Respawn Entertainment: Days of Glory

Chapter 606: 7 Interpretations of the California Guest House Ghost Story

The chord motive of this prelude is so obvious that not only professionals know that this is just a prelude, but there is definitely something else behind it. Even ordinary music fans can feel that the main song is about to begin!

But unfortunately, these hedgehog guys are forced to stop here.

It's like when you're driving the pile and are about to shiver, but then it's gone?

If he were a man, who could resist this?

No, even if she’s a woman, she can’t help it!

Professionals should at least be a little reserved, but ordinary music fans don't care so much:

"Bian Lang, is this appropriate for you? Think about it, who has brought you to this situation? It was us! If we hadn't held on to the small amount of money in our hands, would you have the opportunity to perform today?
Can you force yourself to create such a classic piece of work under such a strict competition system..."

Fortunately, Bian Lang didn’t hear this, otherwise he would have been so angry that he would have passed out!

Normally, Niu Bo should have come out to control the situation at this time, but he also felt that Bian Lang was a bit vindictive and not generous enough, so he let the atmosphere ferment for a while.

The two bands were so frustrated that they had to wait for a long time. Then the lead singer of the reggae band suddenly became excited and acted as the guest host, saying, "Okay, now let's invite our four super fans to vote for the two bands that just finished their performances!"

With this interruption, the almost unanimous complaints from the entire audience turned into laughter.

Hedgehog still won the vote 3 to 1 this time, and Liu Ziyang again voted for Reggae.

Before Niu Bo could ask, he started to explain: "The reason why I didn't vote for Hedgehog is not because their music is bad, but because it's too good, so good that we feel it's a crime that the rest of the music hasn't been created yet!
Of course, the performance of Reggae is also worthy of the ticket in my hand, come on! I don't think I need to say much about this part of Hedgehog. On behalf of all the fans, I would like to ask Bian Lang, when can a full version of this song be arranged? "

Bian Lang expressed his understanding of Liu Ziyang's behavior of being friendly and not helping, but taking the lead in urging for updates was a bit unfair!
"Hurry up and follow the process, the fans are waiting here!"

Bian Lang's words had a significant effect. After coming to his senses, Niu Boyi immediately changed the topic to introduce the next stage of the competition.

But no one at the scene cared about this. Everyone was still thinking about when the complete version of the hedgehog's previous impromptu performance would be released.

As for the fans who started to leave, they began to give limited spoilers as soon as they got their phones.

Tian Xiao called Lao Jiang directly and told him everything that happened today from beginning to end.

After listening to it, Lao Jiang just thought that this "script" was a bit awesome!
It has all the elements of a hit movie, such as surprise, reversal, explosive point, satisfying moment, shocking moment, tear-jerking moment, professionalism, face-slapping moment, etc.

"It's a shame that this show isn't on our station!"

As I was thinking about it, I was thinking about the possibility of putting old wine in new bottles. "The Band's Spring, Autumn, and Winter" is impossible, but the form of "The One and Only Band" can be changed and repackaged, and there is still a lot of room for operation.

The only difficulty is how to negotiate cooperation with the Rolling Stones. As the producer and investor of "Summer of the Band", it is not impossible to get the Rolling Stones to participate in the cooperation of competing products, but it is just a matter of how much it will cost.

"Got it. Considering Bian Lang's current popularity and status in the rock circle, it shouldn't be a problem to invite him to be a mentor, right? Just think of it as helping the Rolling Stones recruit musicians. He has no shortage of works anyway..."

As Lao Jiang thought about it, he felt that another hit product was beckoning towards him.

"Tian Xiao, don't rush back. Meet with Mr. Chen from Rolling Stone and have a chat. I'll work overtime tonight and make a simple mind map for you..."

When Tian Xiao heard this, he was thinking: "Will I be in charge of this project then? Then I have to build a solid relationship with the Rolling Stones this time."

