Hotel California

Okay, another deep question.

What do the lyrics mean? Heard it this morning, love the guitar at the end, but the words make very little sense to my concrete brain!

pure hedonism that South California experienced in the mid-to-late Seventies, that post-hippie dreamscape that turned from "peace & love" to "drugs & sex." Arguably all of the Eagles' songs are about that theme. The Hotel represents the state of mind, the lowering-of-standards that infected so many of the era/place. Your guess is as good as mine about the beast, etc--maybe the beast is the culture, or the record industry? Check out and never leave refers to a tragic death, most likely drug-related.

And Jackson Browne's "Rosie" is about whacking off. lol

I didn't catch on to that for years -- I mean YEARS -- after I bought the album. When the lightbulb finally came on, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.

I had a friend in high school, and he and I were big JB fans. We envisioned "Rosie" as this perfect, malleable girl we would each meet after the chains of adolescence were cast off. D'oh!

play and sing that tune all the time and never knew what it was about. I have a huge naive streak in me.
Once at a bar with some coworkers a girl came over and sat talking with us for hours. I never caught on that she was a hooker. I just thought she was nice. I'm still that way.

It's the live-in-the-studio rockin' high point of that album.

("Album". Listen to this geezer :eyes: )

everywhere, so I like HC and the GH's "albums." My favorite lyric, so often quoted in my life, is

"So many times it happens that we live our lives in chains that we never even know we have the key."

:hi:

I don't like the hat as much as I thought - for some reason it get distorted. I'll probably go back to #21.

'they stab it with their steely knives, but they just cant kill the beast"

"you can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave"

"Besides the four primary rumors (real hotel, mental hospital, devil worship, ghostly images), we've also picked up some unusual ones . . . . (snip)

. . . . The truth proves far less satisfying than the myriad rumors that have sprung up around this song.

Hotel California is an allegory about hedonism and greed in Southern California in the 1970s. At the time of its release, the Eagles were riding high in the music world, experiencing material success on a frightening level. Though they thoroughly enjoyed the money, drugs, and women fame threw their way, they were disquieted by it all and sought to pour that sense of unease into their music and to warn others about the dark underside of such adulation.

In a 1995 interview, Don Henley said the song "sort of captured the zeitgeist of the time, which was a time of great excess in this country and in the music business in particular." In another interview that same year, he referred to it as being about a "loss of innocence."

The album has as its underlying theme the corruption of impressionable rock stars by the decadent Los Angeles music industry. The celebrated title track presents California as a gilded prison the artist freely enters only to discover that he cannot later escape.

The real Hotel California is not a place; it is a metaphor for the west coast music industry and its effect on the talented but unworldy musicians who find themselves ensnared in its glittering web.

Barbara "the golden state of mind" Mikkelson"

http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/hotel.htm