Chords for The Story of How "Hotel California" by the Eagles was Written & Recorded - Don Felder

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_ [Eb] _ _ _ _ [N] _ Hope you enjoy today's video with former guitarist from the Eagles, Don Felder.
When I was in the band Flow in New York, we were a jazz fusion rock band.
And if you listen
to jazz players, they never play the same solo twice.
They just throw themselves out
there and they improvise.
And they have the dexterity and the talent to be able to just
play whatever they're thinking, which I admired immensely.
It's what attracted me to go to
New York, was I wanted to be able to develop that skill.
And so being able to improvise
to me was really a really great talent to develop.
When you sit down to write something,
instead of trying to conceptualize exactly what it should be and fit in some form or
mold or preconceived idea, I'll just turn on a tape machine or my iPhone or something
and just start playing.
And just let that improvising idea come out.
And I'll go, wait,
that was pretty good.
And I'll go back and play that three or four times and record it
a bunch and file it away.
If I got my iPhone out, now I could play you some ideas I just
recently recorded the same way.
For Hotel California, I was just sitting on a sofa in
a living room in a rented house and playing this guitar and out came that progression.
And I played it three or four times.
I said, well, I have to save this or it's going to
go away.
So I ran back into my little one-year-old daughter's bedroom, which during the time
she was awake was my recording studio for demos.
And I just turned on the machine and
recorded some of just the 12-string part over and over and over.
And then I turned
it off and went away.
And when we started putting together the Hotel California record,
I went back and then started listening to a bunch of those little pieces and ideas.
And I said, well, that's kind of interesting.
Let me finish this.
So I got an old drum machine
and programmed it to like a cha-cha beat or something.
And then I replayed the acoustic
and played the bass part.
And most of the guitar parts that you hear on the record,
I'd kind of overdubbed on this tape recorder and put it on a cassette with maybe 15 or
16 other ideas, one of which became Victim of Love and that same batch of just writing
ideas and gave it to Don Henley and Glenn Fry and said, if there's anything on this
tape you hear, let's finish writing it.
And so Henley called me up and said, I really
like that song that sounds kind of like a Mexican reggae.
And I went, oh, I think I
know which one that is.
And so we started working on it.
He started working on the lyrics
with Glenn.
And I started trying to conceptualize how Joe and I, who had just joined the band,
could do that guitar dueling thing on the end of the song.
Because Joe and I had been
doing that together live during Joe Walsh shows that I was just out jamming with Joe
because I loved to play with him before he joined the band.
I wanted to be able to do
that on an Eagles record.
So I sat down and started trying to figure out, as a matter
of fact, the original demo that I still have has a great deal of what I just made up on
that demo that sounds very much like the very ending of the solos on Hotel California.
So
it's just that the way of writing it just kind of comes out of you.
And usually my first
two or three shots at something, that spontaneity and enthusiasm and creative energy are usually
the best.
When you go over and over and over and try to perfect it, it sort of squishes
it into less excitement and more things that are really perfect to me aren't exciting.
I like the energy.
I wanted to try to capture some of that on the Eagles record.
So a lot
of my writing was aimed in that direction of adding that to the band.
And that's how
I wrote.
So that's how I write today.
That opening riff on Hotel California solo was
the same riff identically that I had made up on that demo tape in my daughter's back
bedroom.
When we finally got to the point where we were going to do those live guitar
overdubs between Joe and I in the studio, I always thought Joe and I would set up a
couple of stools.
He and I would sit there.
We'd plug into a couple of amps, roll the
tape, and we'd do what we'd been doing against each other on Joe Walsh shows to just capture
that kind of pushing each other to play something better than what you just played.
And that's
what we started off doing.
Then Don Henley came in the control room and said, no, no,
no, stop.
What are you doing?
And I went, _ playing the guitar parts for these.
He says,
no, no, no, that's not right.
You have to play it like the demo.
I said, I don't even
know what that was, to tell you the truth.
That was a year and a half ago.
So I had to
call my home, have my housekeeper go through my cassettes, find the original cassette,
put it in a blaster, play it and hold the phone up to the blaster.
We recorded it in
the studio in Miami.
And I had to sit down and learn something I had just made up off
the top of my head for that demo.
And it was just, like I said, usually my first or second
shot, just letting something come out is the best.
And Don was right to be able to make
me go back and do that.
I guess he had heard it over and over and over so many times.
He
expected that opening lick and that first solo and stuff to be that way on the record.
Yeah.
Before I leave, I will play you that original demo.
I've got it on my laptop so
you can hear that opening line.
_ Well, we recorded it three times.
The first time we recorded
it, we recorded it too slow.
It was either too fast or too slow.
And so we went back
in and re-recorded the basic track, not all the vocals and overdubs and everything, basic
track.
And then Don went out to sing the lyrics on it that he and Glenn had been writing.
And it was in the wrong key.
He was singing really high, like a Barry Gibb falsetto.
And
I went, no, no, no, that's not right.
We have to change keys.
So we went out and figured
out what key it should be in, which was, gosh, like two and a half steps below where it was _
originally.
Because I wrote it in E minor, which was a good guitar key to play in, right?
And so we wound up moving it down to B minor, which is not a fun, friendly guitar key.
But
anyway, that's where Don's vocal really set best, his range.
So that's where we re-recorded
the whole thing for the third time and finally re-did all the guitar parts and everything
else to finish it.
And when it was done, I remember sitting in the record plant in LA
and we had this big playback party because the record company had been banging on the
door, we need this album, we want to put this album out.
And so we had a playback party
and had a two-track of kind of like the sequence of the album.
And when the Hotel California
cut came by, Don turned around and went, yep, that's going to be our single.
And I went,
Don, that's just, that's the wrong song.
AM radio, you wanted to have something three
minutes to three minutes and 30 seconds.
The introduction before the singer started
couldn't be more than 30 seconds.
So the DJ didn't have to sit and talk for a long time.
And it had to be either a rock tempo or a drippy ballad or something to get on the radio.
It had a specific format.
I said, I just think that's the wrong format for a single.
He says,
nope, that's going to be our single.
And I went, _ okay, but I told you that I've never
been so happy to have been so wrong about my opinion of that as I am today, because
he was right again, I have to say.
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