Hippies vs. Punks: Eagles' Hotel California (1976)

This excursion on chart-topping records from 1975 began after I smelled a rat last month. The local hipster radio station bent over backwards in lugubrious homage after the passing of David Bowie on January 10, devoting a whole day of programming to the oeuvre of the Thin White Duke after just having spent a whole Friday playing Bowie records in honor of his birthday, January 8. My antenna started to tingle after the station engaged in the most perfunctory of memorials following the death of one of the Hippie founding fathers and a godfather of psychedelia, Paul Kantner, at the end of January. The attention paid to Kantner far outstripped what respects were paid to Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey though, because as far as I could tell the hipsters marked Frey's passing not at all (much the same could be said of KEXP's treatment of Maurice White). This does not speak well of hipsters.

It is frequently quoted that "History is written by the victors," which is a form of presentism, the idea that the best way to look at the past is through a prism of the current cultural paradigm. Whereas the radio station's elision of Earth, Wind & Fire is undoubtedly due to racism, the omission of Eagles music can be chalked up to a brittle snobbery and an elite know-nothingism.

The fact is that the Eagles are as important to the Great American Songbook as George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash. They are the highest-selling America band in U.S. history with the highest-selling album in U.S. history, 1976's Their Greatest Hits, 1971 - 1975. Growing up in the United States of the 1970s Eagles music was ambient. And what makes it important for us on this page is that they ruled the roost when Hippies gave up the ghost in the middle-1970s and the Punks arrived on the scene.

Originally, to stay with the year 1975, this post was meant to be about One of These Nights, the hugely successful Eagles album produced by Bill Szymczyk. Unfortunately, the hold I placed on the album at my public library never arrived, and I couldn't bring myself to pay for a digital download. Instead, I found an inexpensive used CD of Hotel California (1976) at my local record emporium. Having a connection to the album, I decided to immerse myself in it this week.

My connection to Hotel California is twofold. First, though the album is listed as a product of 1976, which it is, it didn't achieve saturation radio airplay until the following summer. The Eagles' masterpiece "Hotel California" and the saccharine, lachrymose, Frey-sung "New Kid in Town" both reached #1 on the U.S Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, and "Life in the Fast Lane" almost cracked the top ten. I remember playing Frisbee with my oldest sister's girlfriend, the stereo speakers blasting "Hotel California," on a warm summer evening; it seemed to me to be some sort of perfection, like a state of bliss was aurally captured and transmitted and history had to end because there was no place left for time to go.

That was in the summer of 1977, about the same time as the Sex Pistols took their famous boat-ride-turned-police-melee on the Thames during Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee anniversary celebration. Second, my hipster college girlfriend, a person that flits in and out of these Hippies-vs.-Punks posts (see the Pure Mania post or the Hate Your Friends post), someone with whom I became intimate when my wife-to-be was largely absent for the year prior to our relocating to the East Coast, made a mix tape for me as a going-away gift. Anchoring the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr. and Replacements tracks was "Hotel California."

So, to my mind, the Eagles' Hotel California always had hipster chops. That sense was upheld this week. The two-guitar attack of Don Felder and Joe Walsh that provides the coda to "Hotel California" might not be as arty as Glenn Branca but it is definitely not lite rock and it definitely has an avant-garde edge to it.

There are other arty flourishes throughout Hotel California: the symphonic instrumental reprise of "Wasted Time" that begins side two; a song sung by bass player Randy Meisner, "Try and Love Again," that sounds like something off Gerald Collier's hipster-fave eponymous album from 1997; Don Henley's shrewd indictment of American Manifest Destiny in "The Last Resort" to conclude the album, not to mention an exhaustive criticism of the bankruptcy of "massified bohemia" found in "Hotel California" and "Life in the Fast Lane."

Walking to work on a chilly morning this week listening to "Life in the Fast Lane" I saw a young woman dressed for the office driving in her compact car, and what struck me is that the same thing has been happening for the 40 years since Hotel California was released and the machine has only gotten worse.

