The recording of Hotel California in 1976 and 1977 has been described in the official accounts of the Eagles’ history with the standard narrative of creative triumph — the band at their peak, the material coming together, the production achieving the specific sound that the recording has become iconic for. The unofficial account, assembled from interviews with people who were in and around the sessions, is more complicated and more interesting and involves a specific period during the album’s recording when the band came closer to permanent dissolution than at any previous point in their history.
Don Henley has said, in interviews given at various points across the following decades, that the making of Hotel California was the hardest creative experience of his professional life. He has not elaborated on this in the specific terms that would make it fully comprehensible — he has left the statement without the detail that would transform it from a general expression of difficulty into an account of what actually happened. The people who were around the band during the recording have filled in portions of the account with varying degrees of directness.
What is known is that the creative relationship between Henley and Glenn Frey — the songwriting partnership that was the commercial and artistic engine of the band — underwent a specific crisis during the Hotel California sessions that was different in character from the ordinary friction of collaborative creativity. The Eagles had always been a band of significant internal tension — the history of who brought what to the recordings, who received appropriate credit, who was making decisions about direction and who was being directed — but the crisis during Hotel California was described by people close to the band as something that put the continuation of the band in genuine question.
Don Felder has been the most specific in his account — his memoir describes the period in terms that establish a context of financial disagreement, creative hierarchy disputes, and personal friction that the commercial success of the album ultimately papered over without resolving. Henley has disputed Felder’s account in terms that are themselves revealing — the specific points of contention suggest familiarity with the events being described rather than the dismissal of fabrication.
What has never been explained by Henley — what he has declined to address in the specific terms the question requires — is a decision made during the sessions about the album’s opening track. Hotel California was not the original choice for the opening track. The song that was originally intended to open the album was replaced, and the replacement decision was made under circumstances that the band members have characterized, in partial and oblique accounts, as producing significant conflict.
The title track is one of the most analyzed songs in rock history — the specific meaning of the hotel, the girl in the Mercedes Benz, the dark desert highway, the mirrors on the ceiling, the voices from the corridor, the master’s chambers and the beast they cannot kill, the voices from 1969 to which you have not heard before. Henley has said the song is about the corrupting influence of the music industry and of California’s specific culture of excess. He has said other things about it at other times that are not entirely consistent with this account. He has said, with the weariness of a man who has answered the question ten thousand times, that the song means what it means to the people listening to it.
The album sold sixteen million copies. It remains one of the best-selling albums in American music history. The crisis during its recording was resolved by the resolution that commercial success usually provides — the money arrived and the arguments about who was owed what became simultaneously more important and less urgent.