No, I don't want to explore the metaphorical meaning of all of the lyrics to the classic Eagles song "Hotel California". Nor do I like the Eagles or that song or Don Henley or his 1970s Afro. However, listening to the radio in the car on the way home just now, the song came on and before I could change the channel to something more pleasant, like KTCF (K-Two-Cats-****ing) or KWGD (K-Washers-in-the-Garbage-Disposal), I heard the following: So I called up the captain, "Please bring me my wine" He said, 'We haven't had that spirit here since 1969' " What does this mean? Is the captain using the word spirit to mean "a beverage with alcoholic content"...? As in, "We haven't served wine here since Texas won a football national championship?" Or does he mean spirit as in the intangible feeling or emotional state, as in "WE'VE GOT SPIRIT/YES WE DO/WE GOT SPIRIT/HOW BOUT YOU!!!" ....? This is bothering me, like having an itch on the roof of your mouth, and your mouth is duct-taped shut and your hands are bound and you can't believe you're paying a chick $50 an hour to fire oranges at your bare ass but I'm sure you can all relate.
Wine. I have never thought of it the other way. The Capitan talking about enthusiasm would just be too odd.
Kam, you don't want to admit things like that about yourself on the Internet. Do you see me talking about shooting heroin with Don Rumsfeld before he got his current gig and decided to start big-timing me? No. No, you don't. Mr. M-- see, I'm the opposite. Of course they have wine. They just haven't had anyone around who wanted to par-TAY like that, since 1969. Maybe all their heavy partiers got sent to Vietnam to fight.
I actually like this song. Always fun to speculate on the lyrics. Most people seem to interpret the "spirit" as, literally, the wine, so I'll go along with that. It could always have a double meaning, though.
Wine isn't a spirit. Spirits are distilled alcoholic beverages while wine is fermented. This message is brought to you by Google; Google, helping average people seem like they know everything.
But they have the "pink champagne on ice", so they are drinking. Their living it up at the Hotel California. The whole song is about partying and addiction. You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!
I had always heard that it was a reference to the Satanic Church whose bible was written in 1969. The wine refers to Jesus. That's just what I heard, dunno if I believe it.
This song was supposedly written about a trendy club in LA where people would hang and talk about the occult, which was fashionable at the time. It wasn't REAL occult - kinda the equivalent of a goth club today. But, Don Henley supposedly went and found it to be really phony and used the experience as a metaphor for how phony people can be when they want something from you, particularly gold digging women. I read somewhere that Henley had said in an interview that he dated someone that was only interested in him because she thought he had money and this song sprang from that. That was ONE story. Another story was that it was about people he knew and their addictions to things like heroin and cocaine. It was still a metaphor using that club, just not about a woman. Henley has a tendency to refer nostalgically to things in his lyrics like when he "saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac" in "Boys of Summer" and it reminded him of his youth and how that feeling could never be recaptured just like the feeling he had in this lost relationship. I'm not a fan of the Eagles or Henley, but I've always thought that he was a fairly clever lyricist when he wanted to be.
See http://www.songfacts.com/detail.lasso?id=1121 for an endless discussion therein. Lyrics: On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim I had to stop for the night There she stood in the doorway I heard the mission bell And I was thinking to myself, This could be Heaven or this could be Hell Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say... Welcome to the Hotel California Such a lovely place Such a lovely face Plenty of room at the Hotel California Any time of year, you can find it here Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, that she calls friends How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget So I called up the Captain, Please bring me my wine He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine" And still those voices are calling from far away, Wake you up in the middle of the night Just to hear them say... Welcome to the Hotel California Such a lovely place Such a lovely face They livin' it up at the Hotel California What a nice surprise, bring your alibis Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device" And in the master's chambers, They gathered for the feast They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can't kill the beast Last thing I remember, I was Running for the door I had to find the passage back To the place I was before "Relax," said the night man, We are programmed to receive. You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!
They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can't kill the beast Here there are poking fun at Steely Dan who had poked fun at the Eagles on _Royal Scam_. On _RS_ Steely Dan takes a solid rip at the plastic Cali culture.
So there is really not a Hotel California? Scratch that off my "Places to visit " list. It seemed like a fun place.
