The record company was pushing us
to get going on the new album. We relocated to a ranch out near Calabasas, just outside Los Angeles, to listen to what new material everyone had and to rehearse. The actual recording was to be done and mixed later by Bill, the Soul Pole, at the Record Plant in L.A. and at Criteria Studios in Miami.
I’d put together a demo cassette with about ten or fifteen different tracks, including that glorious summer day’s offering, fully expecting most of them to be dispatched to outtake heaven by “The Gods.” Some had been milling around in my head that whole summer; some were even older. I was always tinkering around with sounds, singing into a Dictaphone in the car, laying down half-tracks, stray chords, or melodies that ran through my head, hoping that one of them might develop into something. More often than not, when I listened to them later, they were stillborns. The original concept had evaporated, the feeling had gone, and so had the glimpse of inspiration, so I’d erase them and start again. Some people work very methodically at creating music, putting in regular hours, but I can’t work that way. I need to feel like it’s a lover I haven’t seen for a while and be excited and enthusiastic about our reunion. You can’t force inspiration. If there’s something in there to be released, it’ll find its own way out.
We were at the Calabasas ranch, with old wagons in the yard. Photographer David Alexander was taking our photos for the new album sleeve, when Don, the Sonic Bat, put my demo tape onto a little blaster he had and started listening. Song after song came and went without much reaction from the bat cave, and I was beginning to feel a little dispirited.
When the one I wrote that fine day in Malibu came on, however, Don sat up, listened carefully, stopped the tape, rewound, and played it again. I’d pretty much worked out the entire arrangement. I’d added some harmony and electric guitar parts, and the whole thing was underscored by this reggae beat. At the very end, I had two guitar solos, trading between a Stratocaster and my favorite ’59 Les Paul Starburst, as if Joe and I were going toe-to-toe. I could tell from Glenn’s face that he liked that part the best.
“Hey, I love this track, Fingers,” Don said, with a rare smile. “It sounds Spanish, like a matador or something. Very Latino.”
Glenn nodded his approval. “Yeah.”
“Oh, good,” I said, feeling like a puppy that had just been patted for peeing outside.
“Let’s call it ‘Mexican Bolero,’ ” Don said.
“OK,” I said, grinning. The fact that Don had granted it a name was a very good sign.
I originally recorded the track in E minor, which was great. The electric guitars were big and fat, and the twelve-string sounded nice and full. We continued playing it in that key right up until Don had to sing the lyrics and realized it was too high for him. “It’s in the wrong key,” he announced.
Disappointed, I replied, “Oh, OK, what do you need? D?”
“No,” he replied, scratching his head. We sat down and eventually decided on B minor, although that’s one of the worst possible keys for guitar. I struggled manfully with the new key, hating every second of it at first, because it sounded so thin and flat compared to the killer E-minor sound.
The only trouble was, the song was six minutes and change, with its unusual chromatic progression and its sudden shift from a minor key to the dominant major key for the chorus. Years of free-form jazz phrasing at jam sessions in Boston had made me slightly overindulgent when it came to track length.
Nobody seemed to notice. Best of all, Glenn had a germ of an idea while he was listening to it. He was great at conceptualizing and was listening to a lot of Steely Dan at the time. “This could be about the fantasy of California,” he said. “I can see this guy driving down a desert highway at night in a convertible and seeing the lights of L.A. way off on the horizon.”
We all knew that feeling; we’d all driven into LA from our respective homes and been overwhelmed by the awesome spectacle of the city, with its twinkling lights spread before us. Don snapped the image in his mind and took it from there, expanding it to the guy seeing a hotel in the distance and deciding to rest for the night. There, where he is served pink champagne under mirrored ceilings, a woman walks in. “It’s such a lovely place,” he muses with that uncanny gift of his, as he absentmindedly adds his smoldering cigarette butt to the dozen he already has lined up in front of him. “This could be heaven or this could be hell.”
Don was very private about his lyrics. After he’d come up with a basic concept, he’d take it away and work on it secretly, and we wouldn’t hear the finished product until we were ready to record it in the studio. No one had any problems with this. After all, he was the Lyric King, and we all knew it. The only time I can ever remember all of us daring to jump in and tell him something was wrong was when, in recording “One of These Nights,” he sang that he’d been “searching for the daughter of God.”
Bill Szymczyk suggested Don might want to change that.
Thinking of my mother’s devout fellow churchgoers in the Deep South, I agreed he should change it unless he wanted every religious zealot in the States after him with a gun. The line was later changed to “I’ve been searching for an angel in white.”
We finally figured my new song out, although it took weeks of demos and rehearsals, recording, dubbing, and overdubbing. I taught Randy how to play the complicated bass part, and Don picked up the reggae-style cha-cha beat on his drums. Joe worked out the other guitar solo that he’d play against mine at the end, and Glenn learned the rhythm part.
When Don first sang his lyrics for us all the way through at the Record Plant, we were completely stunned. I mean, that guy could sing the New York phone book and I’d buy it, but this was really something.
When the track was finally finished and laid down, and given its new name—“Hotel California”—Don said quietly, “I think this should be the single.”
“Are you crazy?” I cried, as Glenn, Joe, and Randy looked up in mutual astonishment. “This thing’s over six minutes long! We might have got away with “Lyin’ Eyes,” but AM radio won’t play anything over three minutes thirty seconds, and never anything slow. They also won’t play something that
stops
in the middle, then starts again, with a minute and a half of guitar solo. It ain’t gonna happen.”
I’d never been more wrong. When Elektra/Asylum asked us to shorten it, Don told them to release it as it was or not at all. He was right.
