June 12, 2001. Earl’s Court arena, London. Its 8:45pm, half way through the concert and I’m standing in the queue for the loo. The first strums of a very familiar song waft through the air. For a split second I seriously think I will continue waiting😱. But… this is my first ever Eagles concert – top of my bucket-list of bands – and , while this could be heaven or this could be hell (😇) no way am I’m going to miss even a second of this. I summon my “bladder control” superpower and rush back to my seat just as the Eagles get into “Hotel California”.  Pandemonium. An entire auditorium of 40 somethings, on their feet, singing along and playing the air-guitar. Absolute Heaven!! I’ve been lucky enough to see the Eagles four times but that memory of watching them live for the first time, just never fades away. (I did eventually get to the loo, thanks for asking!🤪)

“Hotel California” is to the Eagles what “Stairway to Heaven” is for Led Zeppelin or “Smoke On The Water” is for Deep Purple – the one song that forever defines them – for better or for worse. It is one of my favourite rock songs, and has been the No.3 song on my Classic Rock playlist for 35 years. I’ve listened to it at least a gazillion times, and I can so perfectly remember the first time I heard it on the radio. Friends had talked about it to me – “beta ,crazy guitars!” – but I had never actually heard it before. So, one evening when the RJ said she was going to play “Hotel California”, I put down “Sudden Rides Again”, turned up the volume and sat up to listen. The intro is intriguing, the song itself is coming along nicely – trademark Eagles harmonies – and then …….Don Henley crescendos with “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave !” …..and what followed was my first listen of..…that incredible 120 second guitar battle between Don Felder and Joe Walsh – mind immediately blown to smithereens! The lyrics of the song itself are a masterclass in Eagles storytelling – engaging, intriguing and ambiguous full of clever word pictures – “Tiffany Twisted” , “Mercedes Bends” and of course, “Steely Knives” being a call out to the band Steely Dan (’cause they referenced the Eagles in one of their songs). Over the years, I’ve come to love the lyrics as much as the guitar work. BUT, forty years later, I still don’t know what the hell are “colitas” and why do they have “warm smell”??!! 😁 Answers on a postcard, please

Don Felder came up with the melody. Glenn Frey and Don Henley wrote the song. Miserable gits that they are (always were?), they wrote their take on life in LA – the glamour, the girls, the glitz, the drugs, the endless partying and the vicious circle of the music business. The song has been over-played to hell and back – apparently it’s played somewhere in the world every 11 minutes even today, 45 years later. Have I mentioned I still, absolutely, love it?

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 night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave!”

“New Kid In Town” too was on the radio a lot in the late 70s and early 80s. Frey wrote the lyrics and sang the lead vocals on this melancholic story about how, eventually, everything becomes old and fades away – fame, fortune, romance, love, youth, career. Somehow, no matter how many times I listen to it, I can always find something to identify with my current state of mind whatever it may be. By the time they released this song, the Eagles were about to implode, the 70s were ending and punk was rising in rebellion to arena rock, so maybe this just was the Eagles’ writing about how they would fade away soon – irony writ large. IMHO, one of the best Eagles songs, even amongst a bushel full of incredible songs.

You look in her eyes; the music begins to play
Hopeless romantics, here we go again
But after a while, you’re lookin’ the other way
It’s those restless hearts that never mend

A late night 80mph drive on a LA highway was the inspiration for “Life In The Fast lane”. Glenn Frey loved his poker. One night, he’s heading to a poker game, with a drug dealer friend of his driving the car. The car is flying down the highway at 80 miles an hour, and Frey turns to him and tells him to slow down. The drug-dealing-friend-driver turns to Frey and says “hey man, it’s life in the fast lane”. And Frey, hanging on for dear life, files that away in his head as “a great title for a song”! Joe Walsh came up with a riff during a warm up before a show and Frey and Henley wrote the lyrics about a couple (“He was brutally handsome, and she was terminally pretty”), burning the candle at both ends, perfectly in line with the drug fuelled, hedonistic Hotel California motif of the album! “Life In The Fast Lane” really did spell out everything that was messed up with the Eagles at that time – from the infamous “third encores” of their concerts (basically an after party where girls and drugs were sampled in industrial quantities) to the hotel room trashing that Joe Walsh was a world champion in (he learnt from the best – his mentor in room trashing was Keith Moon from the Stones! 😂).

They knew all the right people,
they took all the right pills
They threw outrageous parties,
they paid heavenly bills

Unfortunately, the “Hotel California” album was the beginning of the end for the Eagles – a bit like The Wall / Pink Floyd or Bridge Over Troubled Waters/ S&G (which takes the prize for the most ironic album title of all time). Their previous albums – “Their Greatest Hits” and “One Of These Nights” were huge successes. “Hotel California” surpassed even these and made them Rock Superstars. There really was just no way to top that and the Eagles imploded trying to do just that. Three years of excruciating effort, during which they grew to hate each other’s guts, resulted in the “The Long Run”. The album has some wonderful songs on it, my favourite being “Heartache Tonight” ❤️. A classic rock beat with a blues baseline, it is the usual Eagles perfection. Etched word pictures. Drama and melancholia of potentially wasted love, but, the optimism to still give it a go. Perfect harmonies. Sublime guitar work. And that Bob Seger chorus!

Somebody is gonna hurt someone
Before the night is through
Somebody is gonna come undone
It’s nothin’ we can do

However, the painful experience of having been on the road forever during the Hotel California tour, and then spending three years in the studio, perfecting every chord and every lyric of their follow up to Hotel California – it just tore the Eagles apart. I remember in 1980 the announcer on “A Date With You” (Gitanjali Iyer i think ?) playing Hotel California and telling us that the Eagles have just announced their break up. I mourned for years. Until, one day,………hell froze over 😈