In the end, what is interesting about Hotel California is how negative it is and how prescient it was. The dead end had arrived for the Hippies by 1977, and the Eagles called it. Despite this almost hostile negativity, the record is celebrated as a pillar of classic rock. That makes Hotel California a fascinating document of the nihilism that is the root of our present neoliberal age. Too bad the hipsters at the radio station didn't give it a listen.

April Fools' Day

Today, April Fools', marks one year of commuting three hours every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Never before have I existed on so little sleep. I now squeeze in a 15-minute catnap at lunch to help me get by. When you spend your whole life (nearly a half century) getting eight hours of sleep and then suddenly you shift to getting seven hours (often less), it is rough. My training regimen has also suffered. I now run only on the weekends, not counting the sprinting and jogging I do to and from the train. Gradually, over the span of the year, my conditioning has diminished, and I have gained about ten pounds. It is a situation that if maintained will lead to a continued deterioration until some form of breakdown occurs.

A couple months back I found a damp paperback copy of Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987) on a sidewalk near my apartment building. I was on my way out for a run. So I stowed it in the bushes for my return. Some drunken youth walking home after a night of debauchery probably dropped it. When I left my wife and New York City to make my way back to the West Coast a quarter-century ago, for about a month I stayed with my friend Niall who lived in Haight-Ashbury. He had a copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, parts of which I read and enjoyed. I never read the first essay, "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of These Times." I did last night on the train home from work. The essay originally appeared in 1971 and contains the first known reference to Punk. What captivated me though was Bangs' description of worklife (the boldface is my addition):

Why, I recall when I was in high school (oh, I told you -- that was kind of where they put you when they didn't know what to do with you -- when you were too big for the Kiddie Kokoons and too young to go out an' hafta assume what we call Manhood, which involved going at the same time every day to some weird building and doing some totally useless shit for hours on end just so you could get some bread and have everybody respect you) -- when I was in high school, we used to have some mighty snappy patter. For instance, if somebody did something stupid, we used to say, "Whattaya got, shit for brains?"

What I remember about Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung from reading it 25-years ago is Bangs' essay on The Clash. That is why I started reading the book again last night: I'm working my way towards a Hippies vs. Punks post on The Clash.

*****

UPDATE: I meant to include a link to a video that appeared recently on the Gray Lady's web site. The video tells the story of Dr. John Kitchin, a successful neurologist and psychiatrist, who abandons his career in order to skate all day on a San Diego boardwalk; in so doing, he creates a new identity for himself, Slomo. Basically, the video is a literate indictment of the insanity of the rat race. Kitchin, a.k.a., Slomo, articulates a theory how motion, the sensation of acceleration, stimulates calcium deposits in our inner ear that are somehow aligned with the center of the Earth, and all of this arouses pleasure.

The video is worth watching.

Damned Damned Damned

At some point I went from being approximately the same age of the majority of people in my neighborhood to now I am clearly older than most. It seems like this has happened in just the last couple of years. Capitol Hill went from being a neighborhood that though weighted towards young adults nonetheless had healthy representation in all age brackets except children now appears to be populated overwhelming by young people in their 20s and 30s.

I'm not complaining. I like young people, particularly if they're not intoxicated. Young people have yet to be defeated existentially; they still harbor hope. It's young people who are taking to the street in Turkey and Brazil. As Richard Hell has said, "The truth is in the youth."

The rich maintain power by pumping the youth full of religious dogma and then setting them to fight each other. Things might be starting to shift though.

This morning at work I decided to make a study of The Damned's first album, Damned Damned Damned (1977). I didn't listen to it in college. The first wave of English Punk bands that I listened to were The Clash, Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks. Nineteen-Seventy-Seven is huge for Punk, and Damned Damned Damned, released in February of that year, is a good album.

It's much better than live performances I saw on The Old Grey Whistle Test DVD I checked out from the library the winter of 2012 and that got me thinking about Hippies vs. Punks.

But The Damned were huge back in the day. No denying it.