Checking Into Hotel California

Bowling With "The Jesus"

Last week my daughter Jackie went to see The Eagles at Madison Square Garden. Her husband Joe, a lawyer, got free tickets, so they said, why not? Joe said they sounded like a country band, but that guitarist Joe Walsh fired up the crowd. Ad that the late Glenn Frey's son Deacon had been an adequate replacement. Joe is just getting is pop culture wings, so he'll enjoy most well-played events. Jackie is more critical: a flute major in college, a vaccine lab scientist now, she has her particulars, and those are Ben Folds and Regina Spektor. In high school, she bought a book of Ben Folds piano sheet music and transposed it for flute. The Eagles concert, in their parlance, was "pretty good," "yeah, it was OK." Which is fine with me. I neither envied nor pitied them. It was just a show.

There would have been a time that as a rock critic, I would have felt obliged to make a self-deprecating comment about having my child going to an Eagles concert, especially if she had paid for tickets, which she did not. Such as: Was I a failure as a parent? Did I not raise her properly?

The Eagles were anathema to critics, especially on the East Coast. I admit that I followed the party line for many years. But something kept gnawing at me as I gave lip service to Eagles hate. Every time I heard the beginning a song of theirs on the radio, I'd say to myself, "this sounds nice, I wonder what it is?" before realizing it was the forbidden pleasure of a song like "New Kid in Town."

As a devotee of The Big Lebowski, I still endorse the judgment of Jeff Bridges as "The Dude." After a rough night, he takes a cab home, only to be thrown out of the cab when the black cab driver (a bravado Coen Brothers touch), becomes irate at the Dude's nagging about him listening to the Eagles. It's the world's biggest inside joke, that hip stoners like the Dude have a gene that makes them hate the Eagles.

The Coens play with the Eagles like Lego toys. In the primary bowling scene, "Hotel California" is playing in the background while the Dude, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi) are waiting to roll. The bowler, The Jesus (not "hay-soos," but The Jesus aka Jesus Quintana) played with impeccable grandisoity and outrage by John Turturro, does a slo-mo dance with a bowling ball to psyche them out. While Turturro is caressing his ball, licking it with his tongue, and rolling a strike, the Gipsy Kings' inspired Spanish version of "Hotel California" comes to the foreground.

So simultaneously, the Eagles version is on the jukebox and the Gipsy Kings' version is playing, while The Jesus, resplendent in purple athletic jumpsuit . . . bowls.

You still hear and read outdated anti-Eagles nonsense on social media and at occasional gatherings of the music critic tribe. At such a gathering about seven years ago (the last one I've gone to) to celebrate the life and work of another critic, a former colleague of mine said, apropos of nothing, "I detest the Eagles." Rather than ask why, I accepted that this person has not examined his prejudices for more than 40 years, and was not about to stop now. My favorite sentence in the literature of sobriety may be "old ideas availed us nothing." We learn to change our minds, rid ourselves of long held beliefs and behaviors that are no longer doing any good.

The ferocity of East Coast critics vs. the Eagles took a weird and funny sidebar in the early 1990s when Don Henley was leading a series of benefit concerts to raise funds for the purchase of a land trust for Henry David Thoreau's Walden Woods in Massachusetts, which would protect this land from the threat of development. I was scheduled to interview Henley on a Monday morning when my phone rang at home on Sunday night. It was Dan Klores, the esteemed publicist and a major New York power player. Klores said Henley had a reaction when he saw my name on the interview list. According to Klores, as I remember the phone call, Henley had cold feet aboout doing the interview because "Wayne Robins hates me!" I asked Dan to repeat that because I thought maybe my ears did not carry the correct message to my brain. I assured Dan that I did not hate Henley: In fact, I liked Henley's solo albums more than I liked the Eagles albums, and Building the Perfect Beast and The End of the Innocence had been among my top albums of their respective years. Dan said he'd deal with Henley, and the interview came off without a problem. All these years later, I still don't hate Henley: I always keep my eyes open when I'm on the road, looking for "a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac."

Back in 2010, I made an attempt at at bridging the gap or at least exlaining it, for an online journal called Wondering Sound, edited by J. Edward Keyes, of download site eMusic.com. Its original title was "Bicoastal Bacchanalia."

Hotel California, the Eagles '1976 album, has sold more than 16 million copies. But beyond its place as one of the best-selling non-greatest-hits albums ever lies its once-controversial cultural significance: It was a seriously disputed piece of evidence in one of the great culture wars of the 1970s.

That battle was not between red state and blue state , liberal or conservative, anti-abortion or pro-choice. It was the culture war between New York and Los Angeles. A year after Hotel California was released, Woody Allen depicted that war in his Best Picture winner Annie Hall, mocking the mores of smug, self-satisfied West Coast life. In the film, the embodiment of that West Coast caricature was Tony Lacey (played by Paul Simon), the music producer Diane Keaton's Annie falls for. Allen could have just as easily made his West Coast straw man a member of the Eagles. Or manager Irving Azoff.

Hollywood 's fatal attractiveness, the often thin line between reality and illusion, is what Hotel California is about. But it's more than that: It's not by accident that British critic Barney Hoskyns' penetrating 2006 book about California rock in the '70s is called Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash , Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles and Their Many Friends. The  album, and its title song, defined its place and time in much the way that the Ramones' first album, also released in 1976, defined CBGB and the New York punk scene.

