Some believe the song was written about a real inn bearing that name. Though there is a Hotel California in Todos Santos on Mexico's Baja California peninsula, its relation to the song begins and ends with the coincidence of a shared name. Those who persist in believing the song must be named after an actual building assert that "Hotel California" was the nickname of the Camarillo State Hospital, a state-run psychiatric hospital near Los Angeles which housed thousands of patients throughout its sixty-year history. To them, the lyrics seem to fit what a mentally disturbed person would experience upon incarceration in a long-term care facility. Works for me.
However, Hotel California is, according to the band, an allegory about hedonism and greed in Southern California in the 70s. At the time of its release, the Eagles were riding high in the music world, experiencing material success on a frightening level. Though they thoroughly enjoyed the spectre of fame, they were disquieted by it all and sought to pour that sense of unease into their music and to warn others about the dark underside of such adulation.
In a 1995 interview, Don Henley said the song "sort of captured the zeitgeist of the time, which was a time of great excess in this country and in the music business in particular." In another interview that same year, he referred to it as being about a "loss of innocence."
The album has as its underlying theme the corruption of impressionable rock stars by the decadent Los Angeles music industry. The celebrated title track presents California as a gilded prison the artist freely enters only to discover that he cannot later escape.
The real Hotel California is not a place; it is a metaphor for the west coast music industry and its effect on the talented but unworldy musicians who find themselves ensnared in its glittering web. Nonetheless, meaning belongs to the reader (listener). The theories of meaning that you develop are as legit as any. The author upon publishing the novel or song or poem does not reserve the rights on meaning.
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