If my title has taken your interest, it’s probably because the song, now famous for five decades, somehow spoke to your own experience. Perhaps that’s one of the trademarks of a great and enduring piece of music. To this day upon hearing just one line of the lyrics, or the start of the guitar intro, I get shivers down my spine…
As a musician of sorts myself, I moved on from the style a long time ago: I’m not one of those stuck in the distant past with nothing but nostalgia. Besides, even nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Having said that, there are those recordings which become an integral slice of all of our lives, and part of our psyche, whether we want them to be or not. Without doubt, this is one of them.
Music fans and commentators have speculated for many years about exactly what the song, “Hotel California” is all about. Glen Fry, its co-writer, celebrated the confusion by admitting that the lyrics “…achieved perfect ambiguity”. Later, Don Henly was quoted as explaining the meaning in several different and even conflicting ways. Perhaps the most fitting definition to my mind was this one: “I guess you could say it’s about the loss of innocence”.
Of course, to many the hotel probably sounds like a great place to be-everyone’s having a terrific time, right? Not necessarily. Hotel California has meant many different things to many different people over the years. For me it described a dark, dark time in my life, and a world which almost dragged me down to Hades itself. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say how the lyrics applied to my own life. I can also offer a way out, for all those whose experience of life may have caused a longing to escape. I can tell you from my own firsthand knowledge that you can check out of the hotel, leave, and never go back.
You have to have the will to escape. If you keep hanging around in there in the hope that one day it will bring you fulfillment and happiness, you are indeed in a dark and deluded state of mind. It won’t. Haven’t you noticed that it’s always someone else having that “good time”? The good time will never come to you, unless you’re someone literally being used, or I should say spent, by the management. Don’t waste any more of your life and strength in there. Make up your mind you will get out, no matter what the guy on the door tells you.
Secondly, you need help, and that help must come from someone who is wholly capable and fully experienced in the art of liberation.
I was in my late teens when the song was first being played at every venue frequented by young people, and on every radio station. I was, therefore, already in the Hotel, and oh how those lyrics rang true to me. I was looking for love and meaning in life, as so many young people do, but the first girl I ever gave my heart to turned out to be a full-blown hedonist, and wouldn’t you know, so did the second. They were being used and spent by the management, to their own ultimate loss. The girls I naively thought belonged to me actually belonged to a bunch of other guys as well. If there were any girls with good hearts around at the time, I didn’t know them.
To make it worse, I was, as was shared in another song, “Looking for love in all the wrong places”. I was mixing with people who seemed to have it all together, but in truth didn’t know which way was up and which was down, and didn’t care anyway. I wanted life to have meaning and purpose, but all I saw was shallowness.
I remember one night being in a club with my second girlfriend. She was chatting with the boys, arm in arm, the occasional kiss, drink after drink, while assuring me they were “just friends”. I knew by then that she was unfaithful, and flirting with anyone who took her fancy. More fool me, right? I should have run out of that building and got as far away as I could. But that’s my point: I was the fool, and I didn’t need to be. Neither do you.
That night the song came over the sound system, and the words seemed to describe my surroundings so well. My girl saw me miming, “She’s got a lot of pretty, pretty boys (that) she calls friends”. She immediately caught on to the link between the lyrics and our surroundings. and became indignant. How dare I criticise these beautiful people? How dare I question their motives? She loved her friends and they loved her. When she loved someone she wanted sex with them: what could possibly be wrong with that?
What was wrong was that I wanted commitment, not loose relationships and rejection. Id didn’t want to share until I was thrown on the trash heap. I wanted genuine love: the kind that makes you know your lover is still going to be with you the next day and not with some creep who pretends he loves her in order to use her.
Here, in this club, was the living expression of so much of the song. And of course, the line, “You can check out any time, but you can never leave”, is the most chilling of them all. It seems, when you’re into that way of life, that there’s no alternative, no escape. If your only “friends” are there where else can you go? You can’t leave or you’ll be alone, without a lover, without anyone to have “fun” with, and with no-one to talk to.
THE LIBERATING TRUTH
This way of life is a lie. These people aren’t really friends. Friends are people who honor you and themselves, who respect you, who stick with you, who help you to greater heights not greater depths, and who aren’t looking for an opportunity to get into bed with your lover. Alcohol isn’t your friend, and neither is the weed or whatever else you’re using to make you feel like life is good. It’s a crock, a fantasy, a mirage. What you need is a real friend – someone who is looking out for you, and who will be faithful to you, endlessly.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jesus Christ. I can vouch for this escape route from personal experience, and from decades of seeing that He is a true and faithful friend. In fact, he is the only true friend.
On one occasion, Jesus said this:
“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31:32).
Jesus Christ is the consummate, ultimate deliverer. Are you trapped in Hotel California? Do what I did: call on His name, confessing your fallen state and your helplessness, and believing in the gospel of his death and resurrection. I assure you, you will be saved, and with the help of your own will, life will take on value, meaning and direction.
It isn’t true that you can never leave Hotel California: you can. Your freedom is a step away. Turn away from those false friends, from the girls and the guys who have no idea which way is up and who don’t seem to care. Turn from the lies they believe, and from the hopeless places and the substances you’ve been relying on, and move into the light of God’s son.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 