Hotel California

Hotel California, by Barney Hoskyns

No month stated, 2006  John Wiley & Sons

(Original UK edition 2005)

Barney Hoskyns is a music journalist who has been steadily publishing for a few decades now; I first became aware of him in the mid-‘90s when I came across a copy of his 1997 novel Lonely Planet Boy, which I reviewed on Amazon…back in August of 2000! (And mine is still the only customer review of the book on there, so if you are really bored you can check it out by clicking the link.) I think that novel was an anomaly, as Hoskyns mostly publishes nonfiction books on classic rock and the like. Hotel California is one of his more well-received books, and covers the singer-songwriter, country-inspired soft rock that overtook California in the 1970s. 

Given the prominence of their placement in the book’s super-long subtitle, one might get the impression that the majority of Hotel California will be about Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. But friends they are hardly in the book at all! In reality, Hotel California spends more time on Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt! In this way the book is very similar to later rock book Goodnight, L.A. I found it very curious, particularly given that Hoskyns also doesn’t dwell much on music criticism…except when it comes to the female singers. He’ll off-hand casually mention that CSN finally get around to releasing a new album, and maybe drop the name of a song title or two, and that’s it. But for Joni Mitchell’s latest release Hoskyns will give a few paragraphs describing the songs. WTF? 

Another curious thing about Hotel California is how blandly Hoskyns tells his story. This to me is the biggest difference between “classic rock journalism” and the rock journalism that was published as it all was happening – in other words, the sort of articles one would find in contemporary issues of Rolling Stone. Whereas Hoskyns in this book has a bland, “academic” recounting of how this happened, then that happened – in other words, bald relaying of the facts – the journalists of the actual day put a lot more personality and color into their material. A case in point would be Rolling Stone journalist Ben Fong-Torres, who did several pieces on CSN&Y in the ‘70s; I’ve read some of them, and they give all the color and personality that is lacking in Hotel California. 

There is none of that here. Hoskyns is very much a “just the facts” sort of documentarian, but “just the facts” isn’t the best approach for rock journalism. The sad thing is that I found myself bored for long stretches of Hotel California, and even more damning was that none of it had me heading over to discogs.com to pick up a copy of any of the albums discussed. I also didn’t get much in the way of sordid rock expose stuff; Hoskyns doesn’t even really dwell on the rampant sex and drugs. That said, there was a part that had me chuckling: in the mid 1970s, a coked-out Stephen Stills suffered from the delusion that he was a Vietnam combat vet(!). This was just so bonkers that it had me laughing out loud, but unfortunately other than just a bland mention of the condition, Hoskyns does nothing to exploit it. 

In fact, such is the overall bland tone of Hotel California that I read the entire 330-some page book but am having trouble recalling any of it. But then, many people would argue that ‘70s Californian singer-songwriter stuff was ephemeral pap anyway, so maybe it just goes hand in hand. I did appreciate it that Hoskyns for the most part sticks to the ‘70s; the opening pages, which document the early ‘60s, had me worried. I’m really not into the whole folk singer scene, Bob Dylan and etc, but here in the opening pages Hoskyns just details how the folk stuff flourished in California in the early ‘60s, eventually leading to an influx of folk musicians who had grown up listening to country…and soon enough country rock was created and flourishing. 

CSN are really the big movers and shakers, but as mentioned Hoskyns doesn’t write much about them. We have recounting of famous scenes, like how the group formed due to an impromptu jam session, and also we get detail on how Neil Young was eventually brought into the fold and how the “supergroup” would constantly break up and reform due to various internal strife. Hoskyns doesn’t shy from pointing fingers, which I also appreciated; we’re often told how Stills was a control freak, particularly when he was in “full-blown cocaine addiction” in the ‘70s. And Neil Young doesn’t come off like the addled hippie I always assumed he was; he too begins exerting control of the group. David Crosby is constantly referred to as a the least talented of the group, but that’s by David Geffen, another of the main figures in the book. Graham Nash comes off a the only likable one in the group, on a personal level at least. 

More focus is placed on Joni Mitchell and eventually the Eagles and Poco and other groups like that; Gram Parsons also factors a great deal in the book, and Hoskyns reveals that Parsons’s fame was mostly posthumous. According to Hotel California, Parsons was mostly ignored in life, only reaching a cult fame a decade or two after his early death. For me personally, I’ve never cared for his music. I am aware of when Parsons was being embraced by the hipsters of the ‘90s; I had a buddy who swore Sweetheart Of The Rodeo was one of the greatest albums ever. But it sounded like honky tonk redneck shit to me, and to this day it’s the only Byrds album I don’t have in my collection…and I still haven’t heard the whole thing. 

