Dur­ing the Satan­ic pan­ic of the 1980s, a new breed of witchfind­er cast a drag­net through pop cul­ture, scoop­ing up songs, artists, and albums that were alleged­ly part of a demon­ic con­spir­a­cy to cor­rupt America’s youth. One song rou­tine­ly appear­ing on such lists — “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” by the Eagles. Real­ly? The Eagles? Biggest-sell­ing rock band in the U.S.? Soft-rock super­stars who paved the cocaine-col­ored way for even soft­er yacht rock super­stars?

They were hard­ly Black Sab­bath, but the band’s “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” was real­ly about Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, it was said (just lis­ten to it back­wards). Depend­ing on your feel­ings about Satanism and/or the Eagles, “the truth proves far less sat­is­fy­ing than the myr­i­ad rumors that have sprung up,” writes David Mikkel­son at Snopes. “The song is usu­al­ly inter­pret­ed as an alle­go­ry about hedo­nism and greed in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia in the 1970s.” It turned out to be a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy.

Hotel Cal­i­for­nia, the album, rock­et­ed the Eagles beyond “suc­cess on a fright­en­ing lev­el” and into total burnout. By the time they made their last album of the 70s, The Long Run, they felt trapped in a celebri­ty hell, one that would have to freeze over before they reunit­ed, as Don Hen­ley remarked (hence the title of 1994’s Hell Freezes Over). For the Eagles, hell was the oth­er peo­ple in the band, the con­stant tour­ing, and the incred­i­ble amounts of mon­ey thrown their way, more curse than bless­ing, appar­ent­ly.

Despite these inter­nal ten­sions, the Eagles pro­duced a per­fect sound­track for the 70s. “They reflect­ed the emerg­ing musi­cal style of a 70s post-war Amer­i­ca, and the first tru­ly sex­u­al­ly lib­er­at­ed gen­er­a­tion…. had no trou­ble iden­ti­fy­ing with a band that sang like angels and par­tied like dev­ils,” writes Marc Eliot. “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” has been so close­ly iden­ti­fied with Amer­i­can cul­ture that “when a US spy plane made an emer­gency land­ing in Chi­na in 2001,” Mark Sav­age notes at the BBC, “the crew mem­bers were asked to recite the lyrics to prove their nation­al­i­ty.”

In truth, “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” is nei­ther writ­ten in praise of Satan nor Amer­i­ca. Its work­ing title was “Mex­i­can Reg­gae,” a nod to the unusu­al strum­ming pat­tern, which “fol­lowed a pat­tern clos­er to fla­men­co than to rock,” Sav­age writes, “but played on the off-beat.” The for­bid­ding land­scape in the song’s lyrics, an “atmos­phere of a man in an unfa­mil­iar rur­al set­ting, unsure about what he’s wit­ness­ing,” came from the 1965 nov­el The Magus by Eng­lish author John Fowles, a coun­ter­cul­tur­al favorite, says Glen Frey: “We decid­ed to cre­ate some­thing strange, just to see if we could do it.”

There was, of course, more to the song — the stan­dard inter­pre­ta­tion of “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” as a cri­tique of 1970s excess­es has been affirmed by Don Hen­ley and Frey, who wrote most of the lyrics. The song, Hen­ley said in a 1995 inter­view, “sort of cap­tured the zeit­geist of the time, which was a time of great excess in this coun­try and in the music busi­ness in par­tic­u­lar…. Lyri­cal­ly, the song deals with tra­di­tion­al or clas­si­cal themes of con­flict: dark­ness and light, good and evil, youth and age, the spir­i­tu­al ver­sus the sec­u­lar. I guess you could say it’s a song about loss of inno­cence”  — a feel­ing, as Joe Walsh says in the inter­view clip above, that came out of the expe­ri­ence of arriv­ing and try­ing to make it in L.A. “Nobody was from Cal­i­for­nia,” Walsh says. “Every­body was from Ohio.”

“Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” also “hides” a dig at Eagles rivals Steely Dan in the lyrics, “they stab it with their steely knives” and bare­ly con­ceals Henley’s con­tempt for his ex-girl­friend, L.A. jew­el­ry design­er Loree Rod­kin, as he lat­er admit­ted: “There’s some of every girl I’ve ever been with in all my songs; they’re com­bi­na­tions of char­ac­ters, like fic­tion. Some of the more deroga­to­ry parts of ‘Hotel Cal­i­for­nia,’ how­ev­er, are def­i­nite­ly about Loree Rod­kin – ‘Her mind is Tiffany twist­ed, she got the Mer­cedes bends/She got a lot of pret­ty boys that she calls friends’ – that’s about her, and I wouldn’t be crow­ing if I were Ms. Rod­kin. As far as I’m con­cerned, she’s the Nor­ma Desmond of her gen­er­a­tion.”

