The Eagles' 'Hotel California': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, a show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We are your steely Knives of Scintilla, your two Tiffany Twisted minds of Minusha prisoners here of our own device. I'm Alex Heigl and I'm Jordan Runtog, and I have to say I had no idea they were saying Tiffany twisted in that song. I don't even know what that means. I imagine you'll tell me later. Re listening to all this, I've actually discovered that the thing I like best about this song of the lyrics shocking. That makes sense. I can see that. And as our keen eared listeners may have gleaned from that intro, Jordan, today we are gathering at our master's chambers for a feast of facts voices, waking you up in the middle of the night or whenever you might listen to this, to talk about the Eagles Hotel, California. Yea, love him or hate him? And as I've learned from our reviews on Apple Podcasts, my feelings about boomer music icons are not frequently appreciated, wildly dislikable boomer music icons, I need to say true risk of getting more of those? Yeah, you know, I don't Yeah whatever. Don Henley's quotes speak for himself. Yeah, the Eagles are just one of the biggest bands period and Hotel California is their biggest song, So good for them. I just want to add that discussing the Eagles right now is if listeners can probably tell making you physically ill. Yeah, I'm I'm a little sick of Don henley s. Yeah. I don't know, man, you have a bit more of a partlar fascination with the iconography and everything around them. I just really love Joe Walsh. Yeah, I mean, what's not to love? You know, we have numerous Joe Walsh corner moments in here, so yeah, thank god. Yeah, you know, my festination with the Eagles extends way beyond the music. The tumultuous interpersonal dynamics and the interband drama. For me, put them neck and neck with Fleetwood Mac in terms of just being the most entertaining and grossing rock and roll soap opera. In a previous podcast, I co hosted about rock rivalries. The Eagle story spiraled into an epic trilogy, so it's Titanic levels in the DMI universe. I mean, yeah, I don't know, dude, is it like, don't I want to get one of those T shirts of like Detroit versus everybody that's like Don Henley versus everybody, or like all my homies hate Don Henley. I mean another good one. But you know, I mean despite our strongly held feelings. I know people, people I consider friends who have equally strong feelings for the Eagles in the opposite way they love the Eagles. I mean the gargantuan sales figures speak for themselves. Numbers don't lie, you know. Yeah. In the United States, the Eagles have the first and third highest selling albums ever. Their greatest hits album is number one. He'll Talk California is number three, forming a sandwich with Michael Jackson's Thriller at number two. That's a sandwich. I don't like the Eagles as the bread, Michael Jackson as the meat. Michael Jackson and meat should never be in the same sentence together. Yeah, I don't know, man, you know what it is to me? I think they really crystallized with doing the research and having to read that these guys talk a bunch is they have sore winner energy. You know, they made more money making music than probably anyone will again like just purely from music, because you know, I was thinking about it. I was like, I wonder how rich these guys are. And the reason that they probably aren't as rich as Michael Jackson or your Taylor Swift or whatever is because, to their credit, they didn't do endorsements, they didn't do commercials, they didn't license their stuff, but they have the first and third best selling records of all time, like so you were you you won guys, And all they can do is keep like relitigating the same petty grievances and like the same relitigating in a literal sense, very Austin by the way. Yeah, And it's it's like it's one thing to be a sore winner if you're like funny and engaging, but it's another thing to be like a cantankerous old man. It's a bad look. It's just a bit they like they're just personally unlikable people, except for sweet Joe Walsh oh yes, yes, yes yes, and Randy Meisner. Oh god, yeah, I didn't know that about Randy Meiser. That was that was a surprise read. It's not, you know. I mean, as the honorary boomer in our little duo, I know better than to criticize these golden boys of the me decade too much. So allow me to quote the self proclaimed dean of rock critics, Robert Chris Gau in nineteen seventy two, he writes, another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them. One of the best pieces of rock criticism of all time. Yes, you know, this is just one of the many ways that I am like the dude from The Big Lebowski. My intense antipathy towards the Eagles, despite what I really believe to be their sizeable degree of musical talent. It's really something that fascinates me. How I can dislike them so much but admit that they are very good at what they do. Yeah, I know that's not mutually exclusive, but that's interesting to me. And you know, sometimes late at night, when I can't sleep, I try to examine my feelings and figure out why I feel this way about the Eagles, and I think, like you just mentioned, there's self serious alpha dogness mixed with their seemingly unholy passion for lawsuits, makes their whole peaceful, easy feeling, take it easy eight track classics ring a little hollow. Yeah, it's so disingenuous, Like you're the least easy taking it people of all time. Yeah, I mean, I'm hard pressed the name a group who better exemplifies the curdling of the sixties hippie dream, which, ironically, Joe Walsh was a student at Ohio's Kent State University in nineteen seven, an when the National Guard opened fire on a peaceful anti war protest, killing for students, which is an incident that historically has been viewed alongside the murder at the Rolling Stones concert on Altamont as the death knell of the sixties. So there's that, But there's also something just so much more, something unexplainable, that inspires such strong negative feelings against the group who makes music that is really, by any metric, pretty inoffensive. So to me, like I keep saying, that is just what makes the Eagles so interesting, And I know I'm not alone in feeling that way. Following the death of Eagles co Benevolent Dictator Glen Fry. In twenty sixteen, Billboard published a piece written by Chris Willman called Why are the Eagles So Hated? An explainer on the immensely popular yet divisive rock band. That headline is questionable timing, considering it was written while glen Frye's body was probably still warm, but the New York Daily News did one better, publishing a piece with the headline Glen Fry's death is sad, but the Eagles were a horrific But Chris Willman is a little more even handed in his Billboard piece as he tries to break down the hatred for the Eagles in less emotional and more intellectual terms, and he cites several reasons why everyone seemingly hates the Eagles. One reason is that the band evokes the schism between East Coast and West Coast music rivalries, less with the bands themselves, but mostly with the critics. The New York based critics historically hated the Eagles for the same reason that New Yorkers generally hate la They think they're soft. The rest of Robert Chris gals quote and Robert Christgaus in New Yorker reads the Eagles are the ultimate in California dreaming, a fantasy of fulfillment that has been made real only in the hip, upper middle class suburbs of Barynne County and the Los Angeles Canyons. What do you think about that? Yeah? I think that tracks. I mean, despite all of their high flutinous about this song being like the death of the California Dream, I mean, at their heart, every other one of their songs is about how great the California life style, taking it easy and tequila sunrise this, and how great taking it to the limit is is it? No? No? Well, let me ask you. You are a a longtime New Yorker who recently moved out. Oh people out here are soft? Okay, yeah, okay, yeah I know I yeah, for sure New Yorkers are needlessly hard two or false? Uh you know what? You know what's actually really interesting reading about this band and knowing how none of them were actually from California. But it's funny to me because they epitomize they're not the Midwest mentality of being like genuinely nice, they're the California. They're the Los Angeles mentality of being outwardly nice and secretly huge dicks. Whereas New Yorkers I've found are gruff or whatever, like hey are walking into here, but like yeah, but like we'll go out of their way to help you. I never felt like a New Yorker rudeness, I mean surface rudeness, but like I've always I've always held that about New York. So well, I'm from Boston. Who are in Mino? So well, we're not talking about Boston. What does Boston even have? Drop Kate Murphy's a couple of colleges. Well. According to this Billboard piece, another reason for scorn against the Eagles is their supposed inoffensiveness. He previously mentioned Daily News hatchet job. You know the Eagles were a horrific band. Describe them as quote easy listening, even too soft for an elevator. The music your mom and dad would play in the living room high five while you went upstairs and listened to the clash after dinner. Yeah, there's you know, an easy shot. But as much as like, when I think about like the harmony, this the kind of polished Laurel Canyon stuff, Like they really were polished within an inch of their life. What if you think about like the other three and five part harmony guys of the era. They are tremendous harmony singers. I mean it's really yea, but yeah, it's just so polished. I mean they talk about when Joe Walsh joined the band, they were like John Henley was like, you can't move on stage, like none of that rock starship. It's supposed to be about the music man. Let Joe Walsh move on stage, dude. Don Henley said that because I thought when they hired Joe Walsh they were interested in getting more rocky and it was like sonically but yeah, the quote that I read was he was like, they were like I think it might have been a minute Mark Elliott book. They were basically said, we don't do the like hold your hand up to your ear while you're playing the guitar solo, or like play play between your knees or like all that stuff. Like you know, we just were about the music man. I'm like, well, that's why you have bad problems, Don Henley, is because you got to stick up your ass, oh boy, and commercial and perhaps the most compelling reason for all the Eagles hatred is that we've simply been taught to do it after years of social and cultural conditioning. In his book I Wear the Black Hat Grappling with Villains real and imagined, critic Chuck Klausterman wrote about the Eagles, nodding to Robert Chriscau's famous line by calling his chapter another thing that interests me about the Eagles that I am contractually obligated to hate them, And in the section, Chuck Lusterman rights, after spending the first twenty five years of my life believing that they were merely boring, I suddenly decided that the Eagles were the worst band that had ever existed or could ever exist. I saw the Big Lebowski and decided the main character should become the role model for all human thoughts. Electronica was on MTV. Even Grandma's were temporary. Postmodernists, Aspire and urban outfitter employees were excited about technology and really into Neutramilk Hotel. It was the logical time to believe Glenfry was Paul Pott and elsewhere on the piece, Chuck Lasterman describes the Eagles as quote the most unpopular super popular entity ever created by California, not counting Ronald Reagan. They effortlessly represented what people do not like about Malibu, which is true. I mean he had that famous thing about Coldplay too, right. Coldplay is like British Eagles, really good harmonies, really hard on your sleeve, jibber jabber, really inoffensive and boring. That's again, I don't like hate it. I'm like, this is all really well executed. These guys are pros like, but you do hate it. You just admit that it's well done. Yeah, okay, that's true. No, but at the end of the piece, Chuck Lusterman reevaluates his feelings for the Eagles and he comes to see them as quote, just an old rock band who made music that was significant and relaxing and inevitable. And he also admitted that only an idiot would argue that Take It