Speaking of the Byrds, Hoskyns clearly has a preference for Gene Clark, but yet at the same time is a bit misleading in what he writes about him. For example, in the unfortunately brief section on Clark’s mega-budget 1974 flop No Other, Hoskyns almost implies that the album was never released! We’re informed that Clark, after epic recording sessions, proudly brought the acetate to label honcho David Geffen…who listened to a few minutes worth and then tossed the acetate in the trash, telling Clark to “make a proper fucking album.” No more of this is mentioned, which almost implies that No Other was never released. Luckily, sloppy stuff like this doesn’t happen often in Hotel California, but it could be confusing for someone not already familiar with the topic. 

Back to Joni Mitchell; Hoskyns spends a lot of time on her and her albums. While her music has never been of interest to me, I was very interested in Hoskyn’s random mention of a vintage ad Reprise did for Ladies Of The Canyon. Essentially a short story about a young gal in Laurel Canyon who smokes dope and has just broken up with her boyfriend. Friends, this short story advertisement, which you can see in the Image Gallery here, is so similar to the work of J.R. Young that it was either by Young or by someone in the Reprise marketing department who studied his form. We know from comments left on my review of Young’s stories that Young eventually got into promotion at the record labels, so maybe he was already working at Warner/Reprise while he was doing his Rolling Stone bit. 

Hoskyns is also guilty of revisionism to fit his narrative; he has it that cocaine had so permeated the industry that as the ‘70s went on the artists were no longer able to create lasting music. But after establishing this conceit Hoskyns has to brush off landmark albums like the titular Eagles LP Hotel California (which is, you guessed it, barely even described in the narrative). That said, I found Hoskyn’s explanation interesting; as a guy who has spent a lifetime listening to ‘70s rock, it has seemed quite apparent to me that, for the most part, 1976 was the cutoff point of the good stuff. Of course, there are notable exceptions, like Dennis Wilson’s 1977 Pacific Ocean Blue (but then that was mostly recorded in ’76 and earlier), but for the most part post-1976 rock is bland and without personality, very manufactured and cold. Hoskyns notes this as well…and theorizes that it was the result of cocaine. 

I thought this was very interesting. As Hoskyns notes, cocaine is certainly a fuel for creativity, but at the same time it desensitizes the user. In sum the drug used to create ends up making the creator feel emotionally disassociated from the music being created, resulting in cold, impersonal artifice. Hoskyns also briefly notes rumors that record label boardrooms were overtaken by execs who would leave meetings to snort a quick line. All this reminded me of late ‘70s rock world novel Triple Platinum. But then it wasn’t just drugs; Hoskyns also notes the “corporate rock” that was taking over the industry at the time. He’s particularly dismissive of Boston. 

Hoskyns covers all the big acts of the day, with a focus on the Elektra and Asylum rosters. The latter in particular was centered around Southern California singer-songwriters – Jackson Browne is another of the main figures in the book – but of course they branched out into other areas of the country and rock. Hoskyns stays focused on just the Southern California bands, so Hotel California couldn’t be seen as a feature on Elektra-Asylum. For example, there’s no mention of Dennis Linde, a Nashville-based singer-songwriter. His 1974 Elektra-Asylum LP Trapped In The Suburbs is a new discovery for me…and I’m willing to rank it as one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard. How it could still be so obscure is a mystery to me. 

Hey, “mystery to me” was a Fleetwood Mac reference! And Fleetwood Mac also is a minimal presence in Hotel California, despite being one of the most famous Californian rock bands of all time…at least in the late ‘70s Buckingham-Nicks era. But then, this megastar classic rock album group doesn’t fit in with the narrative slant that rock was a barren, coke-fueled wasteland in the late ‘70s. Regardless, I’m much more a fan of the Bob Welch Fleetwood Mac era anyway, though there isn’t much about him in Hotel California anyway. 

So what do you find in Hotel California? Folks, I read the book and I can’t really tell you. It was a strange experience, because I’m struggling to remember anything about it. I mean it’s cool because there’s an entire book devoted to the ‘70s singer-songwriter movement in California, yet at the same time the narrative tone is so bland and impersonal that none of it registers.