Today, 45 years later, Henley and the Eagles are hopscotching the country, playing the album in its entirety to sold-out arenas, in a multi-year tour that could likely continue indefinitely, if they wanted it to.
He told of a time when he was in “a remote village in a mountaintop jungle in Honduras,” without plumbing or electricity, and a local approached to show his “Hotel California” tape.
“I’ve learned over the years that one word, ‘California,’ carries with it all kinds of connotations, powerful imagery, mystique, etc., that fires the imaginations of people in all corners of the globe,” Henley explained in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone. (Henley and Frey were from Texas and Michigan, respectively.) The fifth album of the Eagles’ storied, debauchery-filled run, “Hotel California” was the culmination of years of momentum they had been building, and served as the celebratory banquet for the entire Southern California soft-rock sound that they had adopted and perfected. “Hotel California” holds the title of being the second best-selling studio album of all time, behind only Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” But even with that statistic, its impact can still be underplayed. The pages served as one of the more significant finds in recent rock ‘n’ roll history, culturally and financially valuable in equal measure. Some of the lyrics were in draft form, offering a window into alternative versions of the songs, and some had notes and lyrics written by Frey as well. “It’s an exhaustive account.”Ī decade later, in the mid-2000s, a rare book dealer, Glenn Horowitz, was presented with the opportunity to buy an item of great interest to music fans: Eagles co-founder Don Henley’s handwritten lyrics for much of the band’s landmark 1976 album “Hotel California” - including for “Life in the Fast Lane,” “New Kid in Town” and the album’s era-defining, Grammy-winning title song. “It’s a good book,” reflected Sanders in ’94. In 1982, People magazine reported that Sanders’ “official saga” of the Eagles was still forthcoming, but eventually the decision was made to shelve it. He spent years working on the book, which was to have been titled “This American Band - The Story of the Eagles.” By the time the four-volume text was finished, however, the band had broken up. The Eagles’ co-leader Glenn Frey had befriended Sanders when the writer was reporting “The Family,” so Sanders was given unprecedented access to the group just as the seams of it were beginning to tear.
“I didn’t want to go down and smell those rotting bodies in the jungle,” he explained in a 1994 interview. The increased attention led to offers for more deep-dive nonfiction work, and Sanders had narrowed the search for his next major project to be either an investigation of the 1978 Jonestown massacre or a band-commissioned biography of future Rock & Roll Hall of Famers the Eagles. The writer and musician had earned a central place at the counterculture table in the 1960s, releasing influential work as a poet and publisher, as well as through his underground rock band the Fugs, but his book about the Manson murders, 1971’s “The Family,” brought him out of the underground and into the grisly mainstream. In the late 1970s, Ed Sanders had a choice to make.
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