On This Day in 1977, The Eagles Released the Single “Hotel California”—Changing Rock Music Forever

Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest rock bands of all time, The Eagles released Hotel California in December 1976. Following a grueling year and a half of work, Hotel California truly tipped the scales from successful musicians to rock icons. The album’s success was led by its title track, a symphonic ode to the decadence often present in American culture. On this day (Feb. 22) in 1977, The Eagles dropped “Hotel California” and rock music was never the same.

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The Eagles Named “Hotel California” For This Beverly Hills Venue

“Hotel California” got its start as an instrumental demo developed by The Eagles former lead guitarist Don Felder. After recording the basic tracks in a rented house on Malibu Beach, Felder handed over copies to bandmates Don Henley and Glenn Frey.

Felder said in 2008 that the song’s lyrics were inspired by a night drive into Los Angeles. “[You] can just see this glow on the horizon of lights, and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have,” he told Howard Stern. “And so it was kind of about that […] what we started writing the song about.”

Despite the deliberate lyrical ambiguity, many listeners wondered if Hotel California was a real place. And indeed, it is—sort of. The Beverly Hills Hotel, on Sunset Boulevard, had come to represent all that the song stood for.

“We were getting an extensive education, in life, in love, in business,” Henley said. “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.”

[RELATED: The Eagles’ 3 Best-Ever Live Performances of “Hotel California”]

An Update on the “Hotel California” Lawsuit

Last year, The Eagles’ seminal song became the focal point of a lawsuit when Don Henley sued a rare-books dealer seeking the return of (allegedly) stolen handwritten notes and song lyrics for Hotel California.

However, a court cleared the New York bookseller, Glenn Horowitz, of any wrongdoing. Now Horowitz is taking legal action of his own. In a lawsuit filed Thursday (Feb. 20), he accused the Eagles frontman of pursuing criminal charges against him despite knowing his claims were false.

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