Group members, especially Frey and Henley, were sports fans and Szymczyk, a Dolphins season ticket holder, took them to all the home games. They wrote more because they were interrupted less.” They were in a much more creative, non-hassle environment than in L.A. “The best thing about working and living in Florida is it got them out of their hometown, and by doing so made them a hell of a lot more comfortable. “We’d always get more of a swamp sound in Florida,” Szymczyk says. The band did much of its best work in Florida. The Eagles already had recorded three hit albums and had five Top 40 singles when they first came to South Florida in August 1974 to record “One of These Nights.” It was like being in the middle of the gunfight at the O.K. Walsh was on my right and Felder on my left, jamming their brains out. Szymczyk recalled the session as “an eight-hour joy ride. “We knew it was something special, but we didn’t know if it was any good or not. “We wanted to have individual statements turning into a double lead,” Walsh says. It was recorded a month after the rest of the song and involved about eight hours of jamming over a period of several days. Guitarist Felder hatched the music to “Hotel California.” The now-classic extended guitar jam between Felder and Walsh at the end of the song also happened in Criteria’s Studio C. “I don’t think anybody had a sense of what that tune and that album were going to do,” says Mashal, “but I think they knew it was some of their best work.” They didn’t just write to make it rhyme.”Įd Mashal, who served as Szymczyk’s engineer, said Henley and Frey “labored over lyrics. “It was important that the words all meant something. “There was an excitement and electricity between them,” adds Johnson-O’Dare. “I remember the line, `She’s got the Mercedes Benz,’ spelled b-e-n-d-s. “They asked us to listen to the lyrics,” says Jenkins. on the third or fourth day, Henley and Frey, (who Szymczyk dubbed “The Lone Arranger,”) came downstairs to the kitchen. “Jeri and I brought tray upon tray of coffee and sandwiches to them.”Ībout 2 p.m. “They stayed in there for three days to work on that song,” says Cindy Johnson-O’Dare, a co-founder with Jeri Jenkins of Home At Last, a company that provided room and board for rock bands. Bay Road in Miami Beach to try to finish the song. The two locked themselves in what they called the “Hollywood Room” of their rented 1934 art deco mansion at 5242 N. Henley, an English literature major and voracious reader, was the band’s “Vice President in Charge of Lyrics.” He and Frey were still wrestling with the words to “Hotel California” after most of the music had been recorded. When we got all the sounds right, tempo right, key right, it was magic,” recalls producer Bill Szymczyk, who coached the band from “On the Border” through “Eagles Live.”
“The actual track used was born in Miami at about 4 p.m. But the first was in the wrong key and the second was in the wrong tempo, too fast. The Eagles had recorded two versions of “Hotel California” in L.A. It was a typical afternoon early in 1976 in Miami’s Criteria Studios. In 1994, when the Eagles reunited for the “Hell Freezes Over” tour, former Post music writer Scott Benarde talked to band members backstage at the Omni arena in Atlanta and through numerous interviews traced the creation of the Eagles’ signature song and album.
“It should really be, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Miami or Coconut Grove,’ ” he says of the opening line of the chorus of “Hotel California.” “We spent more time in Miami, in Florida, than in California,” Don Felder, the group’s former lead guitarist, told The Palm Beach Post in a 1994 interview. The band so closely associated with California rock of the ’70s recorded three of its albums - “One of These Nights,” “Hotel California” and “The Long Run” - in Miami. That’s because the album and its landmark title song were written and recorded in South Florida. 40 years ago on Thursday, one of the iconic albums of the rock era, the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” was released.
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