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Following the success of albums On
the Border and One of These Nights (a Grammy
winner for Album of the Year in 1975), Szymczyk
and the group – who now included longtime
collaborator Joe Walsh – would embark on their
most ambitious studio adventure yet, as they
headed in to record an album that went on to sell
a staggering 32 million copies. The musical mythos
of Hotel California would revolve around everything
one could expect from the making of an epic album,
beginning with the now legendarily lengthy writing
sessions. “We’d work for three weeks, then take a month
off. During that month off is when Don [Henley] and
Glenn would write lyrics. They had innate talent as
songwriters, and fed off each other brilliantly, much like
Lennon and McCartney. They’d go to each other’s
houses, and then come back to the studio for the next
session with, ‘Well, here it is.’ Glenn and Don, by that
point, both knew who was going to sing lead on what song,
and they would always have decided that prior to cutting
the lead vocal.”
The iconic title track, “Hotel
California,” began after Szymczyk first heard the riff
off, “a cassette of a bunch of Don Felder riffs and ideas.
Don Henley picked up on that. He didn’t have any idea
what the song was going to be about, but said, ‘Let’s work
on this riff for a while.’ During the acoustic introduction
of the song, where Don Felder opens with his signature
riff, he was playing a 12-string, which I recorded with three
mics. My go-to mic for recording acoustic guitar was a
Neumann KM 84 – I’ve used the same one since before
‘Hotel California,’ and I still use it to this day. But Don
had a pickup in his guitar, off to a pair of small Orange
amps, and I mic’d them in stereo. The initial opening
guitar intro is acoustic guitar in the middle, and an amp
on both sides, with a chorus that is flowing back and forth
between the two amps.”
Eventually the producer discovered that to reach
sonic perfection, the song would be recorded by the
band three full times before everyone felt they had
finally gotten the perfect take. He confirms, “We
indeed recorded that track three times! The first time we
did it was too fast, but you’re doing a track, and you have
no idea what the words are, or where they’re going to be.
When Don would start to get an idea about what to write
about, he said, ‘Well, this is going to be too fast. We’ve got
to cut it again.’ So we cut it again. Then he progressed
further with the song’s writing, and next decided it was in
Bill Szymczyk, B.B. King at The Record Plant, L.A., 1970
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the wrong key. The third time’s the charm, and that’s the
version that everybody knows. By then, he pretty much had
90% of the lyrics done.”
By the time he was ready to team Felder and
Walsh up as a stereo pair on the song’s outro solo,
the producer remembered feeling Joe’s greatest
assets as a player shone brilliantly alongside
Felder’s own, one that went down over, “a two-day
period working at Criteria Studios. We ran lines out to the
amplifiers in the studio, but they were both performing in
the control room. I was in the middle, Joe Walsh was on
one side, Don Felder was on the other side, and we just
attacked this ending blend of solos. It took us two days, but
it is still one of the highlights of my career. There was a lot
of stop/start and, ‘Let’s try this,’ and, ‘That didn’t work,’
‘Well, if we did this with that, maybe that would work.’
Piece by piece by piece until before it was done. They were
equal gunfighters, Joe and Don.”
Bill joked throughout the process that, “the
console was my weapon.” By the time the team had
declared victory and neared the album’s finish line,
a final flash of inspiration arrived when Walsh and
Henley took the wheel, co-writing “Life in the Fast
Lane.” One of rock radio’s most rotated classics, the
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