Henley’s most tren­chant com­men­tary on the song comes from the 2013 doc­u­men­tary His­to­ry of the Eagles, in which he talks frankly about the band’s crit­i­cal take on their suc­cess and the cul­ture that pro­duced and embraced “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia”:

On just about every album we made, there was some kind of com­men­tary on the music busi­ness, and on Amer­i­can cul­ture in gen­er­al. The hotel itself could be tak­en as a metaphor not only for the myth-mak­ing of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, but for the myth-mak­ing that is the Amer­i­can Dream, because it is a fine line between the Amer­i­can Dream, and the Amer­i­can night­mare.

As for those baroque gui­tar arrange­ments? For that part of the sto­ry, we must turn to Don Felder, who com­posed the song — after Walsh joined the band to replace Bernie Lead­on — in order to show­case the tal­ents of two lead play­ers. See Felder talk about his major con­tri­bu­tion at the top and see him play the “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” solo at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art in a clip from CBS’s Sun­day Morn­ing.

Just above, see an inter­view with Felder back­stage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in which he dis­cuss­es the role of impro­vi­sa­tion in his process, and how his back­ground in jazz led him to write the “Mex­i­can reg­gae” that would even­tu­al­ly play on Amer­i­can radio every 11 min­utes, their most refined state­ment of the “themes that run through all our work,” Hen­ley says: “loss of inno­cence, the cost of naiveté, the per­ils of fame, of excess; explo­ration of the dark under­bel­ly of the Amer­i­can dream, ide­al­ism real­ized and ide­al­ism thwart­ed, illu­sion ver­sus real­i­ty, the dif­fi­cul­ties of bal­anc­ing lov­ing rela­tion­ships and work, try­ing to square the con­flict­ing rela­tion­ship between busi­ness and art; the cor­rup­tion in pol­i­tics, the fad­ing away of the Six­ties dream of ‘peace, love and under­stand­ing.’”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

David Bowie Dreamed of Turn­ing George Orwell’s 1984 Into a Musi­cal: Hear the Songs That Sur­vived the Aban­doned Project

What Makes This Song Great?: Pro­duc­er Rick Beato Breaks Down the Great­ness of Clas­sic Rock Songs in His New Video Series

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When Blondie took the stage at Con­ven­tion Hall in Asbury Park, NJ in 1979, the audi­ence knew the band as a vehi­cle for for­mer Play­boy bun­ny-turned-punk-singer Deb­bie Har­ry. “Deb­bie put on that sexy per­sona with kind of a wink, say­ing ‘This is what you want from me, I’ll kind of give it to you, but I’m also going to give you what I want to give you,’’” says biog­ra­ph­er Cathay Che. “The Blondie char­ac­ter,” as Har­ry called her onstage per­sona, “embod­ied female sex­u­al­i­ty as part threat, part unat­tain­able goal, part par­o­dy,” as Ann Pow­ers writes at The New York Times.

Cast in the role of sex­u­al­ized object since her ear­ly teen years, she had also per­formed in bands since the late 60s, and had sur­vived sex­u­al assault and a near abduc­tion in New York City in the 70s. She was a world-weary per­former in con­trol of her image, but the char­ac­ter drew so much focus from Blondie the band that oth­er mem­bers got a bit defen­sive. “I remem­ber the tour Blondie was doing in April 1978,” punk pho­tog­ra­ph­er There­sa Kereakes writes:

All the posters, t‑shirts, and but­tons you saw were black with hot pink writ­ing that pro­claimed: BLONDIE IS A GROUP! Excla­ma­tion point. No one knew dur­ing that tour in April 1978 — not the band, not their fans, and prob­a­bly not their hope­ful record com­pa­ny — that the record Blondie would release in just six months would be the one to break them into the stratos­phere. They went from Plas­tic Let­ters to Par­al­lel Lines and from the DIY scene to the big time.

Blondie was most def­i­nite­ly a group. By 1979, they had grown into a for­mi­da­ble six-piece, adding gui­tarist Frank Infante and bassist Nigel Har­ri­son to the orig­i­nal line­up of Har­ry, Chris Stein, Jim­my Destri, and Clem Burke. On the cusp of major main­stream suc­cess, they had also hit a peak in terms of musi­cian­ship and song­writ­ing — pow­er­house drum­mer Burke hold­ing the machin­ery togeth­er while each mem­ber played a vital part.