Easy is poorly written or badly executed, which, like we just said, that's the correct take. I feel like inevitable is really interesting because it's it's it's really funny to think about where they were situated in terms of the country rock stuff. Like you know, when they had a what's his name Bernie Leadon, yeah, who he was in the Flying Burrito Brothers, Right, yeah, yeah, so you have like a direct lineage to like country the original the original country rock, right, and then they progressively winnowed all of those elements out and created like, you know, easy listening arena rock, and which is essentially the template for like the commercial music of the eighties. You know, like it's inevitable is a tremendous word to apply to this band's arc, you know, you know, each of these scholars have neglected to mention one of the biggest reasons why I find the Eagles detestable. It's the inconsistent use of an article in the band's name. Is it the Eagles or is it Eagles? I've heard both ways. Yeah, if it's Eagles, that's inexcusable. I'm sorry. It's the same with talking Heads. I can't I'm sorry, it's the talking Heads. I can't like Eagles. It's Eagles. No article on Spotify, it's I hate that. I hate that so much. And yet their header says the Eagles are one of the most iconic bands in the history of music. Like, yeah, it's it's not great. It's not great. What do you think about Pixies? I can live with that. I can't even live with Heads. They're weird enough. But yeah, yes that you know what that's exactly what it is. You are weird enough to be precious about how I refer to your bands. But no, the Eagles, No, you were the Eagles. I'm sorry. Well from the songs cringe Worth, the original title to the Steely Dan song that inspired a key lyric to the theories about whether or not it was a real place. Here's everything you didn't know about Hotel California. In the mid seventies, the Eagles were on top of the damn world, where Don Henley had believed he would rightfully end up since he was born perming iron in hand in Gilmur, Texas, the birthplace of Johnny Mathis. Is he permed or natural hair? He said it was natural? But I mean, yeah, what a cloud? You don't you get it? You don't get an afro that doesn't have a dad from the Brady Bunch. Did I guess that's true? Let's see Buckingham famous white guy afros over the seventies tombler dot com. Yeah, the band's previous album nineteen seventy fives. One of these nights, Bawn the three top ten singles and the greatest hits album that we talked about wound up forcing the ri double Aid to invent the designation of platinum. Did you know that? I didn't. I thought platinum was earlier in the seventies. I thought, but Beach Boys compilation Endless Summer went like quadruple platinumer double Platinum or something in seventy three. I didn't realize it was that late. You'd love it to be the Beach Boys, wouldn't you. I would. Yeah, No ice Cream's shirt wearing Son of a Bitch. We were under the microscope, Glenn Fry said. At the time, everybody was going to look at the next record we made and pass judgment. Don Henley and I were going, Man, this better be good. This was not long after Don Fingers Felder had joined the band in nineteen seventy four, just one day after being called in to add slide guitar on the tracks Good Day in Hell and Already Gone. Assuming he was being brought on board as a full member, he was wrong, realizing that the unholy alliance between Don Henley and and Fry ran the band as a quote benevolent dictatorship. Per Felder's scathingly petty tell all book Heaven and Hell, Fry could be a bully and Henley a controlling perfectionists, about whom Glenn Fry himself once said, no one can suck the fun out of a room like Don Henley. That's great. I like that. This is your best friend and creative partner. Saying that about you and Henley stands was that no band could function as a democracy. They compared the dynamic to a sports team, saying if people play their positions and play their strengths, everything turns out well. The whole is greater than some of the parts. We always understood that some of the other people didn't understand that. They disliked Felder asserting himself and asking for things like songwriting credits, with Henley saying at one point, think of how much could be accomplished if no one cared about credit. Ooh, and in the History of the Eagles documentary, Don Felder was never ever satisfied, never ever happy. I really see both sides of this. This is tricky because on one hand, if you're as talented as Don Felder as he might expect to be treated with, I don't know, a certain amount of respect, get a little thing like songwriting credit. Maybe hey, maybe Glenn Fry was jealous of his musical abilities. To a certain extent, he's a fingers Felder is a way better guitarist than Glenn Frye. But on the other hand, in bands, seniority obviously matters, and no one wants the new guy coming in and throwing their weight around. But as Don Felder tells it, he was being disrespected on a daily basis. That sows the seeds for the end of this episode, shall I say, In addition to fingers Felder's unhappiness bassist and sweet Cinnamon Bun too pure for this world, Randy Meisner was also feeling on the outs. He told the band's biographer Mark Elliott. We were all real close, more or less up until the year of Hotel California. I just didn't feel like I was part of the group at that point. Success changed everything. When we first started, we were really close, like brothers. We'd sit around, smoke a dube together, drink beer and have a good time. By nineteen seventy six, it just wasn't the same. We couldn't sit down like the guys anymore. It was all business. The friendships were all gone by that point. Randy Meisner, He's got that the beautiful falsetto voice that you can hear on take it to the limit. Great bass player, sweet Sweet, the goodest boy Randy Meisner, the most likable member of the Eagle Well No Sorry, second the Joe Walsh, speaking of the breaking of which another key lineup change was the swapping in of Joe the Midwest Madman Walsh, a nickname I just made up for Bernie lead Lips lead In, same founding member. Lenin had firmly been a member of The Bling Burrito Brothers and was way more into the country side of the country rock sound. The Beatles are credited with popularizing. The breaking point in his relationship with the band supposedly came when one night, as for I was intensely talking about the direction the band should head in next Ledden interrupted him by pouring a beer over his head and saying, you need to chill out, man who among us? Apparently he later regretted this, saying that it wasn't his proudest moment and it was really disrespectful, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it sounds pretty funny. It sounds hilarious. Oh can you imagine how mad he got? Well, I mean yeah, I mean he kind of came out on top. He left the Eagles, presumably got a ton of money from his time in the Eagles, and he got one over on Glenn Fry and then he rejoined. I think things are relatively good between them. I think recently, relatively recently, in the two thousands at least, he rejoined the Eagles for I think it was called just the History of the Eagles Tour. I think around the same time that that documentary History of the Eagles two parter came out in I think twenty thirteen. And for anyone who hasn't seen that documentary, it's like, for me, it's up there with the Beatles Anthology in terms of just a truly great rock doc epic. It's so funny, it's so petty, it's so nasty, It's filled with so many great rock cliches, usually involving mountains and being on top of them. What is the one I'm trying to think of the Joe Walsh quote on the process of getting famous. The first thing that happens is you give a label and you got to live up in it, and then you get just get caught up in that. And I forget what the second thing is. You gotta live up in it. Apparently this is the this is just I haven't seen this, but this is from a Grant Land feature on when that came out, and his quote on their breakup is so much stuff just happened. Oh my god. You know, there's a philosopher who says, as you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos and random events, non related events smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation. And then this happens, and it's overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world's going on? And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel, but at the time it don't. I have to give Bill Simmons credit. This is an incredible line in this piece. First, Joe Walsh never names the philosopher, and as far as we know, that philosopher was some dude named Clyde who gave Walsh incredible coke on a Thursday night in like nineteen seventy eight. Second, there's a twenty percent he stole that entire thing from Charles Dickens and just doesn't remember. Third, that's an amazing quote. I mean, Joe Walsh is like the Yogi bearra of rock and roll. Joe Walsh was born in Kansas, raised in Ohio, New York, and New Jersey, but then moved back to Ohio to get his went to Kent State, as you mentioned, to get his music career on the road. His first two bands were basically like Ohio bar groups, but Joe is the star. And in between doing Forrest Gump type like selling Jimmy Page, his iconic gibson Les Paul and learning slide guitar from Dwayne Allman made he made a name for himself. James Gang Whips Funk forty nine's incredible. They were never commercially famous. They were really kind of only a hit in in and around Ohio in the Midwest, but they're such a great power trio. I actually found this really great quote from Joe Walsh talking about it. Oh blah bla Lula whoa, Yeah, that's the intro to the song Meadows. This is what I'm saying, like like like Don Henley would never start a song like that for Joe walshy was it was Tuesday. Jordan Tea is up some of the some of the best Joe Walsh stories. Yes, I have so many great Joe Walsh stories. He's amazing. I think I talked about this on a Revolver episode. But Joe Walsh worshiped the Beatles and he wanted to be one so bad. And in the mid sixties he was in an early group called the Measles, and he set about trying to obsessively learn the guitar part to the Beatles track and Your Bird Can Sing from the nineteenth sixty six album Revolver. And he spent weeks and weeks, maybe even months, trying to work the guitar part out by ear, not realizing that it was actually two guitars playing the part, and they became famous around town for being able to play the whole part on one guitar, and he would proudly say, not even George could do that. And then now, of course he is Ringo Star's brother in law. He's married to Ringo's wife's sister, Lily Tomlin. Yeah, and he's also the owner of Klaus Foreman's original cover artwork for Revolver. So Joe Walsh came out on top there. I love a fellow Beatle obsess of getting what he wants. After leaving James Gang and recording some records under the named Barnstorm, Walsh was invited to join the Eagles by their manager, notorious music industry heavy Irving A's Off, and he did join the man in nineteen seventy five, largely against Don Henley's wishes. As we mentioned earlier, Don Henley thought Joe was too wild for the band. He was not wrong. Was the famous quote about Joe Walsh from Glenn Fry. Joe was an interesting bunch of guys. The guys in the Eagles gave Joe walshy chainsaw for her birthday once as a joke. Probably got a lot of use. Joe was the American champion of hotel room trashing after being trained by his British counterpart, Keith Moon. Joe Walsh had in the History of the Eagles documentary, one of the most terrifying things that ever happened to me was that Keith Moon decided he liked me. That's an incredible quote. He's guy's a quote machine. So, as a result of Joe's penchant for destroying hotel rooms, there was a long list of hotels in which the Eagles were not welcome. My favorite story from this era, if you'll indulge me once more in my Joe Walsh stories, is when Joe Walsh was at the Astor Towers in Chicago with John Belushi, WHI yeah, yeah. They were not allowed into the fancy dining room because they were both wearing jeans, and you know, they had a dress code at places like this. Instead of just you know, going back to the room and putting on slacks, John Belushi and Joe Walsh went into an alleyway and spray painted their jeans black. Unfortunately, they were hungry and didn't wait for the