Asylum 1084
Producer: Bill Szymczyk
Track listing: Hotel California / New Kid in Town / Life in the Fast Lane / Wasted Time / Wasted Time (Reprise) / Victim of Love / Pretty Maids All in a Row / Try and Love Again / The Last Resort
January 15, 1977
8 weeks (nonconsecutive)
With the success of Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 giving the band the luxury of time, the Eagles had more than a year and a half to write material for their fifth album. It was the first with guitarist Joe Walsh, formerly of the James Gang. Walsh replaced Bernie Leadon, who had become disenchanted with the band’s more rock-oriented direction.
“Bernie had left the group and we left the country-rock material even further behind with his departure,” says drummer/vocalist Don Henley. It was producer Bill Szymczyk who introduced Walsh to the band. “Joe had a great influence on the group,” says Henley. “The party line on his joining the group was that it made us a strong rock ‘n’ roll band, but in fact Joe didn’t present that much rock ‘n’ roll to the group. He presented ballads with a lot of harmonies in them.” In fact, Walsh’s main contribution to Hotel California was “Pretty Maids All in a Row,” a song Henley calls “a homage to the Beach Boys.”
“We wanted Joe to play rock ‘n’ roll,” adds Henley, “which he did onstage, and he did contribute some of the music to ‘Life in the Fast Lane,’ including the signature lick, which is the introduction of the song.”
Hotel California was recorded from March through October 1975 at Criteria Studios in Miami and the Record Plant in Los Angeles. “It was a very difficult and very exciting,” Henley says, “because we knew that we were reaching another level in our songwriting and production.” To record the album, the Eagles showed a newfound dedication. “We basically just camped out in the studio, we just locked ourselves in,” Henley says. “We had a refrigerator, a ping-pong table, roller skates, and a couple of cots. We would go in and stay for two or three days at a time.”
The title track began as a demo by guitarist Don Felder. “He would give me cassette tapes with tracks on them. That was on a tape with about five or six other songs,” Henley says. The drummer would listen to the tapes in his car when he drove around L.A. “That was the only one of the entire tape that stuck out. I liked it because it was a nice synthesis of cultures. In a sense it was a reggae record rhythmically, but musically it was Spanish. It was sort of a Latin reggae song.
Lyrically, however, the song, along with much of Hotel California, focused on the narcissistic Los Angeles lifestyle of the late ’70s, a lifestyle critics often accused the Eagles of living. “At first I couldn’t understand it,” Henley says. “I couldn’t understand how people could be so mean-spirited even if they didn’t like the music. We never resented criticism per se, unless it got personal. When critics started writing about our personal lives or what kind of people we were, then it got offensive. If they’d just stuck to the music, everything would have been fine.”
Yet even the Eagles’ harshest critics had to acknowledge that Hotel California was the band’s masterpiece, artistically and commercially. The album soared to the pole position in its second week on the chart and spawned two Number One singles, “New Kid in Town” and the title track. Henley still considers Hotel California the band’s finest effort. “Every band has their peak,” he says. “That was ours.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of January 15, 1977
1. Hotel California, Eagles
2. Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder
3. Wings Over America, Wings
4. Boston, Boston
5. A New World Record, Electric Light Orchestra