Hotel California - The Eagles (1976)
Our Laurel Canyon Classic was a Grammy award winning song. huge hit and the title track from The Eagles first released in 1976. 'Hotel California' became the biggest selling Eagles album.
The writing credits for the song are shared by Don Felder (music), Don Henley, and Glenn Frey (lyrics). The Eagles' original recording of the song features Henley singing the lead vocals and concludes with an extended section of electric guitar interplay between Felder and Joe Walsh.
The song is considered the most famous recording of the band, and its long guitar coda has been voted the best guitar solo of all time. The song was awarded the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1978. The lyrics of the song have been given various interpretations by fans and critics alike, the Eagles themselves described the song as their "interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles". In the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, Henley said that the song was about "a journey from innocence to experience... that's all..."
The Eagles are an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1971 by Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner. With five number-one singles, six Grammy Awards, five American Music Awards and six number one albums, the Eagles were one of the most successful musical acts of the 1970s. At the end of the 20th century, two of their albums, Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) and Hotel California, were ranked among the 20 best-selling albums in the U.S.Hotel California is ranked 37th in Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" and the band was ranked number 75 on the magazine's 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
The Eagles began when Linda Ronstadt and then-manager John Boylan recruited session musicians Glenn Frey and Don Henley in the spring of 1971. Henley had moved to Los Angeles from Texas with his band Shiloh (produced by Kenny Rogers), and Frey had come from Michigan and formed Longbranch Pennywhistle; they had met in 1970 at The Troubadour in Los Angeles and became acquainted through their mutual record label, Amos Records.Randy Meisner, who had been working with Ricky Nelson's backing band and Bernie Leadon, a veteran of The Flying Burrito Brothers, joined Ronstadt's group of performers for her summer tour.
The original Eagles played live together only once, backing Ronstadt for a July concert at Disneyland but all four appeared on her eponymous album. After the gig with Ronstadt, Henley and Frey asked Leadon and Meisner to form a band and they soon signed with Asylum Records, the new label started by David Geffen. The name of the band was first suggested by Leadon during a peyote and tequila-influenced group outing in the Mojave Desert, when he recalled reading about the Hopis' reverence for the ea Steve Martin, a friend of the band from their early days at The Troubadour, recounts in his autobiography that he suggested that they should be referred to as "the Eagles," but Frey insists that the group's name is simply "Eagles".
The first single and lead track, "Take It Easy", was a song written by Frey with his then-neighbor and fellow country-folk rocker Jackson Browne. Browne had written the majority of the song, up until the line "I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona", where he got stalled. Frey added the next line ("It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford") and Browne carried on to finish the song. The song reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and propelled the Eagles to stardom. The single was followed by the bluesy "Witchy Woman" and the soft country rock ballad "Peaceful Easy Feeling", charting at number 9 and number 22 respectively. Their second album, Desperado, took Old West outlaws for its theme, drawing comparisons between their lifestyles and modern rock stars. This album was the first to showcase the group's penchant for conceptual songwriting. It was during these recording sessions Henley and Frey first began writing together. They co-wrote eight of the album's eleven songs, including "Tequila Sunrise" and "Desperado"