I like the Dude, but the Dude hates the fuckin’ Eagles, man, which is only to be expected, because they represent the slickest, most unashamed commercialisation of 60s utopianism, the transmogrification of serious bearded guitar music into radio-friendly and occasionally syrupy country rock. The Eagles committed the unforgivable sin of rendering the hippie aesthetic palatable to what the Dude derisively refers to as “the squares”, and indeed, in terms of record sales, they were a mega-phenomenon, responsible for two of the top ten best-selling albums of all time, one of which was Hotel California.
What’s interesting to me, from the perspective of writing these historical album reviews, is how the Eagles’ melodic and accessible soft rock actually seems like the outlier in the midst of the glitzy, but sinister and overwhelmingly British glam of the 70s. There’s no trace here of the menacing, trash-strewn back alleys of Ziggy Stardust’s front cover, or the gender-bending histrionics of Bolan, or the psychotic experimentalism of Pink Floyd. Instead, we get thoroughly conventional and sunny (if subtly melancholic) Americana, country rock played by cowboys – a reaffirmation of conventional masculinity at a time when the British were challenging and eschewing it. If Bowie put on a dress and went back to his spaceship after every gig, then Don Henley returned to his ranch and woke up at 5AM to round up the horses. Here, then, is the Janus face of the 1970s – effete British glam vs stoic, rough-and-tumble American country rock. That could be a massive oversimplification and it might be possible to like both, but I digress.
I know people who are otherwise keen on the Eagles that can no longer bring themselves to listen to the title track of this album, because they are sick to the back teeth of it. Yes, it’s criminally overplayed, but personally, I never tire of it, despite its considerable six-and-a-half-minute heft. It’s one of the best songs in the history of rock music, although these days, whenever I hear it, I must strain to vanquish mental images of John Turturro licking a bowling bowl. No matter. Everyone knows what it’s about – our narrator gets lost on a desert highway and stumbles upon a lonely, haunted hotel, its neon logo flashing erratically in the darkness. In he goes, and his fate is sealed. Of course, it’s a metaphor for addiction. The hotel’s guests are “prisoners of their own device”, slaves to their passions and dependencies; they can check out, but they can never leave. But what of the reference to the wine that our protagonist orders – a spirit they haven’t had at the Hotel California since 1969? After all, wine is not a spirit, so it must be a spirit in the metaphysical sense, a prevailing mentality, a Zeitgeist – perhaps the disintegration of the hippie dream at the end of 60s, the realisation that you can’t always get what you want, a conclusion at which the inhabitants of Hotel California are yet to arrive, unhappily for them.
Addiction and chemical dependency are key themes on this album, which is most instructive, because despite their carefully cultivated anti-glam persona as uncomplicated farm boys, the Eagles actually spent much of the 70s living it up in LA, balls deep in Class A substances and femme fatales. I don’t know if “Life in the Fast Lane” is autobiographical, but it surely could have been, as it narrates the frenetic story of a badly matched but very frisky couple living out their disastrous and ill-fated love affair in a decadent and unnamed city. This isn’t the first example of a rock band singing about the corrupting effects of big city life, but in the case of the Eagles, the vibe is not so much condemnatory as invigorating, the snarky, strutting tone implying a certain amusing ineluctability to the process of urban self-indulgence / self-destruction. Track 6, “Victim of Love”, is informed by a similarly nihilistic mien – it acerbically tells of a benighted young woman who spends her time in dingy nightclubs with men who treat her like garbage.
Musically softer, but similarly lyrically venomous, is “New Kid in Town”, which breezes by like a summer’s day, but which is apparently directed at Bernie Taupin, to whom Don Henley lost his glamorous, jewellery-designer girlfriend Loree Rodkin. In fact, this was probably exactly the kind of high-society liaison detailed on “Life in the Fast Lane” and, judging by these songs, it seems safe to say that Don was pretty pissed off about it. Overall, we’re left with the fact that around half the songs on Hotel California detail the glamorously unstable lives of up-and-coming young rockstars in seventies LA. Indeed, to some extent, the cocksure and caustic tone of these tales of inner-city excess foreshadows the exultant decadence of 80s hair metal. No doubt the likes of Tommy Lee and Sebastian Bach would bristle at this comparison, assuming that their brains still work, or indeed ever did.
But not every song on Hotel California is an acerbic takedown of Don Henley’s ex-girlfriends and love rivals in the drug, sex, and celebrity drenched City of Angels in the 1970s. The other half of the album is gentle, even soppy. “Wasted Time” is a sad lament to Henley’s relationship with Rodkin and, in fact, a message of solidarity to her, an injunction that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Easy for him to say – he didn’t have to put up with Taupin for the next five years. “Try and Love Again” carries a similar message about resolve in the face of heartache. What I appreciate about these songs is that they never become cheaply anthemic, with misguidedly triumphant, crowd-pleasing platitudes about the inevitability of a happy ending if we do indeed keep looking for love. Their message is one of endurance rather than hope; the best they have to offer is the idea that it wasn’t all just wasted time, that our pain perhaps taught us something, at least. That most people are self-serving twats, for instance.
But these are concerns of the present – Hotel California ends with a nod to the past and to the future. “Pretty Maids All in a Row” deals with the inherently excruciating process of growing up and leaving the simple pleasures of youth behind, while also hinting at the dizzying social mobility of the post-war West; the baby boomers were not only getting older, they were also becoming “fools with a fortune.” “The Last Resort”, meanwhile, is an interesting invocation of some of the album’s key themes of addiction, fame, and the inherent emptiness of the American Dream. It tells the story of a girl from the Northeast who relentlessly moves west in search of “paradise”, the eternal sunshine of Malibu, Hollywood, and ultimately Hawaii, in a grim echo of the unceasing restlessness and ambition that drove European settlers ever further toward the Pacific. Our heroine is, of course, chasing rainbows which evaporate in her hands as soon as she grasps them, but she too remains a prisoner of her own device, and the search goes on.
In the end, then, the Dude has no defensible basis for hating the Eagles. The music is smooth and digestible – plus points in my book – while every lyric is definitively about something, a most welcome departure from the nebulous, free associative lyrical flotsam that rock bands of this period felt increasingly entitled to indulge in and were increasingly allowed to get away with. For me, there’s no competition between these trim, tight, lyrically cohesive slices of melodic country rock and, for example, the meandering, J.R.R. Tolkien-inspired bore fests visited upon the world by the likes of Led Zeppelin, or the unendurably nasal lyrical overkill of Bob Dylan. So fuck the Dude and his shitty rug. Jeffrey Lebowski was right; the bums will always lose.
7/10
Highlights: “Hotel California”, “New Kid in Town”, “Wasted Time”