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In Nagoya, Japan. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BMEABROAD. jeffrey wasserstrom Hotel California

Around the world on a dark desert highway

Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—‘‘Material Girl’’ and ‘‘Smooth Operator’’ and ‘‘Time After Time.’’ There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like ‘‘Country Roads’’ and ‘‘Hotel California,’’ and nobody seemed to think it strange that Filipinos should be singing, ‘‘Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore, West Virginia ...’’ I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station. —Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

BOOM: The Journal of California, Vol. 4, Number 1, pps 3–10, ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2014.4.1.3.

BOOM | SPRING 2014 3 henever I hear Neil Young sing about a ‘‘town Mitchell growing up, that wouldn’t have meant all that in north Ontario’’ where there’s ‘‘memory to much. It had more significance when we found out that W spare,’’ I’m transported back to a hillside in we even shared affection for the music and lyrics of some northern California in the early 1970s. I’m twelve and sit- of the relatively obscure, though influential, unnamed ting with a friend the same age. We’re at summer camp and ‘‘friends’’ alluded to in the book’s omnibus subtitle, such he’s teaching me the simple chord changes to ‘‘Helpless,’’ as Warren Zevon and J.D. Souther. which is about to become the first song I can play on guitar. Still, for some reason, I haven’t gotten around to asking Music does for me what biting into a madeleine did for Pico whether Manila or some other locale he’s visited since that character in Proust’s novel: it sends me hurtling in his peripatetic life springs to mind when those globally through time and space to a specific moment in the past. recognizable ‘‘All-American’’ songs he mentions in Video I’m sure this is true for many other people as well. And they, Night in Katmandu, and doubtless first heard in England too, surely often end up in places far removed from the or Southern California, start playing. When I finally do pose Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/3/381610/boom_2014_4_1_3.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 settings mentioned in the songs that set them in memory- the question to him, there are some things I want to tell fueled motion. him. The first is that whenever I hear ‘‘Country Roads,’’ I’m This is why, ever since reading Video Night in Kath- transported to the mid-1980s, too, around the time he was mandu, with its wonderful evocation of mid-1980s Manila, in the Philippines. But I’m in Shanghai. And ‘‘Hotel Cali- where ‘‘music buzzed through the streets’’ from ‘‘dawn to fornia’’ takes me back to a different Asian metropolis. midnight,’’ I’ve wanted to ask Pico Iyer a question: ‘‘When When ‘‘Country Roads’’ comes on a car radio or over the Don Henley begins crooning about a ‘dark desert highway’ Muzak system in a store, I’m in my mid-twenties again, in California, are you suddenly back in Manila and in your spending a year at Shanghai’s Fudan University doing dis- late twenties again?’’ sertation research. My wife, Anne, has a gig teaching That question first formed in my mind before I ever met English that gets her ‘‘Foreign Expert’’ status and secures us Pico. So I had no inkling we would become friends. Since a place in a building reserved for Westerners and Japanese then I’ve had several opportunities to ask him where ‘‘Hotel of that rank. Shanghai then was much less integrated into California’’ takes him when he hears it played, but for some global musical circuits than was Manila, so virtually the reason I’ve forgotten. This is strange, because one topic only contemporary Western pop songs we hear are those we’ve talked and emailed about regularly is the overlap on the batch of cassette tapes we have brought along or between the music I listened to growing up during a child- those that other expats in the building have in their collec- hood and adolescence spent mostly in Santa Monica, aside tions. (When my sister sends a care package that includes from one year in England, and he listened to growing up a new tape—the latest Elvis Costello album—this is a big during a youth divided between school years in a British deal.) There were only a few Western musicians whose boarding school and summers in Santa Barbara. songs had somehow made their way into China. Many Chi- We’ve discovered in the process that our roughly contem- nese students knew at least one or two numbers by the poraneous cavity-prone years—he was born in 1957, I was Carpenters, for example. And all of them seemed to know born in 1961—had very similar soundtracks. The Eagles ‘‘Country Roads,’’ thanks in part to the simple fact that the come up a lot. How could they not when the most important Carter administration had invited John Denver to perform musical common ground we’ve found is our shared fond- for Deng Xiaoping and his wife in D.C. when they visited ness for the songs of many of the people named in the title the United States in 1979. of the book Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of We didn’t bring any John Denver tapes with us to China. Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, To do so would have meant leaving behind something by Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends? the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, The best known names in that list are beloved by so many Willie Nelson, or one of the many people listed in the sub- people of our generation, whether or not they spent any time title of that Hotel California book. To my knowledge none of in Southern California as kids, that had we just discovered the other expats we knew made room in their musical that we each listened to a lot of, say, James Taylor and Joni stashes for ‘‘Rocky Mountain High’’ or any other album

