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Written by: Don Felder, Glenn Frey, Don Henley
Produced by: Bill Szymczyk
Released: Dec. '76 on Asylum
Charts: 19 weeks
Top spot: No. 1
"Hotel California" was rumored to be about heroin addiction or Satan worship, but Henley had more prosaic things on his mind: "We were all middle-class kids from the Midwest," he said. " 'Hotel California' was our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles." (That doesn't preclude heroin or Satan.) A problem arose when the band, recording in Miami, was unable to re-create Felder's twelve-string intro and twin-guitar coda. Panicked, Felder called his housekeeper in L.A. and sent her digging through tapes in his home studio so she could play his demo back over the phone.
Appears on: Hotel California (Elektra)