Mysterious song is neither about satan worship nor drug addiction, said Don Henley
On this day in history, May 7, 1977, the song “Hotel California” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The six minute and eight second-long song by the Eagles spent one week atop the charts before it was bumped down to the number three spot by the song “When I Need You” by Leo Sayer, the website Best Classic Bands notes.
The album “Hotel California” was released on Dec. 8, 1976, but the title song was released as a single two months later on Feb. 22, 1977, according to rock music website SuperSeventies.
“Every band has its creative peak,” said Don Henley, founding member of the Eagles, to USA Today in 2020 of the album “Hotel California.”
“I think that was ours,” he continued. “We’d become very adept in the studio. We knew a lot about production. We knew more about songwriting. We had the musicianship.”
He added, “We were willing to make some changes and take some risks and try to do something different from anything we’d done before.”
Henley also said, “And you know, the astronauts in the Space Station get a wakeup call every day. A lot of times the folks in the [NASA] control center would play ‘Hotel California.’
Gary P Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
