The newest Eagles wore the coolest hats - a gambler’s top hat for country legend Vince Gill, a natty bowler for Deacon Frey. A towering, grim-faced actor in a black cape emerged from the wings to drop the needle on side one of a vinyl copy of “Hotel California” this almost Lynchian act of summoning brought forth the Eagles, dressed in black and white like pallbearers at a hipster funeral or the Dalton Gang on their way to rob the Oscars. Besides, isn’t “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” just another way of saying “What a nice surprise / Bring your alibis”? (“We are all just prisoners here of our own device,” while also accurate, wouldn’t do as much for the tourist trade.)īackstage before the show, when asked what it meant to revisit songs like these in a place like this, Henley answered desert-dryly: “I’m well aware of the ironies.” Those ironies were occasionally unavoidable: A wide selection of T-shirts commemorating an album about the death of the hippie dream at the hands of cruel commerce could be had for $45 at the Eagles-merch pop-up by the venue’s entrance.īut the minute the lights went down on Saturday in the MGM’s packed Garden Arena, cognitive dissonance didn’t stand a chance. But it’s also a perfect place to revisit an album about malevolent desert oases, American magic and dread, and houses that always win. Is Las Vegas, that monument to escapism, a somewhat counterintuitive place to restage “Hotel California’s” confrontations with the inescapable? Well, sure. It’s the sound of guys who had everything coming to terms with the knowledge that everything must go. “Hotel California” is that goodbye look, and they know it, and that sadness suffuses every song, even the one Frey wrote about riding shotgun in his drug dealer’s car. They’d make one more studio LP, 1979’s three-tortured-years-in-the-making “The Long Run,” the one where they finally stopped mourning paradise and became cynical citizens of the fallen world that replaced it, scoffing jadedly at golden-calf cultists from their bar stools at Dan Tana’s. The band wasn’t finished, but their innocence was. As the late Glenn Frey’s smuggler character Jimmy once said to Crockett and Tubbs on “Miami Vice,” “I always like to take a goodbye look at America, just in case it’s my last.”
From the title track - a 6 1/2-minute flamenco-reggae ballad with an evocative, inscrutable lyric that may be about Satan or Steely Dan, depending which conspiracy theorist you ask - to the elegiac closer “The Last Resort,” it’s a consummately performed album that spun gold from surprisingly bleak themes: disillusionment and loss, the end of the ’60s, the splintering of the country itself. In Alison Ellwood’s epic 2013 documentary “History of the Eagles,” Eagles co-founder Don Henley explains that Don Felder was replaced (by Don Henley) as vocalist on “Victim of Love” because Felder’s take “simply did not come up to band standards.” They would accept nothing less than a masterpiece, which is usually how bands run themselves into the ground. The Eagles’ cocky, jock-y perfectionism instantly set them apart from the mellow folk-rock scene that spawned them, but at the “Hotel California” sessions that creative ruthlessness began to set them apart from one another. Of course, in the mythos of the Eagles, “Hotel California” doesn’t just represent a commercial pinnacle - it was also the beginning of the end. (The first time ever was the previous night.) It’s playing in Tony Soprano’s basement in “The Sopranos” episode where Tony and Carmela bicker about the elliptical machine while the FBI listens in it was playing in my local 7-Eleven the day before I drove to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas to watch the Eagles perform the “Hotel California” album live in its entirety for the second time ever. Since 1976, the Eagles have sold more than 26 million copies of their fifth album, “Hotel California.” It’s the third-biggest-selling album in American history, beating out everything but Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975,” also by the Eagles.īack when people owned CDs, even people who owned fewer than 20 seemed to own a copy of “Hotel California.” The title song remains supremely ubiquitous - it’s unavoidable on classic-rock radio, but also in pop culture, from “The Big Lebowski” to Frank Ocean’s first mixtape.