Eagles – Hotel California

A six-minute single, cut in Miami and Los Angeles

Between March and October 1976, the Eagles recorded their fifth album at Criteria Studios in Miami and the Record Plant in Los Angeles, with Bill Szymczyk producing. It was the first record with Joe Walsh, who had replaced Bernie Leadon, and the last with founding bassist Randy Meisner. The title song started earlier, in Don Felder’s home setup, as a 12-string guitar figure he labelled Mexican Reggae.

Felder brought the cassette to the band. Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote the lyric and the vocal melody on top of it. Henley sings the lead. They cut the basic track more than once. An early pass in Miami was only a rough shape under that working title. A later pass was in the wrong key for Henley’s voice. The take they kept lets the guitars state the figure for a long time before the vocal enters, then drops the drums out in the middle, then hands the ending to the guitars.

That ending took two days at Criteria. Felder and Walsh stood in the control room, one on each side of Szymczyk, amplifiers out in the studio. Felder had already played both parts on his demo, answering himself so it would sound like two guitarists. In Miami he assumed they would improvise. Henley stopped them and told Felder to play what was on the old cassette. Felder could not remember it. They called his housekeeper in Malibu, who held a phone up to a cassette player, and Felder copied the part from that. The album cover is David Alexander’s photograph of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Asylum released Hotel California on 8 December 1976.