In early 1974, Don Felder was invited to join his buddy Bernie Leadon in the Eagles. As with every other member of the quintessential Californian band, the guitarist wasn't born in The Golden State - a native of Gainesville, Florida, Felder had met Minneapolis-born Leadon in high school, while Glen Frey hailed from Detroit, Don Henley came from Texas, and Randy Meisner was born and raised in Nebraska - but when he joined the country-rock superstars he was living in the mountains overlooking Topanga Canyon. Although not for for long.
“One day my wife Susan put a blanket on the ground outside for our baby boy Jesse to get some sun, and she suddenly saw a rattlesnake crawling towards him,” the guitarist recalled. “She grabbed Jesse and called me and said, ‘We’re moving’. So when I came off the road, I came back not to the house I owned, but to a house she’d rented in Malibu. And that’s where I wrote Hotel California.
“When I first joined the band,” he continued, "my high school band mate Bernie Leadon told me, ‘If you want to wrote songs with Don [Henley] and Glenn [Frey], just make musical beds for them, don’t try to give them full songs with lyrics, because that’s their job.’ So ahead of making what turned out to be the Hotel Califiornia album I wrote 15 or 16 demo songs, based on that approach.
“Truthfully, at the time, Hotel California was just another song on the cassette. I didn’t necessarily think it was the best song, but Don called me up after a few days living with the music and said, ‘I really like that one that sounds like Mexican reggae’, and I knew which one he meant.”
Seeking lyrical inspiration to accompany Felder's instrumental, Don Henley drove around Los Angeles listening to the cassette he'd been given.
“Just sitting in a room and trying to find inspiration can be stifling,” he tells Classic Rock / Guitar World contributor Bill DeMain in the current issue of Classic Rock. “It’s a static situation. Driving, if you’re not in heavy traffic, creates a feeling of flow that can free the imagination and call up memories and images while the music’s playing.”
The lyrics are like little photographs, which, much like reading a book rather than watching a movie, allows you to draw pictures in your mind
Don Felder
