Eagles – Hotel California (Live) (1994)
Hmn.
I’ll start here. The Eagles were a really, really good band. They filled the 1970s with some defining songs and deceptively brilliant musicianship (Don Felder‘s guitar solo on One of These Nights is one of the greatest instrumental entr’actes you will ever hear anywhere, anywhat, from anywho, like, evarr). Their voices were the stuff of master classes, and they could pivot from Country to Prog to A/C to shit-kickin’ bar grit with no effort whatever. And their massive hits filled every one of those templates.
And if they’d shut down like a Chrysler dealership in 1976 without adding a single note beyond, their legacy would still be unbothered.
But then came Hotel California. The album and its title track dropped like a bomb at the beginning of 1977, and it was just eagles, eagles everywhere. Radio stations became aeries; teenagers etched the lyrics of whole songs into trees; discotheques pumped Life in the Fast Lane; stoners in suburban basements moaned The Last Resort while their parents hummed clumsily to New Kid in Town upstairs in the kitchen.
Not since Sgt. Pepper, and not again ’til Nevermind... we were in that zone.
A lone post-climactic album followed in 1979, and the next year, poof, it was all over but the lawsuits. In their wake, Don Henley famously answered an interviewer who asked when the band might reunite, by saying… well, you know exactly what he said – you bought the album, the t-shirt and the $100 concert ticket. Six times now.
When the fan blades finally crusted, a single song stood out from all the rest. Hotel California is a paragon in rock music’s recorded anthology. At well over six minutes, it was a Top-40 enigma, but even AM radio stations spun all of it when the band refused to supply a shortened version. No science here, but it’s quite possible the average music fan spent around 12% of their waking hours listening to that one song.
Its lyric is cryptic, but the declared meaning (so’ve said Messrs. Henley and Frey) is the intoxicating allure of L.A. and its mythical dream-catching. The mood is macabre, its envoie Twilight-Zonish (“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave“), and if there had been a film version, Stanley Kubrick might have directed.
But the hero here is the musical arc. The form is a spartan ABABAA1, with three long minor-mode verses and just two full-voiced major-mode refrains, ending with a long instrumental duet. The guitar work is absolutely mesmerizing throughout, and not in the usual athletic sense of technical virtuosity; the finely-textured acoustic guitars are ideal middleware above a hiccupping bass and below a now-squealing, now-popping electric guitar that ‘sings backup’ in the verses and then dialogues with the lead vocal in the chorus. This is skilled melodrama, non-Genesis style.
I think most listeners, players and critics alike would agree that what makes the song a true standout are the brilliant instrumental sections that bookend it. The lovely acoustic intro and the iconic electric coda balance a musical story that is otherwise repetitive and tell of a spiritual journey from soft to hard, from the ether of wide-eyed hopes to the hard soundscape of an inescapable place. And not to wax drivel here, but by any objective measure, Don Felder and Joe Walsh close the piece with an instrumental sequence for the ages – perhaps the most creative, expressive, exhilarating conversation between two electric guitars ever set to record.
So when Hell finally chilled out (you know, the first time), the band returned, its Schmit-for-Meisner lineup suspended in time, to quench a 14-year thirst for its now-adult segment. The hype and the anticipation were, by design, off the hizzy.
When Canada participates in a Winter Olympics, it’s great fun to watch a lot of the sports that get little to no coverage in the intervening four years. Ski and snowboard chase events are thrilling, acrobatic snow sports are riotously entertaining, curling is a fine chess match, and figure skating events are regal and filled with moment. And the medals count for all of those bragging rights, doubtless. But by the closing ceremony, there’s only one singular event that matters. And if the Canadian boys didn’t win gold in Hockey, an otherwise dominant top-of-the-medal-count showing would be an empty, even pyrrhic, win.
For the Hell Freezes Over reunion, there was one song. The rest was cross-country skiing.
The attending live album, recorded for an MTV audience in early 1994 and released later that year shortly after the megatour began, was polished and expertly produced and engineered. Most songs were live versions of oldies, and there were a couple of new studio-recorded songs as well, just to get back onto the charts (and add some creative sharpness to the soft nostalgic edges).
Six songs in, le grand oeuvre, and… *splat*.
The opening 80 seconds are a pedestrian bit of teasing. A two-part, stylistically inauthentic, poorly improvised flamenco-cum-salsa cludge, accompanied halfway through by a cringeworthy percussion caricature, prepends the masterful acoustic intro of the composed version. Inconceivable!
Look, bands do that. And a little tickle never hurt no one, even an eye-roller like this one. If it serves to create a lil’ smokeshow and heighten the anticipation, then job done – we’d waited fourteen years, some fanfare is allowable.
But the ending is a crime. Rinky-dink acoustic guitars trying to pluck out such a soaring instrumental moment as The Great Duet just doesn’t pass muster. Worse, the musical story is now lost. Ever wonder why Comfortably Numb doesn’t come in an acoustic flavour? Play that tape in your head for a few seconds and then listen to the last minute and a half of this lunchbag letdown. Lesseeee… adjusting for inflation, demographics and changing market capacity, that $100 ticket would be about $385 today.
It’s the gold medal game, and Connor McDavid just scored on his own net. Twice.
