Hotel California began on a Malibu couch
Don Felder was living in a house on the beach at Malibu. In his book Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles, as quoted in Guitar World, he says that was around 1974 or 1975. On a July day with the doors wide open, he sat in the living room in a bathing suit, still wet from the water, with an acoustic 12-string guitar in his hands.
He started to play. The chords that became Hotel California came out right there. In a back bedroom he kept a small home tape recorder that could record four tracks at once. He ran there and put the idea down before it got away.
That tape was only the start. In a MusicRadar interview, Felder said he would build song ideas on that little four-track machine, copy them to a cassette tape, and hand them to Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Henley liked the one that sounded, as Felder recalled Henley saying it, like a Mexican reggae or a bolero, a slow dance feel. That tape became Hotel California. Felder wrote the music under it. Henley, Frey, and Felder talked through the word ideas together.
Felder was not sure a quiet 12-string loop would fit the band. The finished track is cooler and thicker than that wet afternoon on the couch. You can still hear how open the first sitting was.
His early demo sat in E minor (Em), an easy key for guitar. MusicRadar has him telling how they fixed it in the studio: Henley's voice sat wrong in that key, so they kept dropping until B minor (Bm) fit. They had to cut the track again. Bm is harder on the hand that presses the strings, but it sat right for the vocal.
Guitar World notes that the studio version is in Bm with a capo at the seventh fret. A capo is a clamp that shortens the strings so open shapes sound higher. Felder wrote the loop with regular open chords in Em. Capo on fret 7 turns that Em circle into the sounding verse on the record: Bm, F sharp major (F#), A major, E major, G major, D major, Em, and F# again. Bm is the soft home under the bright 12-string.
Live, Guitar World says Felder has moved the song to A minor (Am), and his lesson clip uses a capo at the fifth fret. He takes the capo off for the solo. The home on the record stays Bm.
On the record, the acoustic intro is a Takamine 12-string. In a Guitar World Dear Guitar Hero feature, Felder said they put a mic on the guitar and also ran a pickup through echo and a spinning speaker cabinet so the part swirls left to right. For the electric trade at the end he used a 1959 Les Paul into a small Fender amp, with Joe Walsh on a Telecaster so the two guitars stayed clear of each other.
MusicRadar places that two-guitar ending at Criteria Studios in Miami. A Discogs sleeve for the 1976 Asylum album Hotel California lists sessions from March to October 1976 at Criteria Recording Studios and the Record Plant in Los Angeles. The sleeve names both rooms for the album.
Henley wanted Hotel California as the single. Felder thought the shape was wrong for the radio of that time: long intro, a quiet break, a long guitar ending. Henley held the line. Felder later told MusicRadar he was glad to have been wrong.
Want the couch version under your hand? Capo on seven, open Em shapes, and walk that circle until it lands on B minor. That grip is the door into the whole song.