paint to dry, so when they sat down on these antique Queen Anne chairs, the paint came off. This caused a problem when they stood up and the whole backside of their pants were blue again. I guess they were so pissed off by this whole frustrating experience that they went back to Joe's room and caused twenty eight thousand dollars worth of damage in a single night. And amazingly, Joe was still up to these tricks years later when he was in Ringo Stars All Star Band in the late eighties and early nineties, I interviewed Ringo's drum tech a few years back, and he told me one night when the band bread he ritched Carlton, Joe glued the furniture in his suite to the ceiling. The drum tech told me Joe carried a hot glue gun and glued the table to the ceiling, and the lamp plugged in, turned on, and the ashtray with a lit cigarette in it, and then he took a bunch of polaroids and the stunt came with a four thousand dollar price tach And when Joe came in the next day for a sound check, the drum tech asked him, Hey, Joe, have a fun time last night, and Joe said it was worth every penny good for him. I know stuff like that would normally offend me, but for some reason, with Joe Walsh it doesn't. He was in the band's orbit as a solo artist. He was managed by the Eagles manager A's Off, and he used an Eagles pound, Bill Simsick as his record producer. But we mentioned earlier how he's entry in the band kind of sheered away the last remaining vestiges of any country influences in the band, except for maybe the harmonies and the occasional pedal steel. You can just put pedal steel and anything. Did you know that little seat, little music industry secrets for you. Walsh's big contribution to the Hotel California record, other than the dueling lead part in the title song, was the guitar line to Life in the Fast Lane. Yeah, it was like a coordination exercise. He described it as like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. It was like a string skipping exercise, kind of like gum. Yeah, there's a listical there, like top ten riffs that came out of exercises. There's probably a lot of them. Fry told Cameron Crowe. I was riding in a car with a drug dealer, a guy we used to call the count because his count was never very good. We were driving out to an Eagles poker game. I was in the passenger seat. He moved over to the left lane and started driving seventy five to eighty miles per hour. I said, hey man, slow down. He goes, hey man, it's Life in the fast Lane. Frey hung onto the title and Walsh just threw down the riff. One day as the band was warming up, caught both Henley and fryes Ears. Fry said it made a statement Joe Walsh was officially in the band. You know, I think it says a lot about Glen Fries. He's the kind of guy that thinks that the phrase life in the fast Land's cool is bad. As also, seventy five miles an hour on the interstate like not that fast. I know, I was trying. I mean, unless they're like going through like Sunset Boulevard or something. Yeah, yeah, I had that thought too. Is it worth doing a brief rundown of seventies rock stars who were a little too open about crediting their dealers for their big blockbuster hits. Fleetwood mac We're gonna credit their coke dealer on rumors until he, according to Mcfleetwood got snuffed, as he said charmingly described it. And then wasn't there a Black Sabbath one too? Yeah? And when they made Volume four, during which they had cocaine smuggled in and speaker cabinets, they the liner notes, Thank the great Coke Cola. It was so open in the seventies, dude, I mean, like I've read about like the history of drugs in this country, and you know doctors used to just do cocaine, like, oh, it's good for you, insane. I love how Glen Fry was scandalized not only by the speed that this guy was driving, but also just the nature of the song itself, he laid. I said, I could hardly listen to Life in the fast Land when we were recording it, because I was getting high a lot at the time and the song made me ill. This is him talking a rolling stone in nineteen seventy nine. We were trying to paint a picture that cocaine wasn't great. It turns on you. It messed up my back muscles, messed up my nerves, it messed up my stomach and made me paranoid. The title track was the first one track for the record, but it had dated back too long before that. Dawn Franzia Felder nicknames. Everybody gets a nickname. Yeah, you get Anna, and you get a nickname. He'd rendered a beach house in Malibu before the band started on the follow up to One of These Nights, and he told Guitar World in twenty thirteen, I remember sitting in the living room on a spectacular July day with the doors wide open. I had a bathing suit on and was sitting on this couch, soaking wet, thinking the world was a wonderful place to be. This is why people hate Californians. I had this acoustic twelve string and started tinkling around with it, and those Hotel California chords just kind of oozed out. He can did a demo of the tune to his TAC four track tape recorder, playing bass himself and using a drum machine. He told Gibson dot Com in twenty ten, I knew it was unique, but I didn't know if it was appropriate for the Eagles. It was a kind of reggae, almost an abstract guitar part for what was on the radio back then. Did you added these? No? You did. I must have done it in a fuke state. Don Head Honcho Henley and Glenn super Freak Fry took something of a dim view of Felder's demos that he contributed to the session. Aside from what would become Hotel California, he brought them over a dozen other songs, all of which they rejected. Fry would later say ninety five percent of them were cluttered with guitar licks, and we'd listen to one and go, well, where do you sing? He's got some such sticks. I love it. But Henley did hear something he liked in that Beach demo. He told Rolling Stone Felder had submitted a cassette tape containing about a half dozen different pieces of music. None of them moved me until I got to that one. It was a simple demo, a progression of our pageted guitar chords along with some hornlike sustained note lines all over a simple four four drum machine pattern. There may have been some Latin style percussion in there too. I think I was driving down Benedict Kenyon Drive at night, or maybe even North Crescent Drive. Why what a name dropper? The first time I heard the piece, and I remember thinking this has potential. I think we can make something interesting out of this. I love about Don Henley and Glenn Fry make it seem like they plucked this raw diamond out of a messy pile of crap. Fry, in a ninety ninety two episode of In the Studio with Redbeard were called, we said, this is electric Mexican reggae. Wow, what a nice synthesis of styles as a horrifying sentence, and so Mexican Reggae became the song's working title during their early sessions before the lyrics were finalized, Jesus Christ I can't. Another big point of contention between Felder and the hair Wins was the partially complete album cut Victim of Love, which Felder had thought he was going to sing himself. Takes were done with Felder singing lead, but Messrs Fry and Henley weren't having it. There was no space for Filler and don Felder, for all of his talents as a guitar player, was not a singer. Fries adding the history of the Eagles, with Henley adding the incredible incredible, He says, we let mister Felder sing it dozens of times over the space of a week, over and over. It simply did not come up to band standards. So they arrived at an incredible solution. They had irving A's off their manager, take Felder out to dinner and tell him, Hey, you're not going to be singing that song. While Henley was back in the studio recording over his vocal takes. Chef's Kiss of dickishness. That's up there with Fleetwood mac axing Stevie Nick's Silver Springs from rumors and then making mc fleetwood take her out to the parking lot to bay basically shoot her in the head and tell her that her most cherished song was getting cut from the album written as a gift for her mother. Yes, and then Stevie ended up dating Don Henley for a while in the seventies two. So everybody's terrible. Everybody's terrible. It was a truly awful scene. I have to think, like Tom Petty was the only guy who was cool out of that Laurel Canyon thing because he came from Florida. He came from Janesville, you know. Yeah, everyone else in this such a ponderous who's cool in that scene? Linda Ronstat Yeah, there you go. Yeah, Yeah, like all the all time assole of rock and roll came out of Laurel Canyon. Yeah, Crosby Stills, Nashing Young, the Eagles, Warren Zevon, like good Lord Zappa, Zappa difficult, not dickish, maybe, yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, I wouldn't put him in there. Yeah, I wouldn't put him in the Henley category. But getting back to Victim of Love, Don and Glenn predictively got pretty nasty about it. Don Felder later said it was a bit of a bitter pill with Swallow not to sing on it. I felt Don Henley was taking that song from me because I've been promised a song on this album, and Don Henley disagreed. He said in the History of the Eagles documentary, I have no recollection of anybody being promised anything. And he claims that when Felder brought him the song, it was just wasn't even a song. It was a chord progression, no title, no lyrics, and no melody. Henley added, Felder demanding to sing that song as the equivalent of me demanding to play lead guitar on Hotel California. It just didn't make sense. And I mean, Glen Fry sort of defending this power dynamic they'd set up. He admitted that, you know, he and Don kind of carved up the vocal duties between them in the early part of the band's career, but as the seventies wore on and the band became bigger and bigger, he let Dawn sing more songs because that's kind of what the people wanted, and it was kind of obvious that Don Henley was the better singer of the two. This was Glenn's own way of saying that the band's interests outweighed individual interests. As Joe Walsh put it, this is the best thing for the Eagles, and Don Felder never forgot that we were all alpha's and all very assertive and powerful in our own way. In his own defense, Don Felder would admit, there's no comparing my vocal to Don Henley's vocal. There's no comparing anybody's vocal to Don Henley. But he never forgot or forgave the slight and you must have been particularly galling for him that every other member of the Eagles had a solo vocal spot on Hotel California, the album named for his own musical baby except Himself. But on a nicer note, Owners of the old vinyl edition of Hotel California will notice the phrase vol is a five piece live inscribed on the album's run out groove. That's the little smooth part of the record, right, you know, right outside of the label in the center. This was a little inside joke. It's signaled that victim of love was recorded live by the Five Eagles with no overdubs. This was etched in there by the band's producer, Bill Simsick, which basically was mad as a big as a big middle finger to critics who accused the Eagles of being too clinical and soulless in the studio and just overdubbing things within an inch of their life and not having that authentic in the room band sound that said. I think he also said they were like thirty three edits on Hotel California. That sounds right. Yeah, So Bill Simpson was not in a single vowel on that guy's name. Trying to think of a nickname for him, Bill stuttering Simpson is sick vowel movement. He came into their band's orbit by Joe Walsh. He'd produced not just The James Gang, but Walsh's solo records, and the Eagles ditched Glynn John's in favor of Simzeck after hearing his work on those records and wanting to move in a more rock and direction. Simsic has a great sound on sound Feature where he talks about recording the song, and he said in there his initial meeting with Henley, he said how many mics I'd use on a set of drums, and I told him eight or nine. Glenn Johns was known for using three. Then when Glenn Fry wanted to know how long he could work on his guitar solos, I told him as long as it takes. They wanted to rock, and that's what I did. So it was a good marriage and drum set. He really don't need that many mikes and drum set. Control. It's all about control. These guys are all about control. Yeah. Both one of those nights in Hotel California were recorded half at the Record Plane in La as a concession to the band, and half