Hotel California lyrics

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

A good friend of mine told me it was based on Don Henley’s experience of being in a juvenile group “camp” called Elan in Maine. Elan has a long sordid history, Google around for more info. It still exists, but perhaps under a different design.

My friend was placed up there for a while and I got some interesting and disturbing stories.

2

Well, if you are interested in what Cecil has to say on it, read here:

-XT

3

Given that Don Henley apparently spent his entire childhood in Texas, what would he have been doing at a camp in Maine?:

4

You’ve got to admit if he wanted to create a metaphor for a youth camp in Maine it’s hard to think of a more imaginative way than a ‘dark desert highway’ motif; driving a convertible on a balmy night, etc. The great ones never go for the easy metaphors. And it wasn’t just a friend of the OP who said so, it was a good friend. The statements of the original author himself and all of Cecil’s research mean very little now that this Maine angle has blown all our basic assumptions about this mystery right out the window.

5

Here’s the Straight Dope kid.

Don Henley was born in 1947. Camp Elan was founded in 1970. Are you seriously telling me that Henley at the age of 23 went to a behavioral camp in Maine? Hell, he was a rock star, banging chicks, snorting coke and living life in the fast lane at that point.

But, if you play the song backward, you’ll find out the real secret stuff.

6

I always thought it was about sexual desire/decadence in the southern California lifestyle of the 1970s…“they stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast”…no matter how much you indulge you can’t satiate yourself. Also somewhat phallic. “Check out any time you like but you can never leave” as in you get so jaded by what you see and do that you can never regain your “innocence”.

7

So it was really the Letoh Ainrofilac? I’m so confused.