Hotel California – music for grown-ups, and the rest

Hotel California, this week’s BBC Four TV documentary, like Barney Hoskyns’ commendable book with the same title, was a revealing survey of the folk/country-tinged rock music which transformed LA into capital of the pop world for a decade from the mid-1960s.

West Coast poprock illustrates perfectly a key belief of the Music for Grown-Ups Manifesto:

“only a small, variable proportion of music in any genre is suitable for grown-ups”.

That small proportion in Hotel California was music by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. Eagles……? Borderline.

Very few of the other musicians who appeared, though commercially successful, even got close to creating music for grown-ups.


Gerry Smith