at Criteria in Miami, where Simzeck lived after being scared out of California by an earthquake. Really have you any earthquakes? Oh? Yeah, bunch, But I was ever. He was like shaken out of bed in the middle of the night, if I recall correctly, And then he was like this, which is I understand understandable. He told sound on sound every time we were at Criteria. The guys were actually quite happy to be out of LA and away from all of the partying and the hangars on Hotel California took nine months to make, and throughout that time we'd go back and forth between LA and Miami. We do a month in LA and take three or four weeks off, and then a month in Miami. We do a month in LA and take three or four weeks off, and then a month in Miami and take three or four weeks off because we'd record tracks and then they'd have to go away and write the words. What an incredibly relaxed schedule. How lovely for them. Very seldom they would write a full song all in one go. Somebody would have a lick, somebody would have a riff, and then we developed at the studio more than anything else. All that said, Criteria was not exactly a sober living facility. Next door, we're Black Sabbath working on their technical Ecstasy album and simultaneously undercutting the Eagles by playing too loud, which is just another reason to love Black Sabbath. Tony Eaomi, Sabbath guitarists told Uncut in twenty fourteen, the Eagles were recording next door, but we were too loud for them. It kept coming through the wall into their sessions. Hotel California's delicate closing ballad. The last resort had to be rerecorded multiple times due to noise leakage, but the Eagles held their own in volume of cocaine consumed. Sabbath bassist Keezer Butler were called venturing into a studio recently vacated by the band. Before we could start recording, we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board. I think they'd left about a pound of cocaine in the board. Given the length of the recording process. One of the stumbling blocks to getting Hotel California on tape was Felder remembering what he'd played on the demo. He told Music Radar in twenty twelve, Joe and I started jamming and Don said, no, non stop, it's not right. I said, what do you mean, it's not right and he said no, no, You've got to play it just like the demo. Only problem was I did that demo a year earlier. I couldn't even remember what was on it. They settled this with a cross country call. I had to call my housekeeper in Malibu, who took the cassette, put it in a blaster a boombox and played it with the phone held up to the blaster. It was close enough to the demo to make Don happy inconveniencing a housekeeper to please Don Henley just seems about right. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, the first two versions of Hotel California were recorded in LA. The third and final one was cut in Miami, which is perfect for a song about a bunch of not Californian's writing about the California Mythos Simsic told Sound Out Sound the first version we recorded was just a riff. However, once Don Henley began to write the lyrics, it turned out to be the wrong key. Felder elaborated to music Radar. Don went out and start singing on it, and it sounded like Barry Gibb in this high voice. I went, wait, wait, that just doesn't work. So I went out to the studio with a guitar, sat down with him and said, okay, let's drop it down to D minor. But that was still too high. C minor still too high. How about A minor that was too low? So we wound up having to play in the key of B minor, which is not a particularly guitar friendly key, but it was perfect for his voice. B minor is a very guitar friendly key. What the hell are you talking about? Got all the open strings in there? It's the relative minor of D major. Have your open chords? And that wait, talking about Franzy of Felder, It's kind of been better f word, I can slide it. There was that Franzier, was that sim Sick? That's Felder? I was Feller, half of Hotel California's legacies. It's cryptic, ominous lyrics, which I again I love, I actually do love the lyrics to this song. And did it walk such a great line between like very specific imagery and vague turns of phrase that have gone on to just enter the life xicon great writing and Frogman Felder frog mouth for freck frickin frack Felder, What do I just keep riffing? Felder described the writing of the words to Howard Stern in two thousand and eight, Don Henley and Glenn wrote most of the words. All of us kind of drove into La at night. Nobody was from California, And if you drive into LA at night, you can just see this glow on the horizon of lights and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have, and so it was kind of about that. They also said that it was about the myth making of Southern California and also the myth making of the American dream in general, because as Don Henley sagely observes, it's a fine line between the American dream and the American nightmare. Yeah. I mean he was an English major, right they I didn't know that that's what that, Bill Simmons Pece said. Henley told author Mark Elliott Into the Limit, the Untold Story of the Eagles. The concept had to do with taking a look at all the band had gone through personally and professionally. While it was still happening to them. We were getting an extensive education in life, in love, in business. Beverly Hills was still a mythical place to us. In that sense, it became something of a symbol, and the hotel the locus of all that HeLa had come to mean for us. In a sentence, I'd sum it up as the end of innocence Round one. Even worse, that took a page from the Boto playbook, calling the song quote a journey from innocence to experience. Henley and I were listening to the Hotel California demo tape together on an airplane, and we were talking about what we would write and how we wanted to be more cinematic. I told Cameron Crowe, we wanted this song to open like an episode of the Twilight Zone, just one shot after another. That's kind of cool. I like, yeah, I actually like what he says here, And he added that they wanted the song's narrator to be like a character in John Fowl's novel The Magus, where every time he walks through a door, there's a new version of reality. We wanted to write a song just like it was a movie. The guys having across the desert. He's tired, he's smoking, comes up over a hill, sees some lights, pulls in. First thing he sees is a really strange guy at the front door, welcoming him come on in, walks in. Then it becomes Felini esque strange women, effeminate men, shadowy corridors, disembodied voices, debauchery, illusion, weirdness. So we thought, let's really take some chances. Let's try to write in a way that we've never written before. And then Don Henley comes in with just a home run of pretension two camera Crow. I've always been interested in architecture and the language of architecture, and at that time I was particularly keen on the mission style of early California. I thought there was a certain mystery in romance about it. I don't know why I'm doing my time? Is that Tom Ford? That's the voice I thought it was, mister hands could be yeah, yeah, he continued huffing his own farts. Then there are all the great movies and plays in which hotels figure prominently, not only as a structure but as a dramatic device, films such as Grand Hotel, The Night Porter, and even Psycho Motel's Count two. There are plays like Neil Simon's Plaza Suite and California Suite, which Glenn and I went to see while writing the song. But there are also less lofty concerns at play in the song's lyrics. The line they stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast was, in Fry's words to Crow, a little post it back to Steely Dan. Apparently, Walter Becker's girlfriend loved the Eagles and she played them all the time. I think it drove him nuts. Yeah, sure. So the story goes that they were having a fight one day and that was the genesis of the line turn up the Eagles. The neighbors are listening in Everything You Did from Steely Dan's The Royal Scam album. During the writing of Hotel California, we decided to volley. We just wanted to allude to Steely Dan rather than mentioning them outright, So Dan got changed to knives, which is still you know, a penile metaphor, stabbing, thrusting, etc. Well, Steely Dan, the band name is famously named after the dildo from William burrows Naked Lunch. So yeah, he's right, I gotta give it to him. A penile metaphor. The man knows a penile metaphor, you gotta hand it to him. As for kalitas, the word is the diminutive feminine plural of the Spanish word cola or tail. Fry has said that it's slaying for the very tip top of a marijuana bud, where all the sap I guess kengeals, making it the most potent part to smoke, according to the site The Straight Dope, which is a famous weekly column in the pages of the all weekly The Chicago Reader, written by a journalist named Cecil Adams. I guess he wrote an email to Irving as Off in nineteen ninety seven asking about that word, and Irving a'sof to his credit, wrote him back, said, in response to your recent memo, in nineteen seventy six, during the writing of the song Hotel California by Messrs Henley and Fry, the word Kalidas was translated for them by their Mexican American road manager as little Buds. You have obvious already done the necessary extrapolation. Thank you for your inquiry. Incredible. The line her mind is Tiffany twisted, she got the Mercedes Bends, she got a lot of pretty boys that she call friends. Is about Henley's relationship with actress Laurie Rodkin. Tiffany Twisted, I have to assume, is a reference to Tiffany. The brand and Mercedes Benz is actually quite clever because it's wordplay like alluding to like, you know, the car, but it's also referring to the you know, a derangement that you get if you surface too fast from being underwater. They call that the Bends, which is the Radiohead album's famously named after that. That's a clever line. I gotta give him that. It's no pinot. I'm out of form, but okay, begrudgingly, I have to give it to them. But Henley told Mark Elliott, I wouldn't be crowing if I were miss Rodkin. As far as I'm concerned, She's the Norma Desmond of her generation. Oh he's a mean man. Henley was famously one of the great swinging dick bachelors of the seventies in la leaving a behind a trail of x's that included Rodkin, who he would call to get back together with, only to find out that she'd reconciled with her ex before him, Elton John's lyricist Bernie Taupin, and also, as you mentioned before, Stevie Nicks. A lot of the best lines in Hotel California are quite specifically about Don's relationship with Lorie, someone close to both of them told Elliott for the book. In an interview with the Dutch magazine Zigzag shortly before Hotel California's release, Don Henley said this is a concept album. There's no way to hide it. But it's not set in the Old West, the cowboy thing, you know, it's more urban this time. It's our bi centennia, the year, you know, the country is two hundred years old. So we figured, since we are the Eagles, and the Eagles our national symbol, that we were obliged to make some kind of a little bi centennial statement us in California, as the micro calls them, of the whole United States or the whole world, if you will, and try to wake people up and say, we've been okay so far for two hundred years, but we're going to have to change if we're going to continue to be around. We were obliged to make some kind of statement. Oh, Henley, this is this is where we've finally reached. The native of Henley quotes that I dug up. I'm so glad you found us. He was asked in two thousand and nine by The Plain Dealer music critic John Satyr about the line, So I called up the captain, please bring me my wine, he said. We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine. Satyr pointed out to him that wines are fermented while spirits are distilled. Henley's response is breathtaking. Thanks for the tutorial, and no, you're not the first person to bring this to my attention, and you're not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor. Believe me, I've consumed enough alcoholic beverages of my time to know how they are made and what the proper nomenclature is. But that line in the song has little nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It's a socio political statement. My only regret in writing about writing it would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices and songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes. In his defense, that line has always seemed very obvious to be as word play, so that it was a boner question. But wow, thanks for the tutorial. Yeah, that's that's really But with lyrics these scrutinized, it's no wonder that three people were charged in July twenty twenty two after allegedly conspiring to steal Henley's handwritten lyrics to the song, as well as two others from this album. One of them is a high ranking curator from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who I actually met a few months before his arrest. He looks shifty a little bit. Yeah. I don't think they were trying to steal it. I think they were trying to sell it. I think it was like part of the rock Hall archives. I forgot, I don't. I didn't follow the case that closely, but yeah, I think it was like something even weirder. Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office claim the lyrics were improperly obtained and could be worth over one million dollars at auction. The three men pleaded not guilty and were released without bail pending trial. Eagles manager Irving Azoffs had the case exposed the truth about music memorabilia, sales of highly personal stolen items hidden behind a facade of legitimacy. Okay, man, I will recite this header because I was proud of it, to the tune of Benny and the Jets, Fingers and the Walsh Don Don Don Don but Smithsmismismiz Bill Smith. Producer Bill Smiths told Sound on Sound that the recording of the extended Felder Walsh twin guitar coda that concludes Hotel California was quote one of the most amazing times I've had as a producer. Don and Joe were with me in the control room and we ran their mic chords out to amps in the studio so they could hear exactly what was happening. Don Felder was on one side of me, Joe Walsh was on the other, and I'm stuck in the middle with you. No needing that we were punching in all these incredible guitar parts which had not been written before we started to do it. So we were doing a lot of what we called search and destroy. Well let's try this, and let's try that. If I did that, then the harmony would be this. Just overdubbing all these leads was a basic two day process, and man, what a ball that was. They're both great, great players, and the two of them were on fire. I have a question to you, as somebody who's recorded in professional recording studios two days to nale solo, it's seventies for sure. But yeah, actually, you know what, I have the perfect I have the perfect analog for this. When during the making of Wheezer's blue album Rivers, Cuomo fired the guy who was playing guitar with the other guitarists in the band, the guy who actually wrote that fingerpicking intro to My Name is Jonas. He fired that guy and then rerecorded all of that guy's guitar parts himself in one day. Yes, that's right. So the seventies versus the nineties versus now when they would be like, Ah, you don't get to do that, sorry, or actually you'd probably do it by yourself in your bedroom crying. Felder told Music Radar in twenty twelve of the parts, I had a fifty nine Less Paul Sunburst and I plugged into a fifties Tweed Deluxe, a narrow paneled model. It was probably a fifty five or fifty six. That's he's describing like ten thousand dollars worth of gear in that sentence. Joe played a telecaster, but I'm not sure what amp he was using, and I think I had an echo plex, which is a delay unit in the loop at the time. But that was about it. Ranked by Guitar World readers as the fifth greatest guitar soul of all time in twenty twenty one. Those leads were not planned out, as Walsh echoed an interview with The mag he said, Don Felder and I sat down and we worked out all the descending lines. After the basic track was done and Don Henley had sung, it was our turn. We agreed on who was going to play when at the end, at the big solo, and we tried to compliment each other and build up to the very last part. So the solos were not planned. They were spontaneous playing off of each other. We were really good at that, and the rest of the song was kind of planned out. We put these descending lines on that because that was the first set of overdubs. And one interesting thing about the song's composition is that the chord progression, which is a fairly common flamenco chord progression in the shrugian mood, is that what it is? Yeah? Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's something that's not often heard in rock music. So when Jethro Tall multi instrumentalist An Anderson heard it, his ears perked up because he thought it was weirdly similar to his own composition, a song called We Used to Know from Jethro Talls nineteen sixty nine. Sophomore albums stand up. So that's a little suspicious. We might have a little bit of a led Zeppelin obspirit our bands spirit. Thank you that led Zeppelins. Randy California. How can you forget Randy California? Dude. Yes, another great bass player named Randy. It's maybe the most bass player name it is. Yeah. The fact that the Eagles and Jethro Tall toured together in nineteen seventy two was certainly an argument in Jethro Tall's favor. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tall said maybe it was just something that kind of picked up. But Ian Anderson took a very gracious view of all this. He's quoted as saying, maybe it was just something that the band just kind of picked up on subconsciously and introduced that chord sequence into their famous song Hotel California sometime later. This is Ian Anderson talking tosongfax dot Com. But in the Eagles defense, this tour with Jethro Tall took place some two years before Don Felder, Hotel California's primary composer, officially joined the band in nineteen seventy four, though he was a friend of founding guitarist Bernie laden at the time. So maybe he went to one of the shows where the Eagles were opening for Jethro Tall and heard the song and just subconsciously filed it away. Who knows. Don Felder himself later denied having ever heard the song. We used to know at the time. He wrote Hotel California, and he said he knew next to nothing about Jethro Tall other than the fact that they used a flutist. Maybe I'll punch in that song now and you can listen for yourself. Whenever a thing either way. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tall didn't take it further than just musing on it in the press. He said, it's just the same chord sequence, it's in a different time signature, different key, different context, and it's a very very very fine song they wrote. So I can't feel anything other than a sense of happiness for their sake. There's certainly no bitterness or any sense of plagiarism attached to my view on it, although I do sometimes allude in a joking way to accepting it as a kind of tribute. Yeah, I mean, you can't copyright chord progressions. It's like just basic you know, music facts. Have you heard the song is Jethro Tulsa. Yeah, no have you? Yeah. I have a hard time seeing how it would relate. Yeah. I mean, there's probably not a more polar opposite of the Eagles than Jethro tull Like, Yeah, dance around the may Pole, a giant long flute solo versus immaculate five part harmonies, and about California. Another fun fact, Hotel California also contains a bassline and a drum part. It's a little bit of a joke because I find those parts underwhelming. Oh the base though, well, I mean it's just bad white boy reggae. I guess Mexican reggae, please, electric Mexican reggae please. Once mixing was complete, Don Felder told Ultimate Classic Rock in twenty seventeen, we had a playback party for the record company. After Hotel California played, Henley turned around and said, that's gonna be our single. In those days, AM radio would only play something that was under three minutes and thirty seconds long, and it had to be a rock track, or danceable track or ballad of some kind. Hotel California was none of those. It was the absolute wrong format for radio. So I said to Don, I think that's an FM cut. It's something that'll play on FM radio, not AM radio. Don said, Nope, this is going to be our single. We all went with it, and I've never been so happy to have been so wrong. For the single release of Hotel California, the bands went with a version of the album's cover art for the sleeve. The Hotel California album art was the work of British art director Cosh aka Josh Hash, the man responsible for the Beatles Abbey Road album cover, the Who's Whose Next Album cover, the Rolling Stones Get Your Yah Yahs Out album cover, and many others. The guys a real legend, Cosh recalled in a two thousand and seven interview with Rock and Roll Report, Don Henley wanted me to find and portray Hotel California and portray it with a slightly sinister edge. So Cash scouted locations with photographer David Alexander, and they arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. But even after finding this location, achieving the requisite air of menace was a little challenging. Cosh said, to get the perfect picture, David and I perched nervously atop a sixty foot cherry picker dangling over Sunset Boulevard and rush Hour shooting blindly into the sun. Both of us but our Nikon cameras up in the basket and we took turns shooting, ducking, and reloading. We used high speed etchechrome film as the light began to fade, and this film gave us the remarkable graininess of the final shot, and the chosen shot captured at Golden Hour just before Sunset, became iconic. Though its subject was initially displeased, Caush is quoted as saying, as the sales of Hotel California went through the roof, lawyers for the Beverly Hills Hotel threatened me with a cease and desist action, and then it was gently pointed out by my attorney that the hotel's requests for bookings had tripled since the release of the Eagles album, so it was quietly dropped. Meanwhile, the rear of the album cover was shot in the lobby of the Lido Hotel in Hollywood, which I'm gonna see if that's still around Lido. Oh oh, Is that it's an apartment building? Yeah, of course it is the only thing more la would be if it was like a Starbucks or some shot coffee bean. Yeah it's a fine album cover. Yeah, I don't mind. Cash also designed the Hotel California logo, initially as a neon sign, but it proved difficult to bend real neon tubings into the desired shape of the script, so they ended up airbrushing it. Rumors have persisted for ages about the sinister double meaning of the lyrics and in turn the title. There is actually a literal Hotel California in total CentOS, a town on Mexicans Baja California peninsula, but none of the Eagles ever stayed there. The two most persistent theories about the song's title are that it's a reference to the nickname of the Camaro State Hospital, a state run psychiatric hospital near Los Angeles, which housed thousands of patients across its sixty year history before it closed nine ninety seven. And then it's about Satan. Satan. Is that is that a metalocalypse reference? No, it's it's Church O Church Lady, There's there's a Great Metalocalypse A bit with the Church of say, where the preacher had just keeps saying it in this He's just like, hold on Satin. It's so funny. The Satanic panic, I think this dated back to the It started like right away, right because people were just had the lyrics and were immediately scrutinizing it because it's a long song and it's a lot of going on in it. But I think it kind of they were caught up in the Satanic panic of the eighties and the whole backmasking thing that ensnared like Judas Priest and led Zeppelin everybody. But you know, there was some stuff that there was ample fodder for this theory. There's the line trying to kill the beast's popularly you know, the name of Satan and not having that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine, Like it's a like a whole possession of witchcraft thing. Nice, But also is that the air that the Church of Satan was founded? I thought it was older than that. Anton LaVey was, I know, he was in a nineteen sixty seven documentary like Mondo movie called Mondo Hollywood. Ah found in sixty six, Okay, so that, yeah, that doesn't hold up. The inner gatefold of the record is has like a shadowy figure on the balcony, and people were like, Oh, that's supposed to be Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. The other various rumors that Snopes collected included that the song is a tribute to