3/28/2023 0 Comments Take it easy writer![]() ![]() ![]() This is simply part of living in the United States. It’s likely that you, and many people you know, have also had a ridiculous experience with “Hotel California,” which heightens things you don’t want heightened, showing up with its bloated sense of itself at inopportune moments, demanding that you reckon with it, à la “Stairway to Heaven” or “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but irking you with its portentousness at the same time. “On a dark desert highway!” Don Henley sang. As I got my bearings, some fog drifted a little, revealing a sign for the I-91 on-ramp, and the drums kicked in. I laughed, enjoying the absurdity of it through the interminable guitar intro. The moment I realized I was lost-fog floating mysteriously around the road and trees-“Hotel California” came on my car radio. Not long after he told me this, I was driving through Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the fog, and I made a wrong turn. He retracted himself and closed the window. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. Enraged, he opened his screen and, Plastic Man-like, extended his torso into and across the air shaft, positioning his face in front of his neighbors’ screen. He awoke to those first notes, tentative and foreboding, and the next thing he knew that dark desert highway was coming into his bedroom. One night, years ago, around 4 A.M., my friend Andrew was asleep in bed, and his neighbors across the air shaft, bartenders who came home late ready to party, started to blast “Hotel California” about five feet from his head. There are times when you can’t escape them-particularly “Hotel California.” If you dislike “Hotel California,” that feeling, that panicky urge during its first, ominous notes to prevent it from doing its full ridiculous thing-warm smell of colitas, mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice-can produce an intense physical reaction. ![]() ![]() These songs have simply been around us, like the air we breathe, in our cars, in our grocery stores, at our sporting events, in our uncles’ tape collections, in the pages of Rolling Stone, in our rock-block weekends, forever. On “60 Minutes” a few years ago, Frey, when asked to explain the band’s enduring popularity, answered, “ ‘Take It Easy,’ ‘Witchy Woman,’ ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling,’ ‘Desperado,’ ‘Tequila Sunrise,’ ‘Already Gone,’ ‘Best of My Love,’ ‘One of These Nights,’ ‘Lyin’ Eyes,’ ‘Take It to the Limit,’ ‘Hotel California,’ ‘Life in the Fast Lane,’ ‘New Kid in Town,’ ‘I Can’t Tell You Why,’ ‘The Long Run,’ ‘Heartache Tonight.’ ”* Yes, we know. They were everywhere, like Budweiser or Heinz ketchup, agreeable to everybody except to those who scoffed at them. Turn on a classic-rock station, and somebody’s bound to be taking it to the limit or standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. Frey and Don Henley wrote snootfuls of harmony-rich sunny-California easy-vibe megahits in the seventies, selling more than a hundred and fifty million Eagles records after they broke up, in 1980, the songs just stuck around. If you’re American and have been near an FM radio in the past few decades, you likely have strong feelings-love, affection, or the opposite-about the Eagles, whose founding member Glenn Frey died yesterday, at age sixty-seven, in New York. ![]()
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