Bian Lang, who had already left the backstage and came to the preparation room, was immediately surrounded by musicians. Some came to congratulate him on his promotion, while others came to inquire about the details of the improvisation that was to follow.

As for the version of "California Guest House", Bian Lang has not yet decided. The three versions, Frozen Hell, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the original recording version, all have their own shining points.

Also, this song won the Grammy Award. If it is presented in a too sloppy way, Bian Lang would feel that it is not respectful enough to the song.

Moreover, the biggest controversy of this song comes from its lyrics, which are themselves an artistic reproduction of the decadent lives of rock musicians in the 20s and s. With the rhythm of a weird movie, it turns women, DP and YL into erratic forms, jumping around in the lyrics like ghosts wandering at night.

In China, Bian Lang can guarantee that among the people who have heard this song, at least half of them have no idea what the song is about, or what kind of feeling the Eagle wants to express. Many guitar lovers just treat it as a way to practice and play, and don't care what the lyrics are about.

Don't doubt it, Bian Lang himself was one of them in the early days.

But when he had mastered the technique and started to pay attention to the lyrics, Bian Lang slowly realized that the lyrics were very complicated.

Due to the somewhat transcendent status of this song in the global rock circle, many people, like Bian Lang, who think that the lyrics of this song are not simple, began to try to interpret the song from their own perspective.

According to the Eagles' own accounts, the story of Hotel California began in an ocean view room in Malibu.

Donald Felder rented the place for the whole summer, and one July afternoon, he sat in his bedroom with a 12-string guitar and wrote some melodies and recorded them on a four-track recorder. One of the melody was very strange, with descending arpeggios, and Felder took the recording to Don Henley.

It was this descending riff that caught his bandmate's ear, and Henley was driving through California at night, and this dark and spooky sound was the perfect soundtrack.

At that time, California was still a new place for the band members, including Don Henley himself, who said in an interview with TeamRock: "We regard Beverly Hills as a mythical place, full of hope and dreams, where miracles will and have happened, but it is also an oversaturated empty place."

Henley and lyricist Glenn Frey used Felder's riff to write lyrics that described their feelings about California. But the lyrics were not only inspired by their personal experiences, they also borrowed some literary elements.

The vibe of the song was inspired by a book, a 1965 novel by John Fowles, which revolves around a young teacher named Nicholas Urfe who travels to Phraxos, Greece.

There he meets a hermit named Maurice Conchis, who, unbeknownst to Nicholas, subjects him to a series of elaborate psychological experiments that alter the world around him until he loses touch with the real world.

This surreal sense of unreality resonated with Henley and Frey, who saw parallels between the story's protagonist and their own experiences in California, and began writing lyrics that would make people uncomfortable.

Frey explained in an interview with Cameron Crowe: "We wanted to create a character who was like the main character in The Magus. Every time he walked through a door, there was another reality waiting for him. We wanted to write the lyrics like we were making a movie."

In the interview, Frey also said that they tried to make the lyrics cinematic, and mentioned that they were also influenced by The Twilight Zone.

We can hear this cinematic lyrical approach in the opening verse. It is a sensory song that describes the smell and feel of the air, placing the listener in the same space as the protagonist, entering a strange and unknown world.

"On a dark desert highway cool wind in my hair. Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air."

“On the dark desert highway, the cool wind whipped my hair and the warm smell of leaves rose slowly in the air…”

This sense of surreal chaos is also present in the following two sections, where the protagonist flashes through a series of rooms, gazing at strange scenes and engaging in eerie conversations.

In the middle, there is a bright and cheerful Chorus, which forms a very sharp contrast with the atmosphere of the Verse:
“Welcome to the Hotel California .Such a lovely place .Such a lovely face……”

"Welcome to the Hotel California. What a lovely place. What a lovely face..."

It’s a little confusing if read on its own, but if we look at it in conjunction with the Eagles’ California experience, the meaning becomes clear.