the place where the Satanic Bible was written, that of devil worshippers bought an old church and christened it the Hotel California, some or all of the Eagles were heavily involved with the occult or were disciples of Lavay. The album photographs were taken in and around a building that used to be LaVey's headquarters for the Church of Satan. And then the fun and false fact that in California, the Church of Satan is registered under the name Hotel California. So that's all fun, that's just harmless. Nobody's getting hurt there. When I wish John Henley had talked about that, he would probably quote in Milton or Dante. The writing of Hotel California placed us in a lineage of those describing Satanism and Hell. Like John Milton, I thought of myself as Dante, and Fingers Felder thought of himself as John Milton. Clearly Joe Walsh was Thomas aquinas, No, I'm just in all the fact that your voice in that voice sounds less congested and sick than your actual voice, which is I have a part of me. He's like, just do that the rest of it out. Maybe. The song Hotel California entered the Billboard Hot one hundred chart on February twenty six, seventy seven, topped the Hot one hundred Singles chart for one week, and by May peaked at number ten on the Easy Listening chart. In April, and three months after it was first release certified gold by the riable A representing one million copies shipped. The band won the Grammy for Record of the Year for Hotel California at the twentieth Grammy Awards in nineteen seventy eight, a ceremony that manager Irving Azoff told the Recording Academy they wouldn't attend unless they were guaranteed to win, so they watched it live from their rehearsal room. Short an amazing story. Yeah, the Recording Academy wanted the Eagles to perform, and that's I guess what's set this whole thing off, And Irvasoff said, not only will we not perform without some sort of guarantee that we're winners, but we won't even show up, and azof one so far as to suggest that the band hide in a secret dressing room at the auditorium where the Grammys were taking place, where they would emerge only if and when their name was called for Record of the Year winner. They're Hubris man Se Cocaine's a hell of a drug. Yeah, this idea was rejected on the grounds that it was completely insane. They also toyed with the idea of having one of their artist friends except the award for them, maybe Jackson Brown or Lynda Ronstadt. This seemed like a better idea, but for whatever reason, they decided against it. So when the Eagles ultimately did win their Grammy, host Andy Williams just stood there expectantly waiting for someone to come forward. Not the band cared much about their image, but manager Irving Azoff tried to do damage control the next day by putting out a press release saying that the band were in Miami working on the new album, and he ended this statement with a dismissive that's the future. This is the past, So piss on your Grammy. If they were disappointed that they were there to accept the award in person, they didn't show it. Don Henley told the La Times the whole idea of a contest to see who is best just doesn't appeal to us, except for as the way I've lived my entire life. Yes, poor Eddy Williams. This was like a year or two after Stevie Wonder one the Grammy, and he wasn't there to accept it, so he had to like be beamed in via satellite and and yeah, he said, can you see us? Steovie? Yeah, put his foot in his mouth by asking Stevie Wonder if he could see them. I just watched, um whatever happened to baby Jane for like the first time in like two decades. And did you ever hear about the oscar thing with that? No, the feud with um. Yeah, it's Joan Crawford and Betty Davis. Yeah, And so Betty Davis was nominated and a Bancroft won in sixties the Miracle Worker. Yeah, and Joan Crawford accepted Anne Bancroft's Oscar as like a few to her, as few to Betty Davis. And Betty Davis was furious about it. Yeah, she never forgave her for that Back to Hotel California. Rolling Stone has permanently placed it somewhere on there ever changing five hundred Greatest Songs of All Time list. It's been named one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's five hundred Songs That Shaped rock and Roll. The album has been certified twenty six times platinum in the US has sold over thirty two million copies worldwide, not even their best selling record. Again, that would be the Greatest Hits, good Lord, that will always just be the most random choice for a best selling album of all time in the United States. Eagles Greatest Hits seventy one to seventy five. All you know what, It's just every song on it. It's a Hotel California is an epic song. Yeah, Thriller is an epic song. All the songs on their Greatest Hits are just like taken individually. I'm just kind of like, ah, I guess it's just it was easy and accessible, and I just, yeah, I don't understand how they had that kind of juice to be the best selling album in the United States history. People people love taking it easy. Yeah, but oh man, I thought I was listening to Joe Walsh earlier and I forgot my all time favorite lyric of his from a Life's Been Good to Me, where he says, they say I'm lazy, but it takes up all my time. Ah. Despite all of these plottits surrounding Hotel California, the album failed to earn them critical cred from the rock bible of the era, Rolling Stone. The Eagles were a favorite target for the publication. One review of a nineteen seventy seven show read, in part, the Eagles flaunt no athletic grace, if anything, they loiter on stage. But critic Charles M. Young went too far, and the Rolling Stone issue dated September eighth, nineteen seventy seven, he included the small, seemingly innocuous line in the random notes section of the magazine criticizing the amateur softball team made up of the Eagles and their organization, the Eagles you have to understand we're big fans of softball because they felt it helped them relieve their tensions. Glen Fryes said at the time, if we can yell at each other on the baseball field, we don't yell at each other in the studio. This probably was not true. And my guess is this goes a long way and explaining why music journalists had an inherent disliked the Eagles. It goes back to the old geeks versus jocks thing. Everything goes back to high school anyway. After referencing Joe Walsh's new solo album, Rolling Stone journalist Charles M. Young wrote in his Little Random Notes column, the Eagles, on their first vacation in three years, seymore interested in finding a softball team they can beat, having lost in recent weeks the teams by Andrew Gold aka the guy who sang the Golden Girls theme. Thank you for being a friend, Jimmy Buffett, employees of several San Francisco radio stations, and their own road crew. Glen Fry, you know you can. You can insult Glen Fry's stage presence, you can insult Glen Fry's songs, you can insult a lot about Glen Fry, but you cannot insult Glen Fry's softball skills. So he took this criticism personally, and he wrote a furious letter to the editors of Rolling Stone, clarifying, what you have failed to mention is that the Eagles won two out of three games against Jimmy Buffett. Anytime you pencil pushing desk jockeys want to put on your spikes, we'll kick your ass too. Oh shut up, God, it's so petty. It's a fighting baseball game. Dude. You're like you sold thirty two million albums. You were red asked about Rolling Stone saying that you were more interested in softball and crowing about and then and then crowing about beating Joe Jimmy Buffett is some kind of a trump card of that, not like you know, uh yeah, well I fished, fought. I don't know Jackie Wilson, who is like a boxer. You beat Jimmy Buffett in softball. That doesn't make you like an alpha male, and getting red asked about it makes you so much more beta. Oh, not to speak ill of the dead. Well Glen Fry challenged the staff at Rolling Stone to a softball match, and the staff at Rolling Stone accepted the challenge. The showdown took place the following May in nineteen seventy eight at Dodoux Field on the campus at the University of Southern California, and the stakes were that the loser would pay five thousand dollars to UNI staff, so Lisa was all for a good cause. The Eagles team had the band themselves with Don Henley as the pitcher naturally, and their roadies and various members of their tour crew, and the Rolling Stone team, who were called the Gonzos appropriately enough, had writers like Cameron Crowe and Fong Torres and Charles M. Young the guy who set off the whole rivalry in the first place. Jan Winner, the Rolling Stone editor and owner, flew in his staff all the way from New York to la and Eagles, of course had the hometown advantage. The bleachers were packed with fans like Chevy Chase, Joni Mitchell, and California Governor Jerry Brown, who apparently had nothing better to do that day. The Rolling Stone riders thought, you know, he's a politician. Jerry Brown's going to be neutral about this, but since the Eagles defined California so strongly, Jerry Brown was very blatantly on the band's side in this game. And Charles M. Young said, I felt like I was walking into the Roman Colisseum and was about to be eaten by lions when I walked onto the field. My favorite part about all this is that. Before the game started, a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, ladies and gentlemen, please stand for the national anthem, and then they played life in the fast Land. The Eagles, as you can probably believe, were predictably cutthroat for this game. They wore metal cleats, which riled up the Rolling Stone team to no end. Yon Winner yelled to Irving Asof the Eagles manager Somewhay might get hurt. Irving Asof replied, how exciting. He also wore a jersey that read Yon Winner is tragically hip, which barely counts as trash talk. But okay, I don't even really know what that means. Is is that where the Banning got their name? No? I think that was an expression. Okay, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. The Eagles crushed the Gonzos fifteen to eight. Yeah. Wow, that's pretty bad. And as Don Henley and Glenfry wrote in a letter to the magazine a few weeks after the game, in the end, it was the errors that cost Rolling Stone the game. Their first error was to call the Eagles sissies in the random notes section, which they didn't do. He just said they cared more about softball than making a record or something like that, which, honestly, this whole event bears that out. Yeah exactly, Oh my god, what tremendous asshole. Well, the Eagles won the game because their organization was a well oiled machine. They are no strangers to physical prowess, especially on the road, and this is partially because Don Henley ensured that the roadies were toned by forcing them to lug his mattress around from tour stop to tour stop. This is one of my favorite Eagles anecdotes ever. The Eagles had Electrician, a guy by the name of Joe Barry told author Mark Elliott in his book To the Limit, The Untold Story of the Eagles. Don Henley insisted on having a kingsize bed and mattress available at all times, which the crew had to drag around everywhere. The tour seemstress made a special cover for it with handles to make it easier to pack in the truck. Every night it was Don's bed. It went everywhere, and Don Henley defended himself in later years by saying that this was crucial for his drumming, which, given what's going on with Phil Collins these days, I guess seems fair. Drummers have notoriously temperamental backs. Don Henley explained to Modern Drummer, I used to have to hold my body in such a position that my spine got out of alignment between playing the drums and keeping my mouth in front of the microphone. It really twisted my whole body. I got to a point in the seventies where I literally could not sleep, he added to Mark Elliott. Hotel mattresses are awful, the worst damn thing in the room. Bitch, bitch. Levon Helm had been cancer and he got back behind the kit. The best part of all of this, According to the tours electrician Joe Berry, the mattress quote never once got used because no hotel would allow us to bring it in. I'm guessing I don't know how bedbugs concerned. I mean, I'm not sure which of the many reasons they chose not to allow this mattress in. In addition to this expenditure, Glenn Fry also supposedly brought along his tennis coach on this tour, and there were also times when Don Henley would squire his girlfriend Stevie Nicks around a lerid jet. The expression at the time among the alpha males of the Eagles was love Them and Lirium, which I hate. Don Felder, Poor Don Felder resented all of this because apparently all these expenses were paid for evenly by the group. Oh that's so bad again, the guy being like, you know, oh we've been We've got a lot more daunt if people didn't care about credit. But also the entire bander is responsible for my bed that will be carted with us, that I will never use. That's pretty good. