Which eagle sings hotel california

Don Felder had rented a beach house in Malibu, and was in the midst of taking in the ocean breeze as he leisurely strummed his guitar.

After completing the basic melody, he fetched his TEAC 4-track tape recorder to preserve his latest composition, which he embellished with bass and drum-machine overdubs. When the Eagles reconvened in the spring of to begin work on what was to be their fifth album, Felder assembled cassettes of his instrumental demos for his bandmates to mine for song ideas.

Despite his initial reticence, the reggae-flavored tune made the cut. There may have been some Latin-style percussion in there too. Glenn Frey was equally impressed. To oversee the new sessions, the Eagles turned to veteran producer Bill Szymczyk, who had worked on their previous album, One of These Nights. His reasoning went beyond the technical. To avoid the earthquake zone, he insisted that the band record in Miami. Eventually a compromise was reached, and they would split time between both favored studios.

They were joined at Criteria by Black Sabbath, holed up in the adjacent studio working on their Technical Ecstasy album. Sabbath may have been louder, but the Eagles held their own when it came to partying. When he and Joe Walsh began to work out the extended guitar fade, Henley felt that something was missing.

So the band was forced to improvise. In the end, the results were deemed satisfactory. The fact that the Eagles and Jethro Tull toured together in did little to dispel his belief that, maliciously or not, they lifted elements of the song from him.

Whatever the case, Anderson takes a magnanimous view of the incident. Some of these late nights yielded memorable lyrics. Big Time! According to journalist-turned-director Cameron Crowe , "Hotel California" was almost named something entirely different. The Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in , and all seven former and present members of the group performed "Hotel California" together on stage.

There is a playful nod to the band Steely Dan in the song. The line "They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast," is a playful jab to rock band Steely Dan.

In the case of Hotel California, it means enough that the song is played on American radio every 11 minutes. It means enough that last year, the Eagles took time out from suing each other to issue a lawsuit against a Mexican hotel using the name. The band never matched it again, and trying to do so drove them apart. And less fanciful listeners get out of the song a feeling rather than a meaning - that same loss of innocence which concludes that novel The Magus.

And in the lines about being prisoners in a world of "pink champagne on ice", pleasure and regret mix in a way that's surely prescient. After all, when did you last hear of musicians trashing hotels? The last time may have been in when Busted's Matt Willis threw a television out of a window, then immediately apologised.

And quite right too. Image source, Getty Images. The band has two of the top three selling albums in history. When he first played it to the band, they perceived it as "a bizarre mix of musical influences" and the song's working title became Mexican Reggae. Recording began in Los Angeles, but the first version of the song was in the wrong key for Henley's raspy vocals.

A second recording turned out to be too fast, so the band started again in Miami, fine-tuning the instrumentation and the lyrics in the process. The band recorded several takes, then spliced together the best bits to create the version we know today. That's the kind of perfection we were dealing with. Once the basic track had been constructed, it took two days to record the closing guitar solos, with Felder and Joe Walsh trading riffs side-by-side in the control room.

Felder had initially assumed they would improvise this section - but Henley and Frey had other ideas. It's not right,'" Felder said in an interview with Music Radar. So we had to call my housekeeper in Malibu, who took the cassette, put it in a [ghetto]blaster and played it with the phone held up to the blaster. The perfectionism paid off. Hotel California is the band's most enduring song, still played more than times a month on UK radio, and covered by artists as diverse as The Gipsy Kings, The Killers and Frank Ocean.

When a US spy plane made an emergency landing in China in , the crew members were asked to recite the lyrics to prove their nationality. Apparently, their Chinese captors considered that "the song symbolised America". Henley would have disagreed. We weren't afraid to step out and take chances.