The image of California is very bright. It is the home of Hollywood and the music industry. It has beautiful people and beautiful beaches. There are all kinds of large-scale performances and big villas. This is a world that many people yearn for, a world that seems like a paradise to the outside world. In the first verse, the protagonist enters this world, but he has already smelled the smell of danger:
"This could be Heaven or this could be Hell..."

"I wonder if this place is heaven or hell..."

In the second verse, we can feel the wealth and glamour of California, but when the protagonist asks for wine, he still feels that something precious has quietly disappeared in the life of luxury:

"So I called up the Captain, Please bring me my wine. We haven ' t had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine. He said..."

"So I called the foreman: Please give me some wine! He said: We don't serve strong liquor since 1969..."

Many people think this phrase represents a shift in the music industry. In the 60s, rock music felt like part of some kind of revolution, and the psychedelic movement was full of utopian optimism and people were filled with a sincere belief in finding a better way to live.

But a decade later, the music industry has become sluggish and cynical. The original revolutionary vision was "It sells!", and the music industry has become a vivid experiment in cruel capitalism.

Meanwhile, hallucinogens gave way to new, stronger chemicals that took over the music industry and turned it into a world of excess.

In the third verse we see this process and understand the darkness hidden under California. It is indeed full of magic, but in the corners rock stars are falling.

In the final classic couplet we see the most horrifying thing:

"You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave..."

"You can check out anytime but you can never get out..."

You do everything you can to escape this world of fast money and addictive drugs, but it always calls you back from some distant corridor. Knowing Henley and Frey’s intentions, it’s easy to read Hotel California as a warning about the Hollywood lifestyle.

But that's not the only meaning people have drawn from the song, The Eagles themselves described it as about "lost innocence".

Some popular theories are that the song is about a romantic love story: in the first verse, the protagonist is frustrated and lonely, then he meets a woman, and they get married.

In the second verse, when love is mixed with material things, the relationship becomes shaky and the protagonist misses the good old days. In the last verse, he tries to get out of the relationship and return to his former self, but eventually realizes that he has changed.

There is another saying that this song is a ghost story, and this ghost story can be interpreted from six different angles.

Interpretation one: Hotel California does exist!

In the small town of Todos Santos in Southern California, there is a hotel that looks like a movie cover. Many music fans believe that this is the prototype of "Hotel California".

The small town of Todos Santos is right next to the desert on the Southern California highway. Not far from the hotel is a church whose bells ring in the middle of the night. Both elements fit the scene depicted in the song "Hotel California".

Moreover, this hotel did have secret romantic dealings in the past.

The owner of the hotel also claimed that this was the "Hotel California" in the song, but in the history of the town, the hotel was renamed in the 80s, after the song became popular. In the late 90s, several newspapers began to publish the story of this authentic "Hotel California".

This eventually led to an official denial from songwriter Don Henley in 2000: "No member of the Eagles was ever here!"

Interpretation 2: Detoxification Center...

The many references to sex in the song are the source of the idea that Hotel California was originally a detox center. According to this theory, Hotel California is a voluntary detox center on a highway in Southern California, and the Eagles' experience of having sex and being hospitalized was the source of the lyrics.

The lyrics of the song start with colitas suggesting that feeling heavy in the head is a characteristic of Fei Ye Zi. "Lit up a candle" is a common phrase used by XX, and dancing in the backyard is a phenomenon of losing control after XX.

This type of voluntary detoxification center is mainly for the middle class, and is somewhere between a sanatorium and a detoxification center. The YL phenomenon is a normal phenomenon among the middle class after their debauchery in the 1970s.

The addiction to XX allows you to recover for a period of time and leave the detoxification center, but you can never get rid of the shadow of returning to the old ways. This is exactly the true portrayal of the last sentence of the lyrics: "You can pay the bill for a while, but you can never leave..."!

Interpretation three: Mental hospital?

The weird lyrics may be the source of the mental hospital, and the related hints in the lyrics are:
"There are constant hallucinations of distant voices..." Heaven and hell refer to the evil humanity of some mentally ill people like demons, and the purity and unconsciousness of angels.

