118. The Eagles, "Hotel California"
Uggggghhhhhhh for real?
OK, fuck it. Let's do it. Hey, are you a thrice-divorced retired orthodontist with a condo in Newport Beach and a midlife crisis Harley you ride once a year? Did you have some pretty wild times at USC in the 70's? Is your fave place to take a hygienist with crispy hair on the first date a bar called Sharky's? Then this might be your favorite album. This absolute slab of midtempo schlock is so easy going down that it makes Coors Light look like a 14% quadruple IPA. It's the absolute apotheosis of wildly overproduced completely soulless white man's easy listening, a testament to what Southern Californians with plenty of musical ability and no ideas at all can do.
Let's stick a pin in the title track and come back to it, because first we must land on track two, "New Kid in Town," a track so soft and unbothersome an Olson twin could kick its ass. Don Henley said "It’s about the fleeting, fickle nature of love and romance” and “It’s also about the fleeting nature of fame, especially in the music business." Not a terrible idea for a song (and the Eagles were always about the music BUSINESS, emphasis on business, not music itself), but the package is so treacly-sweet it practically gives you a toothache. So many songs on this album are like that. "Wasted Time" probably had aspirations to be a blue-eyed soul number but it's just a feint at that idea, flopping back on its overproduced self. STG, I bet the demos for this album are 1000x better than the finished tracks.
There's some signs of life in "Life In the Fast Lane," based on a Joe Walsh guitar riff and maybe the only genuine rocker on the album. Like many of the songs hint at, it's right out in the open about 70's California excess:
The coming attraction, the drop of a name
They knew all the right people, they took all the right pills
They threw outrageous parties, they paid heavenly bills
There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face
She pretended not to notice, she was caught up in the race
Out every evening, until it was light
He was too tired to make it, she was too tired to fight about it
These are actually not terrible lyrics! A whole album more like this song might have been interesting, but these guys just weren't in it. (Believe it or not, there was a Life in the Fast Lane roller coaster at Hard Rock Park (later Freestyle Music Park), a short-lived rock n roll theme park in, you guessed it, Myrtle Beach, that closed quickly in a flurry of lawsuits and financial troubles.)
Walsh sings lead vocals on "Pretty Maids All in a Row" but that song shows none of the oomph of "Fast Lane" and instead is just another slogging synth-string slow jam that never goes anywhere.
OK, the title song, which is undoubtedly etched into your brain after years of forced exposure, if you're of a certain age, like even former Catholics can still recite the rosary or whatever you guys have, I'm not Catholic. ANYWAY generations of stoners have puzzled over the sophomore-in-high-school poetry class lyrics and have interpreted them variously as an indictment of the same SoCal culture the rest of the album alternately celebrates and condemns; something about capitalism; heroin addiction; and Satanism. Most likely, it's just a bunch of phrases some dudes zooming on high-quality coke strung together because they sounded cool. Then it ends with like a 20-minute guitar solo.
Henley was later asked about the lines "So I called up the captain / 'Please bring me my wine' / He said, 'We haven't had that spirit here since 1969'" and he said "But that line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It's a sociopolitical statement. My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes." Oh ok Don Henley, sorry we didn't get that you were going all Howard Zinn on us and we were too stupid to get it. Don Henley sounds like he's kind of a dick, which probably isn't a huge surprise.
Why do I hate this album so much? I don't hate it, exactly. I'm just bored by it. I'm sick to death of the title song, like all of us are, but the album as a whole is just so bland and blah that I more resent the fact that it sold seventy bajillion copies and is somehow adjudged to be the 118th best album of all time when there are so many better albums that are either overlooked or much farther down the list. And every few years the remaining Eagles emerge from their Malibu compounds and play some shows that people pay 3 or 4 figures to see and crank out the hits and cash their checks and I guess that's what passes for an Experience today.
Is this album in my personal Top 500? In the immortal words of our President, "C'mon, man."
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