The focus on Har­ry didn’t only detract from her male band mem­bers. “Ms. Har­ry must have felt a bit like… the object of some­one else’s prof­itable fan­ta­sy” at times,” writes Pow­ers, trapped in the role of punk-rock Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe. As key­board play­er Destri put it, “no one real­ly paid atten­tion to Debbie’s singing style and how great a writer she was, because they couldn’t get past the image,”

They would pay atten­tion after Par­al­lel Lines and fol­low-ups Eat to the Beat and Autoamer­i­can. Songs like “Dream­ing,” revamped dis­co hit “Heart of Glass,” and dance­floor clas­sics “Call Me” and “Rap­ture” made Har­ry an inter­na­tion­al super­star and left the rest of the band dis­en­chant­ed. Before law­suits and long­stand­ing resent­ments broke them up, Blondie was an incred­i­ble live band. See them prove it in the full show at the top, the first set of the night. They played a sec­ond, dupli­cate set lat­er, adding Marc Bolan’s “Bang a Gong” at the end of the night. See them tear through it just above and see a full setlist with time­stamps on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Learned to Deal With Super­fi­cial, Demean­ing Inter­view­ers

Watch Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Per­form “Rain­bow Con­nec­tion” with Ker­mit the Frog on The Mup­pet Show (1981)

Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vin­tage Clips

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When Louis Arm­strong first record­ed “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!”, in 1963, he “found the song trite and life­less,” says his biog­ra­ph­er Lau­rence Bergreen, a sur­pris­ing fact since it became one of his sig­na­ture tunes. “Arm­strong had trans­formed the song, infus­ing it with irre­press­ible spir­it and swing,” Marc Sil­ver writes at NPR. He did so all the way to the end of his life, play­ing “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!” after accept­ing an award at the Nation­al Press Club in one of his final per­for­mances on Jan­u­ary 29, 1971. “He sang in a voice more grav­el­ly than ever” and per­formed despite the fact that he “was under doctor’s orders not to break out his trum­pet” after a heart attack that near­ly felled the jazz giant. He died five months lat­er on the morn­ing of July 6th.

Arm­strong spent July 5th, 1971, his final night, at home, relax­ing and record­ing reel-to-reel tapes in his den at his home in Coro­na, Queens. Trans­fer­ring his music to tape and mak­ing cov­ers with his own col­lage art had been a decades-long hob­by for Arm­strong, a life­long archivist and mem­oirist. “

It appears,” the Louis Arm­strong House notes, “his [tape] num­ber­ing sys­tem got well into the 400s.” In 2009, Arm­strong House Archivist Ricky Ric­car­di ran across an odd­i­ty, an unnum­bered tape with no art on the cov­er. The only iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion came from a note on the box in Arm­strong’s wife’s Lucille’s hand­writ­ing, “Last Tape record­ed by Pops. 7/5/71.”

As Ric­car­di explains in a post here (from a longer series on the last two years of Arm­strong tapes), it would take five more years before he dis­cov­ered the con­tents of the final Arm­strong tape — an audio doc­u­ment of the LPs Satch­mo lis­tened to just hours before his death.

“Final­ly,” Ric­car­di writes, “around 11 a.m. on an ear­ly Feb­ru­ary day [in 2013], I was ready. I explained to my vol­un­teer, Har­vey Fish­er, what was about to hap­pen. I went into the stacks, grabbed the tape, sat at the tape deck and loaded the tape onto the hub. I hit ‘Play’ and held my breath as it start­ed spin­ning.” What came out was “Lis­ten to the Mock­ing­bird” from Armstrong’s 1952 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gor­don Jenk­ins, Satch­mo in Style.

“I felt tears in my eyes while dub­bing it,” Ric­car­di writes. After record­ing this song, Arm­strong flipped the record over, record­ed the sec­ond side, then went on to record the entire 2‑LP set of Satch­mo at Sym­pho­ny Hall, “prob­a­bly with fond mem­o­ries of the musi­cians and friends on that album who were no longer liv­ing.” Final­ly, Arm­strong put on his first, 1956 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ella Fitzger­ald, an album, writer and musi­cian Tom Maxwell argues, that made a “cul­tur­al leap [in] the mid­dle of that tumul­tuous cen­tu­ry, that two black per­form­ers could be con­sid­ered the best inter­preters of white show tunes, and that the extem­po­ra­ne­ous heart of jazz could ele­vate the whole to icon­ic sta­tus, deseg­re­gat­ing Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture in just eleven songs.”

After the final song, “Louis left his den and head­ed down the hall­way to his bed­room,” Ric­car­di writes, where, Lucille says, he “was feel­ing frisky and tried to ini­ti­ate ‘the vonce.’ She declined, fear­ing for his health. He went to sleep. About 5:30 in the morn­ing of July 6, Louis Arm­strong passed away in his sleep…. Can you think of a bet­ter way to go out?” It was a peace­ful end to a hard life lived in devo­tion to spread­ing his musi­cal joy. You can hear a playlist com­piled by Ric­car­di of most of the music from Armstrong’s 1969–1971 tapes above. It starts with “Hel­lo Dol­ly!” and ends with the last song on Ella and Louis, and on Armstrong’s final reel-to-reel tape, the last song he ever heard: “April in Paris.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

Louis Arm­strong Remem­bers How He Sur­vived the 1918 Flu Epi­dem­ic in New Orleans

When Louis Arm­strong Stopped a Civ­il War in The Con­go (1960)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.