That was a problem for the eager-to-be-respected Eagles, who had been scorned by East Coast rock intelligentsia from the moment they released their self-titled debut in 1972. Writing in Long Island's Newsday, Robert Christgau presented an essay in June 1972 acknowledging his mixed feelings about the Eagles. On the one hand, he respected their "basic commitment to rock 'n' roll." Christgau then went on to inform the reader: "Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them." The Eagles induce in Christgau "an anguish that is very intense , yet difficult to pinpoint ."

                  That was a problem, because if the influential Dean of American Rock Critics could not articulate the argument against the Eagles, who could?

The Eagles entry by Mark Coleman in the Rolling Stone Album Guide notes that "the hippie cowboy pose that so angered East Coast rock critics attracted legions of suburban record buyers." While their 1975 album (and studio predecessor to Hotel California) One o/These Nights spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, Coleman represents the East Coast critical sensibility in his declaration that "the sugar-coated vitriol" of hits from the album, Lyin 'Eyes and Take It to the Limit ," "still leaves a sour aftertaste."

In short, the Eagles came to represent the synthetic over authentic, the triumph of the booming Sunbelt suburbs and Southern California-style sprawl over the grim, economically depressed East Coast cities. In October, 1975, the federal government told New York officials that it would not offer a bailout to the financially strapped metropolis. "Ford To City: Drop Dead," said the famous New York Daily News headline.

The lavishness of Hotel California recorded over many months at a cost said to be well into the six figures, struck East Coast critics as a heedless indulgence: Our favorites, the Ramones, recorded their self­ titled debut album for something like $6,000. And if punk wasn't your cup of tea, mainstream rock fans in the New York metropolitan area had a new standard bearer: Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen may have been struggling to build an audience with his first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild. the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (both 1973), but critical acclaim was immediate. And when Born to Run was released in 1975, Springsteen was embraced with rare same­week cover stories in both Time and Newsweek, an occurrence usually duplicated only by the election of a president or death of a Pope. Springsteen even showed up the Eagles on their home turf: "When Springsteen stormed the Roxy in October 1975, the Eagles "act of loitering onstage suddenly looked self-satisfied," Hoskyns wrote. "For a music press that regarded Springsteen as harbingers of rock's second wind, the Eagles embodied everything that was complacent about Southern California ."

Perhaps all of this emboldened the Eagles to make Hotel California their best album. In addition to the two main singers and songwriters, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, they added a Midwestern rocker, guitarist  Joe Walsh, to give their sound some needed edge, and another guitarist with imaginative fire, Don Felder. The combination proved explosive on the album's third track, "Life in the Fast Lane," arguably the Eagles most uninhibited rock 'n'roll recording. Charter member Bernie Leadon, the guitarist with the impeccable country-rock resume (Flying Burrito Brothers, Dillard & Clark), was now gone.

The album lives and dies by its first three songs: "Hotel California," "New Kid in Town" and "Life in the Fast Lane." If the Eagles had been seen before as exemplars of a land of plenty - plenty of sunshine, plenty of sex, plenty of drugs, plenty of money - this time they were looking at the dark side of California, the possibility that they were being swallowed by the perfect beast they helped create in the American imagination. The song "Hotel California" is ominous , claustrophobic, full of surreal nightmare

sequences. The defining final lines: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" reflected their ambivalence about what they had accomplished, and what they had to lose.

The strangest line, though, may be in the verse about a diabolical party, a feast, at which "they stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast." It seems to be a reference to friendly rivals Steely Dan, the critical faves who had tweaked the Eagles in their song "Everything You Did." A humiliated man, shouting at his girlfriend, tells her contemptuously: "Turn up the Eagles, the neighbors are listening." Both The Eagles and Steely Dan were managed by the combative Irving Azoff, a ferocious negotiator on behalf of his clients.

The album's third classic-rock radio standard, "New Kid in Town," also reflects that combination of cockiness and self-pity that made the Eagles attractive to civilians and an irresistible target to critics. On one level, it's a beautiful song about a typical teenage rite of passage: A new kid comes to town and upsets the social order with his good looks, athletic skills, musical prowess. The popular clique suddenly feels threatened, and hopes the obsession with the new kid eventually fades out. Typical story, unless you think about the "New Kid" being Bruce Springsteen. New kid, moved in from New Jersey, stole the critics ' hearts, just when the Eagles had nothing more to gain except the critical acclaim they always felt they deserved.

So here it is: The Eagles were a very good, sometimes great band, never greater than on the first three songs of Hotel California. Among the lesser songs, some good choices are Walsh's sentimental ballad, "Pretty Maids All in a Row"; the soul-stirring "Wasted Time"; and the closer, Henley's heartfelt, bruising environmental plea, "The Last Resort." The orchestrated end of the track goes a little over the top, but then again, that was the Eagles: Big music for big speakers, hi-fi all the way. They made enough good music and plenty of money. They likely squandered fortunes on drugs, and still had plenty left over. Sometimes they were posers, but the folks who voted with their wallets liked what they heard.

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One more story, especially for those tuned into the old school music business power structure. I was in Los Angeles, dining at the Ivy with some well-connected publicist friends. We could only get a 6 pm reservation and were told we had to be finished for another reservation at 8, but that was OK. But service was slow, and as we were being served dessert, we were asked to take our plates and finish the meal in the bar. My hosts, who included Patti Mitsui, a formidable woman, objected. But management was unshakeable. They offered a second dessert for our inconvenience, but we didn't need a second dessert. I tried to be tactful: "How about a round of after dinnner drinks?" The answer was no. This got my gall up, and I wondered who the VIP was who would not wait one minute past 8 o'clock for his table. The mortified waiter went to ask, and returned with the information: "Does the name Irving Azoff mean anything to you?" We said, "not really," and then left, laughing our asses off.