And so here we are. This is the last album of the year in my publishing track. I’m writing this early June 2025, and I went back and checked when I actually started to make notes – September 2024. So although this is a year of publishing one a day, it’s still taken me around 10 months to get this far, which is just over one third of the way through the 1089 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (remember that I’m rather obsessively using the compiled list of all editions up until 2023).
We started in 1955, and here we are, 21 years later, from Frank Sinatra to Eagles. If the rate remains roughly the same, the end of 2026 should see us at some point in the late Nineties. And annoyingly, there’s one more album from 1976 otherwise I could roll over into the new (calendar) year with a new (album list) year, but hey-ho.
But anyway. The album.
The title track is surely known by anybody who may be reading this. Superficially it’s a horror story, the classic trope of the weary traveller who arrives at a mysterious hotel, which turns out to be stuffed full of mysterious figures – the woman who greets him by candlelight, the creepy maitre d’, the room where figures sacrifice “the beast”, something of a cross between the Bates Motel and the Overlook Hotel (and I can’t help but think of Manos, Hands of Fate as well).
But it’s also an extended metaphor for (a) the music industry, (b) LA in general and (c) the USA in general. The narrator is drawn into the strange world of the Hotel California and “can never leave”. “The Beast”, stabbed “with their steely knives” is like feeding the fame machine, or capitalism, read into as you like. When “the Captain” says that “we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969”, he could be referring to the "spirit" of peace and love of hippydom. And referring to who is evidently a waiter or maitre ‘d as “captain” reminds me of Zaphod Beeblebrox calling the waiter at Milliways “plate captain”.
This theme of loss of innocence, of lives chewed up and spat out by the Hotel California continues throughout the album. Life In The Fast Lane tells of a couple addicted to a hedonistic lifestyle that destroys them – “There were lines on the mirror, there were lines on her face” is a lyric that I like for being just that right level of clever. New Kid In Town is again ostensibly about a “Johnny-Come-Lately” who makes a big splash in a small town and charms the girls, only for time to cause his wife/girlfriend to lose interest in him in favour of the next new kid in town. But it’s also about the fleeting nature of fame, I think.
The album closes with the big orchestral and cinematic saga The Last Resort, about the taming of the West and how popularity transforms a beautiful paradise into a sordid urban waste filled with hypocrites – see also Telegraph Road by Dire Straits, City Of Dreams by Talking Heads, and there was a John Pryne one as well on the same kind of topic.
I think that the departure of Bernie Leadon (replaced by Joe Walsh) gave Henley and Frey more license to move away from Leadon’s favoured country rock, and so the songs on here are less overtly country, more a kind of radio rock for grown-ups, evoking visions of sweeping vistas from John Ford films, coupled with the emptiness of Jim Jarmusch films. There are quite a few songs on here about heartbreak as well, inspired by the break-up of Henley’s own relationship and although the album sounds nice and unthreatening on the surface, it carries a lot of darkness within it.
For me, this was an album that I listened to a lot many decades ago, until I became bored with it, and hearing it again I still felt like my musical tastes had changed. I personally think I could combine some tracks from this with some from Take It To The Limit to make my own personal quintessential Eagles. But, listening to it again with an older, more critical, ear I can really appreciate how well-constructed some of the tracks are, and the nuance of some of Henley’s lyrics.
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