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Too much information in just a moment. Hotel California's popularity even caught the eyes of Hollywood, notably the eyes belonging to Julia Phillips, the first female producer to win an Oscar in nineteen seventy seven. She was coming off of hits like The Sting and Taxi Driver, with her latest project, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, poised to continue the streak. Phillips died in two thousand and two, but she wrote in a nineteen ninety one memoir called You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, and she explained that she had this project kicking around called the third Man through the Door. I was unable to find anything else about this other than in her book. The third Man through the Door is a something Sam Peckinpass said about Westerns where he said, that's the character. There's the bad guy or the hero, and then the sidekick or the b guy, and then the third guy through the door is the guy who holds the door and usually dies, and he doesn't have a name. And he said, I wanted to make films about the third man through the door. And so this thing Phillips was envisioning was this crazy like meta meta narrative about like the movie industry and itself and myth making blah blah blah. And she got in touch with Irving A's Off for a preliminator meeting and explained this to him, and she wrote in her book that he said, I don't have the vaguest idea of what you have in mind, but you seem like a crazy creative person. Let me put this together. The seventies, Phillips, like some of the band, it must be pointed out, had a prodigious cocaine habit, and she recalled the meeting with the band at her Beverly Hills home, and she said she brought out a big pile of coke. She said, everyone but Irving partakes throughout. I do my riff. John Henley seems bright and responsive. I get kind of hung up on his ears, though, which stick out. I love that he probably read that and seethed for days afterwards. A recalcitrant Glenn Fry does a lot of blow and seems angry about it. The seventies they seem sparked by the idea, but then everyone except Irving is pretty lit by the blow. They agreed to think about it. In the Mark Elliot Eagles book recalled his version of the same meeting. Both Glenn and I remember that day quite vividly. We had gone to her house reluctantly. We'd already had some bad experiences with movie people. They always thought we should be excited or flattered because they wanted to make movies out of our songs. In fact, we really didn't want anything to do with it. We were pretty sure they'd take our songs and ruin them. We knew enough about the film business to know that you'd have to relinquish all control, and that it's somebody else's vision just like rock videos are today. Okay, Coke, Henley continued, was at the peak of its popularity in Hollywood, and Phillips was in the process of flaming out her career on it. We sat there, polite, but not terribly friendly. We were too wary to be friendly. In an effort to loosen us up, she dragged out this huge ashtray filled with amount of coke. She offered us some and we said no. We didn't know her that well and it was a business meeting. Afterwards, Azof gave her the brush off, and in short order she was fired from close encounters and wound up living with her drug dealer, in her words, to cut out the middleman. But the project was probably ill fated from the art. As someone close to the band told Elliott for the book, the band didn't really want to see Hotel California made into a movie. They were suspicious of the film business, after all, that was what Hotel California was about. To that end, the band has infrequently allowed their music to appear in TV shows or movies, and consequently, one of the best known covers of the song is their version of the song that appears in The Big Lebowski, which is a Gypsy king's flamenco rendition, which is hilarious because that film obviously gives us the iconic line I've had a rough night and I hate the Eagles. Other notable covers came from the British electronic duo The Orb, whose version charted at number sixty two in the UK in nineteen ninety Great Band Name Love a band just called the Orb a Hawaiian artist named Mike Piranha who wrote a parody called Hotel Honolulu, satirizing the over development, crime and other issues in Oahu. The song became a local hit in Hawaiian nineteen ninety eight, and one of the most famous ones is Frank Ocean released a song that samples the entire instrumental track of Hotel California, which must be said is a pretty lazy way of sampling stuff on his seminal mixtape Nostalgia Ultra in twenty eleven, so I was called American Wedding and Don Henley, who hates sampling and rap, threatened Ocean with a lawsuit for copyright refringement. I found out what he said about Frank Ocean. Oh will you say? I thought he was a talentless little prick ah anymore. I mean the thought seems to imply, but nope again, like I get it. It's a pretty egregious sample. He said, you can't rewrite the lyrics to somebody else's songs, record it and put it on the internet. Some of these young kids have grown up in a world that doesn't understand or respect copyright material or intellectual property. They look at songs as interactive playthings. Okay, sure, I would have accepted the explanation had he not used such soulless terms like intellectual copyright and yeah, like songs are my children like like that kind of description, I would be like, okay, fine, Yeah, I mean, songs are playthings. It's the folk music dude, like jazz jazz like well, the best thing or the worst thing to make up, you know, choices. Yours about the song Hotel California is that it basically spelled the end of the Eagles. Bassist and founding member Randy Meisner quit the band formally in nineteen seventy seven, citing exhaustion. In truth, he was just really not cut out for life with Henley and Fry. Simply put, he wasn't as Joe Walsh put it, and Alpha. There's this heartbreaking vintage interview with him back in the seventies in the History of the Eagles documentary. He says, all they want to see is five guys happy playing together. Narrator voice, that was not going to happen in the Eagles. To use the Godfather law of interpersonal dynamics. I always saw Randy as the freighto to Glenn's Sonny. You know, he's loud, quick tempered, the nominal leader, not afraid to look like a jerk. And Don Henley's Michael just the cold fury. It's a great side by side image is Alpacino as Michael Corleone had Andy's punchable little face. But Randy Meisner, he just wasn't cut out for this. Confrontations were really hard for him, and he felt that as soon as the band started all taking separate limos, the camaraderie was lost. In addition to the strain of living out of a suitcase ran he was also coping with the collapse of his marriage, which he did by partying, and his major discomfort about touring with the Eagles. Really concerned the song Take It to the Limit, which features his soaring falsetto It's Really Beautiful. The song became an instant staple in the Eagles set and served as their concert encore. And this moment in the spotlight just didn't sit well with Randy. He wasn't cut out for it. He was just fundamentally a shy, humble guy, and the pressure of having him do the solo spot really wore on him, and he just dreaded it. He was always terrified that he wasn't gonna be able to hit that high note and let everyone down. And you've heard that high note, it's pretty screaming. That's a very real concern. So all this anxiety came to a head at a gig in Knoxville in June nineteen seventy seven, after eleven straight months on the road. They were a little fried. Yeah, there are differing accounts as to what happened exactly. According to Glenn Fry and Don Henley, Randy but out with some ladies in a bottle of vodka the night before and his voice was pretty shot by the time they were ready to perform. According to Randy, his ulcer was acting up and he had a bad case of the flu. Either way. Right before the show, Randy told the tour manager that he wasn't well enough to do his big spotlight moment and WO would take it to the limit. Removed from the set list. Glenn Fry learns of this, and he's unhappy, to say the least, I feel like he's fundamentally unhappy. He wants Randy to provide that big encore moment. He tells him, you know, there's people in the audience who've been waiting something, you know, for years, to see you do this song. This is our big moment, it's our big encore. We can't let them down. Randy doesn't want to do it. This all results in a backstage scuffle, with Randy throwing Glen up against the wall, which is kind of nuts considering he's this mild manner again. It's like Fredo and the Godfather fighting Sonny. It's sorry to imagine. Security starts to swarm, but Don Henley warns them off by screaming, stay out of this. This is personal and private, real private, amazing a white man yelling at the police stay out of this, like talk about what a what a perfect image. It's private, real fucking private. From that point, on. Yeah, who do you think is worse kimono and big curly perm era Lindsey Buckingham Or it's definitely Henley, Just definitely Henley. Okay, yeah, I mean he who would win in a fight? Oh, great question? Probably Henley. He would want it more Lindsay Bucky at least, see his credit was like genuinely interested in like innovating and being weird like tusk you know they like eagles would never make tusk um. I'd like to think Lindsay could throw some hands. But yeah, Henley, he's too much. He would and he would. He would fight like Sonny too. He would. He would smash you. He would bite the garments can he would? He's a biter. I see that in his eyes. Wait did Sonny bite? I don't remember, Sonny. When the guy's like, when the guy's like holding his hands on the on the rail, he like leans down in his fury and like bites in his hands to get him to stop. Oh yeah, I like this metaphor. I like this metaphor. Is the Eagles is guys for the Godfathers. But poor Randy from that point on, he was basically iced out and at the end of the tour, he quit. He later said those last days on the road were the worst. Nobody was talking to me or would hang out after shows or do anything. I was made an outcast of the band. I'd help start. He later added, this was the end. I really felt like I was just a member of the group and not a part of it. And the band ultimately replaced him with bassist Timothy B. Schmidt, who oddly enough, had replaced Meisner in the country rock band Poco seven years earlier, and his second Bird related contribution to Rock and Roll. As we covered, he also coined the term parrot heads for Jimmy Buffett fans. Oh that's right, Yes, that's right, Timothy B. Schmidt, friend of the Birds. Yes, Poco have any members of the Birds in it? Oh? I don't think so. I was Buffalo Springfield, never mind, would have been amazing, a lot of layers. No, I thought it seems I thought of someone in lall Kenny who probably didn't suck as Jackson Brown. Oh yeah, no, he seems awesome. Yeah. Randy Meiser's later years are pretty gothic. He joined the Eagles at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in nineteen ninety eight, but his attempt to join the band on stage when the two thousand and eight tour came through LA were rebuffed. He said, I didn't get much response. I thought it would be nice to sit with Timothy bie Schmidt and saying take it to the limit, but they pretty much gave me a no. In a roundabout way. I can't blame them. They have to keep their band the way it is, and his story, it just gets bad. He founded the band, they have to keep the band. This makes me so sad. Sorry, well, it gets even sadder. In twenty thirteen, I guess they finally did reach out to him to join their History of the Eagles tour alongside prior Eagles member Bernie Leaden, but Randy Meister had a serious health scare that