The Meaning of the Eagles' "Hotel California"

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Is it really about Satanism? (Hint: probably not.)
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You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. You might be familiar with this cryptic lyric from “Hotel California,” but what does it mean? We took a deep dive into the classic Eagles song, including its origins, its haunting lyrics, and its many different possible interpretations (from the logical to the more outlandish). Keep reading for the scoop.

“Hotel California” at a Glance

The meaning of the Eagles’ 1976 hit “Hotel California” is ambiguous, but it’s thought to be a commentary on greed and hedonism in the music industry and the disillusionment with the American dream. Some listeners also theorize it’s a reference to drugs, a mental institution, or even Satanism.

Section 1 of 6:

What is “Hotel California” about?

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  1. Eagles founding member, drummer, and co-lead vocalist frontman Don Henley says the song “means different things to different people,” but the band themselves commonly describe it as a commentary on disillusionment with the American dream, and the hedonism and self-destruction that often accompanies fame and fortune. [1] “The concept had to do with taking a look at all the band had gone through, personally and professionally, while it was still happening to them,” Henley revealed to Rolling Stone . [2]
    • “We were getting an extensive education, in life, in love, in business,” Henley says. “Beverly Hills was still a mythical place to us. In that sense, it became something of a symbol and the ‘Hotel’ the locus of all that L.A. had come to mean for us. In a sentence, I’d sum it up as the end of the innocence, round one.” [3]
    • In the 2013 documentary The History of the Eagles , Henley describes the song as “a journey from innocence to experience... that's all.” [4]
    • Eagles guitarist—and, at one time, the biggest party animal of the band—Joe Walsh expounds on this theme in 1980’s “Life’s Been Good,” singing, “I have a mansion, forget the price, / Ain’t never been there, they tell me it’s nice. / I live in hotels, tear out the walls, / I have accountants pay for it all.”
    • “Hotel California” appears on the 1976 album of the same name. The Eagles had already released four albums; by their fourth, 1975’s One of These Nights , they were one of America’s biggest bands, and Hotel California illustrates their descent into the greed and corruption of the music industry.
  2. Hotel California by the Sea is a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center; this isn’t what the song is about, but the connection has brought some listeners to assume the song is about drug addiction. This theory is strengthened by the inclusion of lyrics like “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” (as in, perhaps, “you can leave the center, but addiction will follow you”) and “Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air” ( colitas is thought to be Mexican slang for marijuana). "Hotel California" is thought to be slang for heroin.
    • Despite their often mellow tunes, the Eagles were known party monsters, particularly Walsh: “My higher power [was] vodka and cocaine,” he said. “I burned all the bridges. Nobody wanted to work with me.” [5]
    • The Eagles disbanded in 1980, but they reunited in 1994, when Henley and co-lead singer and frontman Glenn Frey decided to get back together under the condition that Walsh would get clean. “My feeling was, well, that’s a really good reason to get sober,” Walsh said, “and I didn’t really have one before that.” [6]
    • It wouldn’t be the first Eagles song inspired by their drug use: “Life in the Fast Lane,” also on Hotel California , was titled after an exchange Henley had with his drug dealer. “I was riding shotgun in a Corvette with a drug dealer on the way to a poker game,” he said in The History of the Eagles . “The next thing I know, we’re doing 90…. I say, ‘Hey man!’ He grins and goes, ‘Life in the fast lane!’ I thought, Now there’s a song title. ”
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  3. Rumors suggested the song was about the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where one of the band’s members allegedly stayed for a time in the 1970s. This is all conjecture, but you can see how some fans got there with lyrics like, “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.’”
    • And, of course, the song’s general sense of dread and the references to the hotel’s liminal quality—“This could be heaven or this could be hell”—add to the vibe.
  4. OK, so the song's probably not about Steely Dan, but there's a quick reference to the fellow '70s yacht rock band in the lyric, “They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast.” Steely Dan’s Walter Becker’s girlfriend loved the Eagles, and they even reference the Eagles in their song "Everything You Did" : "Turn up the Eagles, / The neighbors are listening." The “Hotel California” lyric is thought by some to be a response to their inclusion in the Steely Dan hit. [7]
  5. Some listeners claim the song is about devil worship, believing Church of Satan (not to be confused with the Satanic Temple) founder Anton LaVey is featured on the album art (spoiler: he isn’t). [8]
    • Some listeners theorized that the titular Hotel California referred to a San Francisco hotel that was purchased by LaVey and converted into the Church of Satan. The song purportedly also included backwards messages encouraging Satan worship (didn’t all songs back then?).
    • The lyrics, “So I called up the captain: ‘Please bring me my wine,’ / He said, ‘We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969’” form the basis of some of these rumors, with “wine” serving as a metaphor for the blood of Christ.
  6. Lyrics like, “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” have led some listeners to believe the song is about…well, eating people. OK.
  7. Despite what different Eagles members have said about the song being a commentary on innocence lost, American hedonism, and the music industry, it’s still a little ambiguous what the intentions behind “Hotel California” really were. “Everybody wants to know what that song was about,” Glenn Frey said in a BBC interview, “and we don’t know.”
    • He said he and Henley had “wanted to write a song that was sort of like an episode of The Twilight Zone ”: “We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it. And then a lot was read into it—a lot more than probably exists. I think we achieved perfect ambiguity." [9]
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Section 2 of 6:

More about “Hotel California”