In the backyard, the patient is dancing like a possessed person. His twisted mind is the direct language of mental illness, and being a prisoner of his own thoughts is also a code word: "The mentally ill hallucination of wanting to kill the devil but always failing to kill it." Of course, mental illness is the same as XX. You can feel that you are normal temporarily, but you cannot guarantee that you will be normal in the future, and you will never be able to leave that shadow.

The seventies was a time when horror films were popular in the film industry, and these lyrics outline just such a story framework.

A lonely person on a remote desert road, a beautiful woman holding a candle in front of the door, a mysterious bartender, a demon-summoning dance in the backyard, a demon that you want to kill but can never kill, and even when it's over there's always someone behind you to remind you that there's a sequel.

All these factors give the lyrics a ghostly feeling, and in horror movies, mental hospitals are often the main background locations.

The fourth interpretation is: It refers to the corrupt music industry!
The 60s, when "California Guest House" was born, was a period of free creation in the American music industry. The popularity of rock music became a symbol of freedom and rebellious ideas in the s. However, its heyday also gradually led to an increasingly decadent attitude towards life among musicians.

XX and XX became the same decadent path that almost every American rock musician took in the 1970s. Money and pleasure became the new image of rock music in the 1970s.

The Eagles, also musicians, saw this fact but were powerless to do anything.

Musicians have come to regard this kind of addictive life as the norm in the music industry. Rock musicians are always surrounded by beautiful girls and decadent lives. They always forgive themselves for the doubts from the outside world: "Relax, we are born to be easily tempted. The music industry can no longer kill the demon of money. Even if some individuals can temporarily end it, they can never get rid of it."

Interpretation five: American society in the 70s?
The 1969 Woodstock Music Festival is regarded as the pinnacle of rock and roll. The lyrics of "California Guest House" "We haven't had that thing since 1969" imply that after Woodstock, the spirit of rock and roll no longer exists.

Those who think this song symbolizes American society understand it this way: 1969 was the last year of the 60s, and since then there has been no spirit of freedom, peace, and equality. As soon as the United States entered the 70s, it encountered the Middle East oil crisis, the failure of the Vietnam War, Nixon's Watergate scandal, etc.

Just overnight, the mental outlook of the United States changed from struggling young people to vulgar and decadent middle-aged people.

Stanley Kubrick once made a movie called "Eye wide open". Audiences who have seen this movie can find many plot contents in the movie that are similar to the lyrics of this song.

It is the same XX and depravity, the same HYWD, the same demon worship complex, and the same inescapable shadow. This movie is like a commentary on "Hotel California", telling the unbearable state of American society.
Interpretation six: Los Angeles!
"Los Angeles" is the answer given by the Eagles after people asked them countless times.

In the 20s, the Los Angeles metropolitan area adjusted its original industrial structure, quickly revived after the nationwide economic recession in the 60s, and eventually became one of the world's financial, trade, and management centers in the 70s.

With the adjustment of economic structure and the influx of a large number of immigrants, the social structure of Los Angeles has also changed, and it has gradually become a gathering place for the upper class.

Don Henley, a member of the band, explained: "We are a group of young people from middle-class backgrounds in the Midwest, and 'California Guest House' is our understanding of the upper class in Los Angeles. It can also be seen as a symbol of the United States, which always pursues a luxurious life, not just about California and Beverly Hills."

As for Bian Lang, he still sticks to his seventh interpretation.

That means when they were writing the lyrics, the three guys from the Eagles band must have been poisoned by eating wild mushrooms!
If those people had been in Yunnan Province, where wild mushroom poisoning clinics were rampant, this song would never have been born!

Therefore, he must find a mushroom-eating season, enjoy a good meal, and then take out the lyrics of this song. Otherwise, it is terribly unreasonable for such lyrics with a realistic and magical theme in the background of the United States to appear in the work of a Chinese musician for no reason!

(End of this chapter)