“Check out” is a common euphemism for death.
I have heard interviews with the members where they said the entire album was about their reaction to the music scene in LA, and the distasteful things they found there. I cannot provide a cite.
So yeah, I figured that the “Hotel California” was just California, not any specific part of it.
Although that particular song seemed to be about drugs.
“Some dance to remember, some dance to forget”
“They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast”
It is the tale of a recreational user who falls in with a bunch of addicts, and by the time he realizes that he’s in a bad scene, he has become an addict himself.
You can stop using, but you can’t stop being an addict.
And yeah, Last Resort was beautiful. One of the other members said he thought it was the best job Don Henley did on lyrics in his entire life, and all I can say is that field is so tough I can’t be sure.
AND:
In 1986 or so, my High School English teacher was teaching Poetry in Music, and so we learned all the words to Sound of Silence, Stairway to Heaven, and Hotel California. He had multiple copies of an old book with a glossary, and had us look up “colitas”, and it told us it was a “Fragrant desert flower”.
I’m on the “slang term for pot” side of the argument, but he had what looked like a reputable source for the “flower” side of it.
HIS theory was the song was about a mystical transformative experience that leaves one forever changed, and that the fragrant flower combined with the “shimmering light” suggested hypnosis.
Of course, this was the same guy who suggested that we try using sleep deprivation to achieve what Poe got from narcotic use: get so mentally fried that inanimate objects start talking to you.
I think he was a big fan of mystical transformativ experiences, and a bit hampered by being completely unable to advocate drug use and keep his job.
You didn’t mention the line:
“So she lit up a candle,
and she showed me the way.”
I.e. lighting up a candle to prepare the heroin from powder to liquid for injection.