‘Hotel California’: 3 Things You Didn’t Know About the Eagles’ Classic
One of the most beloved classic rock songs from the 1970s is The Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Every perfect song has layers. Here’s a look at three fascinating facts behind The Eagles’ signature song.
1 of The Eagles explained a mystery line from ‘Hotel California’
“Hotel California” has a song about the “Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air.” “Colitas” is Spanish for “little tails.” It’s a slang term for marijuana.
During a 2013 interview with SongFacts, The Eagles’ Don Felder elaborated on the line. “The colitas is a plant that grows in the desert that blooms at night, and it has this kind of pungent, almost funky smell,” he said. “Don Henley came up with a lot of the lyrics for that song, and he came up with colitas. When we try to write lyrics, we try to write lyrics that touch multiple senses, things you can see, smell, taste, hear. ‘I heard the mission bell,’ you know, or ‘the warm smell of colitas,’ talking about being able to relate something through your sense of smell. Just those sort of things. So that’s kind of where ‘colitas’ came from. It’s a plant that grows in the desert and blooms at night.”
Don Felder didn’t want ‘Hotel California’ to be a single
Felder said he didn’t want “Hotel California” to be a single because it wasn’t the sort of song that did well at the time. His argument was a little odd. “Hotel California” is a soft-rock song through and through and the subgenre was huge in the 1970s.
What separates “Hotel California” from other soft-rock hits is that its lyrics are a bit eerie. That’s also true of songs by Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd that were big at the time. Felder is certainly a talented musician but perhaps he could have thought about the top 40 a little harder. Perhaps “Hotel California” ‘s mix of soft-rock, Gothic fiction, and Mexican music is the reason why the song remains a radio staple nearly 50 years after its debut.
The Eagles initially used a different title for the song
The initial title for “Hotel California” was “Mexican Reggae.” On one level, that’s a perfectly apt title. The song has elements of both Mexican music and reggae while feeling distinct from both. However, you shouldn’t just name a song after its genre. That would be like if Kurt Cobain changed the name of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to “Grunge” or if Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” was instead called “Pop-Rock with Dance Elements.”
Felder discussed how the tune’s title evolved. “[The Eagles’ Don] Henley said, ‘I like that song that sounds like a Mexican reggae,'” he said. “That was his description of what it drew in his mind. And later we started talking about it, and he came up with the framework lyrically of the hotel being a physical structure called the Hotel California, which there is no real Hotel California other than the one that’s down on Sunset here, the Beverly Hills Hotel is the artwork on the front of the cover.”