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  1. It was written by Don Felder (music), Don Henley, and Glenn Frey (lyrics), featuring Henley on lead vocals and ending with a 2-minute-12-second electric guitar solo by Felder and guitarist Joe Walsh, with the two taking turns playing the lead before harmonizing together as the song fades out.
    • Felder came up with the melody, including the dueling guitar solos, while riffing on his guitar in a beach house in Malibu—not the sinister L.A. underbelly setting you were expecting, huh?
    • “I remember sitting in the living room on a spectacular July day with the doors wide open,” he wrote in his book Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles . “I had a bathing suit on and was sitting on this couch, soaking wet, thinking the world is a wonderful place to be. I had this acoustic 12-string and started tinkling around with it, and those ‘Hotel California’ chords just kind of oozed out.” [10]
    • Sensing the melody had potential, Felder recorded it along with other new melodies and gave the recording to Henley, who said, “I really like that song that sounds kind of like a Mexican reggae.” The song’s working title became “Mexican Reggae.” [11]
  2. It topped the Hot 100 singles chart for a week in May of that year—the Eagles’ fourth song to reach number 1. [12] Billboard named it number 19 on its 1977 Pop Singles year-end list. [13]
    • Three months after its release, the song was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America—in other words, one million copies of the song had been sold.
    • The album has now gone Platinum 29 times. [14]
    • The Eagles’ 3 other number-one Billboard hits up until then included “Take It Easy,” “Witchy Woman,” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”
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Section 3 of 6:

Is “Hotel California” a bad song?

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  1. Despite their success, the Eagles are a band music lovers love to hate—possibly because they are so successful, and/or because, as Stephen Deusner wrote in a 2013 Salon essay, “They come off as deadly serious, with no sense of humor about anything, least of all themselves.”
    • Gersh Kuntzman summed up his loathing for the band this way, in an essay featured in the New York Daily News right after Glenn Frey’s death in 2016: “No disrespect to Glenn Frey, but the Eagles were, quite simply, the worst rock and roll band. And hating the Eagles defines whether a music fan is a fan of music or just a bandwagon-jumper.”
    • Craig Silliphant wrote in The Feedback Society , “The Eagles are competency (notice I didn’t say talent) without a quantum of soul.”
  2. Rolling Stone ranked it 49 on a list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it in their list of 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll (the Eagles were inducted into the Hall in 1998). The album Hotel California won the Grammy for album of the year. And the song’s killer guitar solo was voted the best of all time by Guitarist magazine readers in 1998. So you do the math. [15]
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Section 4 of 6:

The Eagles in Pop Culture

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  1. In the Cohen brothers’ 1998 comedy hit The Big Lebowski , Jeff Bridges’ the Dude famously loathes the Eagles, in one scene telling a cab driver who insists on playing their music, “Come on, I had a rough night, and I hate the f*ckin’ Eagles.” The driver pulls over and kicks him out of the cab.
    • Bridges himself doesn’t hate the band, but apparently Glenn Frey wasn’t happy with the movie using the Eagles as the butt of a joke: “I don’t hate the Eagles like the Dude hates them,” Bridges told Rolling Stone . “I remember I ran into Glenn Frey, he gave me some sh*t. I can’t remember what he said exactly, but you know, my anus tightened a bit.” [16]
  2. The Eagles’ saccharine soft-rock ballad “Desperado,” from the band’s 1973 album of the same name, was famously featured in an episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine’s pretentious new boyfriend Brett insists she stop speaking any time it comes on the radio because he’s so emotionally overcome.
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Section 5 of 6:

Popular “Hotel California” Covers

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  1. The Gipsy Kings
    Frank Ocean (sampled on “American Wedding”)
    Passenger
    Nancy Sinatra
Section 6 of 6:

Other Popular Eagles Songs

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  1. “Take It Easy”
    “Peaceful Easy Feeling”
    “Desperado”
    “Witchy Woman”
    “Life in the Fast Lane”
    “Take It to the Limit”
    “I Can’t Tell You Why”
    “Lyin’ Eyes”
    “Best of My Love”
    “Heartache Tonight”
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      References

      1. ↑ https://youtu.be/g9bMFUadjuA?si=GlCGE7Wj-pQ5uoFM&t=735
      2. ↑ https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-eagles-hotel-california-10-things-you-didnt-know-111526/
      3. ↑ https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-eagles-hotel-california-10-things-you-didnt-know-111526/
      4. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2194326/
      5. ↑ https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/joe-walsh-tells-recovery-story-facing-addiction-ncadd-gala-8478944/
      6. ↑ https://youtu.be/g9bMFUadjuA?si=cJO1AiI0Si41phzp&t=973
      7. ↑ https://ultimateclassicrock.com/eagles-steely-dan-hotel-california/
      8. ↑ https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35347075
      9. ↑ https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35347075
      1. ↑ https://www.guitarworld.com/lessons/how-to-play-hotel-california-on-guitar
      2. ↑ https://youtu.be/qDeoCZw_LE0?si=AJYI1KZ004ZeGjOI&t=146
      3. ↑ https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/1977-04-16/
      4. ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=k0UEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT61
      5. ↑ https://www.thefeedbacksociety.com/music/songs-we-hate-hotel-california-by-the-eagles/
      6. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20061214111349/http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/500songs
      7. ↑ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/the-dude-survives-jeff-bridges-on-the-enduring-big-lebowski-187214/

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