, enjoying modest success.
Modest not a word that I’ve seen associated with them in any other context.
They’re not popular enough here to have worn out their welcome and given that i missed out on most of 70s I’m only familiar with a handful of their songs. Hollywood Waltz isn’t one of them but it’s a convincing argument you’ve presented. I’ll be giving it a listen. I just won’t be partaking of anymore from the gallon jug.
Thanks, JJ. It makes sense about the Eagles, and Springsteen, and others who are insanely popular here while hardly making a dent over there. There’s a particularly ‘American’ bent about them that’s hard to translate. Which makes me wonder about the flip side: which popular artists are so particularly British that we colonials just don’t get them?
That’s got me thinking. Here’s a diverse selection, some of which will be well known, particularly to citizens of tnocs but didn’t have much of an impact Stateside.
We had a thing for boy bands, through the 80s to 00s especially, most of whom didn’t travel well. Take That were the biggest but I wouldn’t say they were defined as particularly British – whereas their big 90s rivals East 17 were totally defined by coming from East London.
Blur and The Smiths are obvious ones who most people reading will have heard of but didn’t sell loads of records in the US.
Madness for me are the ultimate quintessential English band.
Going back further The Small Faces managed to miss out on the British Invasion, they started off as souped up R&B with an American influence but ended their career with the whimsical psychedelics of concept album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.
Can’t omit Cliff Richard, biggest singles act we’ve ever had, started in the ’50s and still going. Had a bit of success in America but dwarfed by his home success. Something like Summer Holiday, his answer to Elvis’ film career couldn’t be anything other than British.
Last one; Chas and Dave. Late 70s / 80s pub rock, as cockney as as its possible to be. No way this was gonna find success in the US
https://youtu.be/qGNojF9qKS0?feature=shared
Not to mention Mr. Blobby.
Ah yes, the pinnacle of cultural achievement for our nation. Its been downhill ever since.
Both Blur and The Smiths got airplay on alternative radio here though mainly just one or two songs, so they were familiar. They had their hardcore fans here for sure, but I was looking at their U.S. chart appearances and you are right- abysmal.
Bucks Fizz
@stobgopper, you done us proud. I, too, had never heard “Hollywood Waltz” by Eagles (as Casey Kasem proudly called them during the 1972 AT40 countdown on last weekend), but this song has all the empathy lacking in “Hotel California.” (But “Hotel” RAWKS, man! It’s got that Joe Walsh-Don Felder guitar-off!) And if I’d heard the song before reading your story, I may have been more doubtful, if only because Henley always seems so world-weary pissed-off. But the lyrics are good, even if the music is your basic I-IV-V with other transitions thrown in.
(Henley doesn’t help himself with his sorta-fill, though. As a drummer, the guy’s a great vocalist.)
I don’t hate the HC album. “New Kid in Town” redeems most of it — especially the bridge — and “Life in the Fast Lane” has guts (even with its “rancid ideology,” per Dave Marsh, whatever “rancid ideology” is). I think I wrote about my dislike of “Victim of Love” in Stereogum’s TNOCS — I could be wrong, but I’m not, no I’m not — and the rest tries too hard.
Anyway, I credit the Leadon brothers for “Hollywood Waltz’s” kindness, and I’ll give Henley his ups for “The Boys of Summer” (Mike Campbell gets credit, too), and especially “The Heart of the Matter,” where the guy revealed he’s not a complete jerk.
And I’ll credit you for a nice essay, especially your closing metaphor. Hey, it’s more honest than Eagles would come up with.
An @TLeo sighting! YAY!