Credit: Far Out / Steve Alexander
Sat 17 October 2026 21:45, UK
By the time that Eagles hit upon Hotel California, there was one throughline going through the mind of Glenn Frey: This had better be good.
The band had been working their asses off to make a classic album ever since they started working on their debut, and even though they did have a decent conceptual effort when they worked out the bugs of Desperado, it wasn’t like the record was going to stand up as an all-time masterpiece when it got that cold reception behind it. They needed something that was foolproof, and California was the one time where everything fell into place.
That said, those trademark Eagles harmonies aren’t necessarily talking about stuff for the faint of heart across the album’s runtime. The title track was all about Don Henley telling everyone about the dangers that can come from being pulled into the Hollywood machine and not being let out, and even when Frey cools things down on ‘New Kid in Town’, talking about those that will eventually replace you isn’t the first thing that most people want to hear about on a record about life at the top of the world.
But that’s not what the Eagles meant to describe. Some of the biggest rock and roll songs of all time did have a tinge of sadness to them, and while Frey gave his best to make every Eagles song sound carefree, there’s no way of listening to a tune like ‘Take It Easy’ at one of their shows without also appreciating the sadness of ‘Desperado’ or the melancholy of ‘Take It to the Limit’ every now and again.
So if an album is all about the damage that Hollywood is doing to the world, how the hell do you land that particular plane? The message of an album like that doesn’t really feel all that hopeful, and when looking at the final track ‘The Last Resort’, it didn’t look like Frey was looking to sugarcoat the gory details of what rock and roll had become when helping Henley pen the final verses.
The song is fairly simple with only a few chords going around and around, but a lot of the song had more to do with the environmental dangers that were happening. So many people got so consumed with big business that they never bothered to look at what was happening behind the scenes, and Frey knew that people needed to hear about what real suffering was beyond the flashing lights.
And even in the 2000s, Frey felt that the entire song had seemed to only grow more relevant over time, saying, “How prophetic is ‘The Last Resort’ 28 years after it was written? Aspen is a town where the billionaires have driven out the millionaires. It was once a great place. Look at Lahaina; look at Maui. It’s so commercial. It’s everything Hawaii was not supposed to be. Whether we’re carrying the cross or carrying the gasoline cane, we seem to have a penchant for wrecking beautiful places.”
Further reading: From The Vault
To Henley’s credit, though, he was willing to put his money where his mouth was whenever he sang that song. The Walden Woods Project was an effort to preserve the wildlife that people wanted to tear down, and given the amount of money that they have raised over time, a lot more people are trying to ensure that the kind of plastic Paradise in ‘The Last Resort’ never has to become a reality.
Because as much as people might want to talk about the money that could be made with whatever new tech they use, the fact is that this planet is the only one we’ve got, and we should be doing our best to protect her. It’s easy to ignore this kind of soapbox music from time to time, but Frey wanted to ensure that whatever came of this song helped make the world a better place to live.
