The concluding twin-guitar solo on “Hotel California” has moved into classic-rock lore — representing, as it does, the first in a series of fiery, off-the-cuff collaborations between Don Felder and new Eagles member Joe Walsh. Only, Felder counters, it wasn’t improvised at all. Instead, the completed Eagles song mirrors — almost note for note, at Don Henley’s insistence — the original instrumental demo that Felder created in his Los Angeles home.
“This was going to be his first record with the Eagles, so I wanted to write something Joe and I could play together toe-to-toe — doing what we had been doing together in some of his shows,” Felder tells the Newton Bee. “So, when I got to the end of the track, I had two guitars in my little bedroom studio and I picked up one and played something. Then I set it down and picked up the other one and played something I thought Joe would play — kind of simulating the end that you hear on ‘Hotel California’ now. And I made copies and Henley really liked it and wanted to do it.”
Maybe, in fact, too much. Don Felder had imagined he and Joe Walsh “pushing each other to reach newer highs,” so when the two guitarists got to the Miami sessions for the album that would become Hotel California, they “set up face to face — and he’d play a line, and then I’d play a line.” Until Henley called a halt to everything, saying “‘Stop. What are you doing? That’s not right. That’s not like the demo,'” Felder remembers. “And I said, ‘I just made that stuff up for the demo; it’s not the final solo.’ And he says, ‘No, you’ve got to play what’s on the demo.'”
Don Felder didn’t even have a copy with him. A frantic call to his California housekeeper led to her frantic search through all of the cassettes in Felder’s home studio. She then put the found tape into a boombox, and played it through the phone, so Joe Walsh and Felder could learn the original demo’s twin solos.
“We had to learn how to re-play, verbatim, what I played more than a year before when I made the demo,” Felder marvels. “So, we get to the end and Joe says, ‘Now we’ve got to play something that goes deedily deedily deedily deedily.’ And I say, ‘What is deedily deedily deedily deedily’? So, he and I sat down and figured out the line we would play, with that guitar harmony on each chord. We literally went chord by chord, slow motion, learning that harmony solo on the ending. Then when we started recording, we would record one chord and stop, then we’d punch in for the next chord, piecing each section note by note, and chord by chord until we were done.”
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So who’s the genius: Felder for creating the solo, or Henly for insisting on it?
Both…
I love a lot of different types of music, but that song, and that “duet” at the end is just amazing.
I got to see them play it during the “History of the Eagles” tour. Amazing.