“Hotel California”
by the Eagles (1976)
The surfer boys were growing up and moving on by the late
sixties. The beautiful sons and daughters of the migrants to this magnificent
coast with its tinge of the Mexican influence were changing. California was not
the same place as the fictitious Joad family sought out in “The Grapes of
Wrath”. It wasn’t the California of real characters like Brian Wilson’s father’s
family either – they had moved to California from Kansas when he was five and were
so poor they tented on the beach.
No indeed California of the ‘60’s had become the dream. From
surrealistic places like the LA suburb
called Laurel Canyon Joni Mitchell (remember “Ladies of the Canyon”) the Byrds,
The Buffalo Springfield (with transplanted Neil Young) and others like a young
Jackson Browne, had made a sound of their own – what loosely could be called the
Southern California sound.
As the decade clicked off into the seventies a young DonHenley from Texas met Glen Frey from Michigan at the Troubadour club in Los
Angeles. Both of them had their own bands and wanted to make it big in
California. It was Linda Ronstadt who by instructing her manager John Boylan to
recruit her some session musicians in spring of ’71 who set in motion the
events that would ultimately produce one of the biggest bands of all time.
