“The Eagles were recording next door, but we were too loud for them. It kept coming through the wall into their sessions”: How Black Sabbath nearly ruined one of the most famous American rock songs in history

Eagles’ Hotel California was to mainstream US radio what Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody was to its UK counterpart – the single that broke the mould and forced programmers to indulge the artists’ creative whims despite the restrictive, three-minute format. And like Bohemian Rhapsody, it has grown into something much bigger than just a mere song – today it stands as the semi-mystical embodiment of an entire era and culture.

Don Felder was sitting on the couch of a rented beach house in Malibu, when he came up with the idea for the most famous American rock song in history. It was July 1975, and the guitarist was 18 months into his stint with the Eagles. They’d notched up their first No.1 with that year’s One Of These Nights, Felder’s first full album with them, and were on an upward swing that would soon gather pace like none of them could imagine.

“We’d just come off One Of These Nights, which was a very successful record for us,” recalls Felder, “but we were under the gun to come up with a lot of ideas, so I had put together a reel of 16 or 17 song sketches, in this little reel-to-reel four-track TEAC tape recorder in my back bedroom. And I was sitting on the couch on a July day – in cut-off shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops – playing guitar and just goofing around in this beach house in Malibu.”

Maybe it was the sun glistening on the Pacific waves or the sound of his infant children playing on a swing on the beach, but a hypnotic chord pattern came into his head. He played it, then played it again, and then again, four or five times. He’d been doing this long enough to know the glimmerings of a great song when he heard them. And this sounded like it could be a great song.

“I thought, I have to go record some of this before I forget it. And so I ran into my back bedroom and turned on the TEAC and played about five times through the chord progression, then turned it off and went out to join my kids.”

A few weeks later, he gave a demo of his idea to Eagles bandmates Don Henley and Glenn Frey, who heard something in it. “Felder had submitted a cassette tape containing about half a dozen different pieces of music,” drummer and co-vocalist Henley remembered. “None of them moved me until I got to that one.. I think I was driving down Benedict Canyon Drive [in Los Angeles] at night, or maybe even North Crescent Drive the first time I heard the piece, and I remember thinking, ‘This has potential; I think we can make something interesting out of this.’”

Henley christened it Mexican Reggae, a working title that perfectly encapsulated its sound. By the time they came to record it several months later, Henley and Frey had written a set of lyrics that nailed the cultural, spiritual and metaphysical confusion of mid-70s America. From its instantly recognisable penning lines - ‘On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair’ – onwards, it presented a surreal, hallucinatory view of California that could only have been written by people who had grown up elsewhere.

“We knew we were heading down a long and twisted corridor and just stayed with it,” Frey later recalled. “The Eagles take a look at the seamy underbelly of LA – the flip side of fame and failure, love and money.”

It was Henley who was responsible for much of the song’s vivid imagery, not least the titular hotel – reportedly based on The Beverly Hills Hotel.

Eagles - Hotel California (Live 1977) (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube

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“We were getting an extensive education, in life, in love, in business,” said Henley. “Beverly Hills was still a mythical place to us. In that sense it became something of a symbol, and the Hotel the locus of all that LA had come to mean for us. In a sentence, I’d sum it up as the end of the innocence, round one.”

The Eagles were notorious perfectionists, and it took them three attempts to get the song right. During the final attempt, at Miami’s Criteria Studios, Black Sabbath were in the next room. “The Eagles were recording next door, but we were too loud for them,” Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi recalled. “It kept coming through the wall into their sessions.”

It wasn’t just external influences that caused problems. When he turned up for recording sessions, Felder began playing a different solo, only for Henley to call a halt to proceedings and insist he play exactly the same thing he had done on the demo.

Eagles perform 'Hotel California' at the 1998 Rock Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony - YouTube

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“Don Henley went, ‘Stop, that’s not right,’” says Felder. “And I said, ‘What do you mean it’s not right? We’re just gonna make these solos up.’ He said, ‘No no no, you have to play them exactly like what’s on your demo.’” Felder had to find the demo and then “sit in the studio and re-learn what I’d already played a year before that.”

It was the right call. The closing solo – a glorious duel between Felder and new guitarist Joe Walsh – lifted an already great song into the annals of immortality, sending it arcing into 30 million desert nights. Today, Hotel California remains not just the high point of the Eagles’ fabled career, but the pinnacle of 70s American rock.