prohibited him from going out on tour after thirty six years of waiting. He missed his chance to rejoin the band that he helped found. And I guess somehow this health scare involved him losing consciousness after a piece of food obstructed his breathing, and he was in a coma for a time. And he also dealt with alcoholism and mental health issues, including bipolar disorder. And in twenty fifteen I read it he threatened to kill his wife with an AK forty seven during an episode of what I assumed to be his bipolar disorder, and on another occasion he threatened to take all of his medication at once. And I think he was placed in a conservative ship for a time, but then his wife ended up getting killed what a rifle she was handling accidentally discharged in some freak accident. So all in all, Randy Meiser's later years have been pretty bleak. So prayers up for him. And you know, I feel compelled to back up my soft spoken, gentle bass playing brethren. And I think there was a time our friend of the real life friend of the Pot, Andrew Bank, told me about this wild story about how somebody went out and toured under Randy Meiser's name for many years just impersonated him. Yeah, a weird story there. There's a lot there. And to continue on the gradual, slow dissolution of the Eagles, we got to talk about Dawn Finger Felder, which is a schism we've been foreshadowing this entire episode now, as with Fleetwood Mac with rumors the Eagles struggled to follow Hotel California and its huge success and sessions for the album that would become their follow up. The Long Run stretched on for a punishing eighteen months, just torturous sessions, and by this point no one in the Eagles liked each other. But Don Felder was especially aggrieved. He was increasingly at odds with Don Henley and Glen Fry, who he derissively referred to as the gods, hanging out in the back of their private plane and discussing the future of the bands while everyone else was left out in the cold. There are stories about Don Felder being bullied on the road for wearing the quote wrong colored shoes and being told where to stand, lots of foot criticism. Once Glenn Fry mimicked his walk on stage and Don Felder kind of understandably flipped out and shoved Glenn against the wall. So resentment boiling for many, many years, And this resentment boiled over on July thirty first, nineteen eighty, the night the Eagles played a benefit concert for California Senator Alan Cranston at Long Beach Arena. This is a truly historic moment in Eagles lore. Don Felder was pretty a political so he was frustrated about having to go along with Don Hanley and Glenn Fries wishes to make a grand statement, And then when the Senator went around thanking each musician individually at a pre show meet and greet, Don Felder replied to his thank you with a very Kurt, you're welcome, Senator. I guess Glenn Fry was outraged by his surliness and let Felder have it as soon as the Senator left. Felder said in his two thousand and eight memoir Heaven and Hell, My Life and the Eagles, Glenn found me in the dressing room and started yelling at me. I don't know if it was the drugs so the fact that we've been on tour for so long, but he just blew up. Just before we stepped on stage. I turned to him and said, you know, Glenn, you know what she did back there. You're a real ass for doing that. Glenn replied, that's an honor coming from you. The threats continued on Mike in the middle of the night's performance. Glenn Fry recalled, now we're on stage, and Felder looks back at me and says, only three more songs to like, kick your ass. Pal and I'm saying great, I can't wait. We're out there singing best of my love and inside we're both thinking, as soon as this is over, I'm going to kill him. And there is audio of this that's you can hear in the History of the Eagles documentary, and what was said on the mic was you're a real pro gun. Yeah you are too. The way you hand I've been paying you for seven years. Sound technicians, who feared that the crowd might overhear these taunts, worked overtime to make sure that Glenfryes mike was turned down, but Don Felder said after each song, Glenn would come over and approach me to quote rant rave curse and let me know how many songs remains before our fight? Three more songs, asked I'm gonna kill you. I can't wait. That's my favorite. Counting down the songs you have left on stage before you want to get a fight with your co band member. Incredible. Oh, that story goes out to our friend of the pod, Dora. I know she loves that one. I'd rather than assault Glen Fry. Don Felder asked a roadie after the show to hand over his acoustic guitar, which he then smashed against the concrete column backstage, an old trick he learned from bandmate Joe Walsh, feller out in his memoir. By the time I was finished, it was kindling on the floor. I turned and saw the Cranstons the Senator standing right behind me, their mouths and gape. A few feet away stood a stony faced Glenn Fry. This had little or nothing to do with the Cranstons, but Glenn thought I did that right in front of them to drive it up as but typical of you to break your cheapest guitar, Glenn told me. After the Cranstons hurried off to their car, afraid of what I might do if I opened my mouth to respond, I jumped into my limo and sped off. And as master of understatement Joe Walsh would later say, when that kind of stuff is on stage and you're in front of people, you got problems. Yes, Don Henley kicked a fan out of a show in twenty fifteen, fore yelling Don Felder's name, Wow, What did he say? I mean? I feel like you need to give an experiences introducing. He was introducing the band and as he was introducing them. Someone in the crowd goes Don Felder and the guy continues, which is a curious assertion. Don Felder taught Tom Petty how to play guitar that I knew. Yeah, well, that pissed on him. Don Henley off. He said he had a security escort the guy out. He's a scary dude. I found out he just suited. One of his lawsuits was for the clothing company or Duluth Trading Co. For using they had an ad for their Henley's which is a you know, a style of and the ad read don Or Henley and take it easy. And he sued them over that. Oh okay, I mean that's okay. I would annoy me too. I guess I thought he was like trying to claim ownership of the term Henley No, which is only a matter of time. So all right, Randy Miser's out of the picture. Fingers Fell, there's living on borrowed time and the Eagles. Even the seemingly indestructible partnership between Don Henley and Glenn Frye is starting to splinter by nineteen eighty, and this partially had to do with their very different personalities. Don Henley's generally been portrayed as the more likable of the two, more personable, gregarious, and magnetic, whereas Glenn Frye was basically seen as edgy, attention seeking and generally less afraid of being seen as an asshole and making them popular calls. Don meanwhile, could just sit back and be liked. Someone who knew them both has said that quote, Don Henley has extraordinary charisma and Glenn Frye has charisma, which is a great Yeah. Yeah, I guess they used to live together in the early years and they had kind of an odd couple situation going, with Don Henley being kind of a neat freak and Glenn fry as the slab. So I just love imagining them as Felix and Oscar and the odd couple. Again, they were very different people, and then initially they were bonded more out of a mutual ambition than any sense of genuine friendship. And when they kind of achieved that goal of you know, having the best, biggest selling album of all time, that common ground was gone, and what little camaraderie they did enjoy it was eroded by the constant pressure of having to bang out songs and lead the band. Glenn Frye would say, we had to worry about doing this or living up to that. We could talk about girls or football for a while, but it wouldn't be long before we remember we had to make a decision about this, or that we had to get another song written for the next album. And Don Henley felt similarly, one saying every minute I'm awake and even when I'm asleep, I'm worried about the next album and what's going to be written on it, how it's going to do, and how it's going to be accepted, and how my peers are going to react, and how it's going to be better than the last one, and how the record companies on our case about hurry up, we didn't get an album for you in nineteen seventy eight, and it's not going to look good on our stock report and what about the profit sharing plan? But yeah, for Glenn and Don, the tension that had kind of been president in their relationships since day one was exacerbated by years of pressure, and instead of discussing their feelings, they'd simply storm out and nothing would ever get resolved. Throw a bunch of cocaine into the mix, and these feelings are heightened, and the pattern is repeated for years and years and years. Something's got to give. The Long Beach incident, though with Don Felder, was really the end of the band, though, But unfortunately the Eagles owed their label another album, so they decided to release a double album of live tracks. But it required a little sweetening, and as producer Bill Simsk later admitted, Glenn fries refusal to join them for overdubs or even speak to his former bandmates meant that they had to take a piecemeal approach. He's quoted as saying, I had my assistant in Los Angeles with Glenn, and I had the rest of the band fot in Miami. We were fixing three part harmonies courtesy of Federal Express, and the Eagles just were so done with being the Eagles that they refused to record new songs for this live album, even after being offered two million dollars just for two songs. But yeah, they were done. As Glenn Fry would later say, we had come to a point where we were running out of gas. Artistically. We had gone from being a band that could make an album in three weeks to a band that couldn't finish an album in three years, and Don Henley would later come to agree one of the few things they could agree on at this time. I'm very proud of what we did. We put everything we had into it, at the expense of our health, friendships and everything else. But Glenn was right, it was time for it to end. This was nineteen eighty and that was basically how the Eagles story ended until nineteen ninety four, when they reconvened for the Health Freeze's overtour, an album and an MTV special. But that is another story. I just found out they sued the actual Hotel California. Where is there an actual Hotel California in Mexico? Oh wow, twist Yeah yeah, founded in nineteen fifty but changed the name multiple times in the Canadian couple bought it in two thousand and one and changed the name back to Hotel California and started using you know, obviously playing up on it. And they sued them, And that feels like a perfect place to end episode on the Eagle Sudes Up California. Yeah, this song casts a long shadow and pop culture, and I'm sure Don Henley is sad that he can't sue every person who uses the phrase you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Because that's been used, it's passed into economics, which is really interesting to me. It refers to how the appeal of an attractive host country to ford investors maybe countered by the cost of exit on leaving the country. So you can check out in time length, but you can't leave because you've sunk too much money into the country. They talk about with foreign investors in China. It's called the Hotel California effect. It's also used to talk about the negative effects of financial regulations on investment and problems with leaving like a service and Internet service provider, or social network or cloud computing. People have even applied it to bregsit and hell, there was even a clandestine operation named after the song by the CIA and special Forces in Iraqi, Kurdistan in the lead up to the Iraq War. So presumably the one entity that John Henley could not sue. But my head grows heavy and my psycros dim. So we're going to stop for the night. Thanks for listening everyone. I'm Alex Sigel, and this has been too much information where we remain just prisoners here of our own device and I'm Jordan run Tag. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalg and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum. I'm a Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. 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