Can you explain what the words mean? Is it some kind of symbolism?
HOTEL CALIFORNIA
The Eagles
(D. Felder, D. Henley, G. Frey)
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy, and my sight grew dimmer
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
‘This could be Heaven or this could be Hell’
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say…
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year, you can find it here
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, She got the Mercedes bends
She’s got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, that she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget
So I called up the Captain, ‘Please bring me my wine’
He said, ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969’
And still those voices are calling from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say…
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely Place (such a lovely face)
They livin’ it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise, bring your alibis
Mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice
And she said ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers, they gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
‘Relax’ said the nightman, We are programed to recieve.
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave
I once saw an interview with Joe Walsh (a member of the Eagles, but not a composer of this song), in which he said, " The song is about how everyone in L.A. is from Cleaveland."
It just refers to the way that California looks like the Promised Land to a lot of people living elsewhere, but it’s just a weird place full of weird people. Truer words were never said.
I had heard one WAG a while ago that the whole thing was a metaphor for addiction of some sort (heroin maybe). Certainly explains the line “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Now, there may not be a line-for-line meaning with drug addiction, but if you look at the idea of a nice looking Hotel that looks good from the outside, but you notice it sucks once you’ve been there a while, but cannot ever leave, it sounds like an addiction metaphor to me.
Other songs usually cited as being about Heroin adiction are often quite metaphorical, including James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and America’s “Horse With No Name” Songs that go “I shot a bunch of heroin and I got adicted. Yeah, Yeah, na-na” aren’t terribly entertaining, but ones about weird hotels and being lost in deserts are.
A longstanding interpretation of the song held that the “Hotel” in question was Camarillo State Hospital, a Southern California mental hospital which closed several years ago and is or will soon be the newest branch of California State University. The building on the cover of the album may or may not be that institution, I can’t remember, but it was usually interpreted that way. According to at least one source, this is bunk, but it does make for fun mythology.
“Colitas” has been covered in a previous Straight Dope column. I believe the most likely translation was “little buds,” which is pretty self-explanatory as far as 70’s rock bands are concerned.
I had never heard that about either song. Specifically, Fire and Rain has one or two hurdles to jump: it is reported to have been written as a eulogy to a girl Taylor knew who died in a plane crash on a trip her parents encouraged her to take against her initial wishes; it’s production preceded Taylor’s addiction by a couple of years.
I cannot guarantee the truth of either of those objections, but after the Puff the Magic Dragon fiasco, I’m always leery of assuming any song is about drugs.
The thing is you cannot really get the whole story from a short excerpt. I did not think there would be a copyright issue but if there is I would ask the mods to take them out.
I once heard a folk musician, introducing a song about his Catholic upbringing, as saying “The Catholic Churchis like Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Damned if you aren’t one of my new favorite people! It’s been ages since someone had something nice to say about not printing song lyrics. I feel like I’m in the wilderness sometimes.
But there’s actually a lot of gray areas. One of the “fair uses” is scholarly discussion of a subject matter. Whether that fair use exception extends to a commercial enterprise such as the Chicago Reader is open to question, and whether it extends to non-affiliates of the Reader discussing the matter on a message board owned by the company is yet another question.
I’m going to leave the lyrics here for now. If Cecil or a SD Staffer decides to comment, I may have to make a change. That said, if someone would go out there and find the copyright info so I can edit it into the OP (fair use requires acknowledgement), I’d certainly appreciate it.
If no one’s performing the song or putting it on the board here to make a profit, a copyright holder would seem to have a darn hard case to prove infringement. It would be similar to yelling “Copyright infringement!” to someone singing “Hotel California” as they walk down the street.
Back to the OP …
Saltire’s on it. It is a metaphor for California itself; NOT drugs or anything else.
I love the song, but I have to confess that I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Sometimes it’s even better that way.
Off topic a little, but if you really want to hear something amusing, try to find the version of Hotel California released by a Korean pop group called Roo Ra (or something similar; it’s been a while). They do the song in english, but their accents render it unintelligible in various hilarious ways…
Isn’t the hotel on the album cover the incredibly famous Beverly Hills Hotel? It’s got a sort of mission-y look, plus it’s pink.
I’m afraid I can’t go into my collection and check, as I would rather chop off my own dick than allow any Eagles music into my home.
Dreadfully sorry to hear the Camarillo looney bin is closed down. Charlie Parker spent some quality time there back in the ‘40s…among other things, it resulted in his tune "Relaxin’ at Camarillo." Which sounds awfully pleasant and Californiaesque until you learn that it’s a mental hospital.
Fire and rain has been explained by Taylor himself, and is self explanitory when you consider the following set of events:
Taylor and later famous guitarist Danny Kortchmar had a band in the late 60’s called Flying Machine. The band broke up, largely because (to paraphrase Taylor) they spent more time doing drugs than writing music. It was at this time that Taylor got hooked on heroin. He entered a sanatarium down south somewhere (North Carolina IIRC) to battle his addiction, and while there struck up a friendship with a fellow inmate named “Suzanne.” After getting out he headed to London to try to make it big, and while there he signed with the Beatle’s Apple Corp. Records (I think he was thier first act) and began to record his first album. Shortly after he left the sanitarium, Suzanne committed suicide, but his friends avoided telling him until he was done recording to avoid upsetting him. When the broke the news to him, it was several months after the fact. If you put this together, the song makes sense when you consider that he is reminiscing about Suzanne, how he met her, the drugs he used to do (Especially the second verse “won’t you look down on me Jesus/you’ve got to help me make a stand/you’ve just got to see me through another day”), and his early times in New York when he got hooked on drugs. The drugs ruined his first band (“Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”), and ultimately took his friend Suzanne from him.
Well, that was a brutally long Hijack… but that is the story of fire and rain…
Don’t forget the rumour among certain religious fundamentalists (ie those who hate ‘pop’ music) that it’s actually about the headquarters of the Church of Satan (which was/is in a hotel in California), and if you look closely at the cover, you can see someone who looks like Anton Lavey (founder of the C.O.S.) I don’t know if any of the individual facts are in any way correct, but the Eagles have never seemed to me like minions of Satan.
Hotel California is one of my favourite songs and whenever I mention it or it’s played and I’m with someone I always seem to here the same thing: it’s about the prison Alkatraz and the controversy surrounding it. While I don’t want to go through it line by line, I’m sure this meaning fit the song very well (as could a lot of things). The only reason I think this theory bears repeating is that I have heard it from many different people who don’t even know each other. It may be an Urban Legend but I don’t know for sure.
On the “HC” discussion, i think i read in some interview with Don Henley (and I believe also Don Feldman) shortly after the Eagles reunited that Hotel California is about the California lifestyle. Sort of a more oblique “Life in the Fast Lane”, if you will. Pretty much one of the Eagles’ favorite themes after they left their Gram Parsons phase…