The final recording and editing
of the
Hotel California
album took place at Criteria Studios, so we rented, among other houses, 461 Ocean Boulevard, Miami Beach, the white stucco beach house made famous by Eric Clapton and his comeback album, called
461 Ocean Boulevard,
released in 1974. We hoped that by renting the very same house, some of the magic would rub off on us, and we’d make a great record too.
We had some of our best times as a band in that place. It was right on the beach, and every Saturday and Sunday, we’d lie around the living room, watching football on the television, and then during halftime we’d go out and play touch football on the beach. We were all skinny, puny-looking, 150-pound guys, compared to the bulging musclemen of Miami, but we’d have a game until we got exhausted, then go back in and drink a bunch of beer and watch some more football. It felt, for once, as if we really liked each other.
Much to my delight, while we were there, Don and Glenn chose another of the songs I’d written at the beach house in Malibu. I’d called it “Iron Lung,” reminiscent of my childhood illness, because it had a distinctive echo slap on it. They agreed that its rhythmic sound was just like someone wheezing away on a polio ward in the giant cylindrical machine that encased their body, doing their breathing for them. It was merely an idea, with no lyrics or melody, but with the help of “The Gods,” it became one of our most recognized songs—“Victim of Love.”
Glenn first came up with the concept. He and I, plus Don and J.D., were sitting up late over at Glenn’s house one night, drinking and talking through various lyrical ideas about broken hearts, lost dreams, and power and anger in a relationship, all of which those three knew a great deal about. I often wondered if they sometimes deliberately broke off relationships with their various women, just to keep that emotional edge as songwriters.
“Having a broken heart is like being a victim of a car wreck,” J.D. said broodily, still smarting from his latest split. “You wake up all battered and bruised in an emergency room.”
“Victim’s a good word,” I pointed out.
They all nodded their approval.
“Victim of what, though?” I said, my brow furrowed. We all sat and pondered.
Glenn, sitting quietly in a corner, suddenly spoke: “Victim of luuuuuve.”
He pretty much took over from there. My hesitant, wheezing “Iron Lung” was soon transformed into a hit. Easy as that.
Because I wrote the music for that song, and because of the original agreement to try to keep everything as equal as possible, I was supposed to sing the lead vocal. I was more than a little nervous. I can sing OK, but I’ll never be in the same league as Don Henley. Still, I thought, I’ll give it my best shot. We were in the studios in Miami, and I’d drunk some red wine when I went up to the mike and started to sing. I knew my performance wasn’t great. Nothing was tingling. Don stepped up and sang, and it was immediately apparent to everyone, especially me, that he should sing it—even though, deep down, I wasn’t thrilled at losing my slot. I just hoped there might be another opportunity later on, but there never was.
Joe had come up with a lick and he, Randy, and I jammed on the idea over at Randy’s house one night. It eventually evolved into “Life in the Fast Lane.” Randy had bought Ricky Nelson’s old house, which overlooked Universal Studios and had a 360-degree view. He was a big fan of Rick, the singer of hits like “Hello, Mary Lou,” especially since he had played in Rick’s Stone Canyon Band. I believe the actress Helen Hunt bought the house from Randy afterward and tore it down to build a new one—a shame, because there was so much of Rick in that property, even his children’s painted handprints on the bathroom tiles. Anyway, it was a great place to rehearse, and we were up there jamming and listening to a little cassette machine with Jage Jackson, a terrific roadie who also played drums.
“Hey, try this one,” I said, playing a lick I’d first come up with in Boston. “I’ve had this one lying around for years, but I never did anything about it.” It opened with a raunchy guitar riff and a fast-paced backbeat, but then it fizzled out.
Joe listened hard, his head hanging so low that his greasy hair flopped completely over his face, parting only to reveal his bulbous nose. “I have an idea what to do with that,” he said suddenly, picking up a guitar. We all worked on it, with Jage adding some nifty drumbeats and me contributing a few licks that followed Joe’s classic intro, but the song definitely became Joe’s.
When the demo was done, Joe took it to Don and Glenn, who rushed away and came up with a concept. Glenn came up with the idea of driving in the fast lane, and he took that idea and expanded on it. I thought it was brilliant, sheer genius, to use the spaghetti-like L.A. freeways as an analogy of what it was like to be in the rock-and-roll business. Perfect. Don wrote some great lyrics that summed up how people destroy themselves with drugs in the “cold city”—lines of cocaine chopped out on a mirror creating lines on their faces. Pretty cool!
It was only when it was almost finished, when they set up the vocal track and Don started singing in that soulful Ray Charles voice of his, that we realized what he’d really achieved. We all thought, “Wow.”
Many consider
Hotel California
to be our finest album, but it wasn’t always an easy road to that elusive hotel. Just when we thought the departure of Bernie and the hiring of Joe had cleared the air, the pressure was
still
on to top the
Greatest Hits
album. How do you better your best? It was like raising the high jump bar another few inches, moments after you’ve won the gold medal. We worked many days and nights until the wee hours of the morning, squeezing the highest quality out of everyone involved. Whether it was engineering, writing, singing, playing, tracking, or editing, it was all done under the most intense scrutiny. Joe and I had calluses on our calluses. The ultimate goal was to produce the best possible record, but the process was extremely taxing and caused a lot of wear and tear on everyone’s nerves. Everyone wanted to set an impeccable standard for Eagles records.
In trying to achieve this, however, we often wound up erasing performances that were fiery, motivated, and inspired. If a take had a tiny human glitch, one note out of tune, even if all the rest sounded fine, we’d junk it and do it again. This was before Pro Tools digital editing allowed someone to sit at a computer and insert sounds or fine-tune a few notes. None of that existed then, so we’d have to play the song over and over. Before we knew it, we’d squeezed the creativity out of it. We could strive for flawless music, but we couldn’t force people to remain flawlessly inspired while delivering ten or twenty identical takes. The creative process was quickly robbed of its passion.