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In Havana, Cuba. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SCOTT LOFTESNESS. by Denver. Still, ‘‘Country Roads’’ ended up being among What then of ‘‘Hotel California’’? Whenever I hear Don the songs we heard most often that year. Felder’s distinctive guitar opening now, I’m instantly in And we didn’t just hear recordings of it. We often heard aNewDelhicafe´ in a supremely jet-lagged, disoriented students sing snatches of the song, and they sometimes state. I’d been in India less than 24 hours when that song asked us to sing it ourselves or sing along with group rendi- from my teenage years in California became the first one tions of it at parties. In that pre-karaoke period (both ‘‘Coun- I ever heard in India. try Roads’’ and ‘‘Hotel California’’ will later become karaoke The mechanism of this musical memory must be some- mainstays in Shanghai and many other places in Asia), what different from the one that sends me to China when- singing a cappella at social events was a popular thing to ever John Denver waxes nostalgic about the Shenandoah do. Many Chinese students had at least one number, often Valley. For while I had heard ‘‘Country Roads’’ plenty of an operatic one, which they could perform passably to times before going to Shanghai, I had never thought much superbly at the drop of a hat. They assumed ‘‘Country about it, nor did I associate it with any special setting or Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/3/381610/boom_2014_4_1_3.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Roads’’ was that kind of song for everyone who looked like moment. The Eagles, by contrast, were a group I listened us, treating it as a kind of national anthem. We generally to—and thought about—a lot while growing up in Califor- tried to be good sports about this and were glad that, unlike nia, dreaming of a career as a singer-songwriter. And long the ‘‘Star Spangled Banner,’’ at least ‘‘Country Roads’’ was before ‘‘Hotel California’’ began evoking an Indian cafeon´ easy to sing. my first visit to the country in 2010, it made me think of a very different time, place, and companion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, whenever I heard ‘‘Hotel California,’’ I would be transported back to an after- noon in the 1970s in the west LA home of close family friends, soon after the album Hotel California was released. The house was one I hung out at a lot in those days. I was close to two of the three brothers in the family, Danny and David. In this moment, David keeps picking the needle up off the turntable and restarting the song after first twenty and then thirty and then forty seconds of it have played. He is determined, in a way that fascinates me because it seems to border on the obsessive, to figure out how to replicate exactly the song’s bass line. The intensity of his focus strikes me as special, because I can never get myself to work as hard as David on mastering a lick. (It isn’t until later that I realize he is equally bemused as a teenager by how long I can spend worrying over and reworking a lyric I’ve written, which already seems to work fine in terms of meter and rhyme.) It took the strangeness of hearing the song right after arriving in India to break the memory hold of that west LA living room, but by the time that happened, I had already spent years thinking about the song’s peculiar global ubiq- uity. Seeing it mentioned in Video Night in Katmandu was one thing that got me thinking about this topic, but so did noticing how often, from the mid-1990s on, I would hear the strains of the song at least once during my periodic

In Florence, Italy. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DAVID MCSPADDEN. return visits to China. I also began to notice how often

6 BOOMCALIFORNIA.COM I would see the song mentioned on Beijing-based blogs, days of captivity. At one point, a guard or multiple guards often disparagingly. (the accounts of the American crewmembers vary on the Most memorable in the digital-dissing category was a 13 details) asked the Americans to recite (or write down) the September 2005 post on the invaluable Danwei site that was lyrics to ‘‘Hotel California.’’ Presumably, this request was titled ‘‘Seeking Graffiti Artists and Hotel California-Haters made because it was a favorite song of the person or people in Beijing.’’ It described an upcoming creative happening— who made the request. Perhaps, though, the request was a musical exorcism. The event would include ‘‘an artistic made in the hope that hearing the words spoken rather than attempt to destroy the song ‘Hotel California’ in a 24-hour sung or seeing them written out would make their meaning sark [sic] fest performed by bands, DJs, spoken word artists, clear. It is, after all, a hard song to parse, even if English is dancers, etc., who are invited to help crush the Eagles song your first language and you are steeped in American popular that has been causing serious auditory pollution in China culture. How many listeners in the United States know, for for the last two decades ...Let’s hope Country Roads and example, that the song’s allusion to ‘‘Steely knives’’ was Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/3/381610/boom_2014_4_1_3.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 everything ever recorded by Kenny G are next on the list.’’ inspired by the admiration Glenn Frey and the other co- Eagles guitarist and singer Glenn Frey is reported to authors of ‘‘Hotel California’’ had for the lyrical dexterity have said during a master class about songwriting that of Steely Dan? ‘‘Hotel California’’ should be approached like a Twilight One thing I like about the spy plane story is its utter lack Zone episode. By the time I went to India in 2010, I had of menace. ‘‘Hotel California’’ is a singularly dark song, with come to think of its omnipresence in China, and the violent undercurrents (those ‘‘Steely knives’’ are used for varied responses to that ubiquity, as having a Twilight stabbing, even if they ‘‘just can’t kill the beast’’). In global Zone-like weirdness to it. And that was before I had seen circulation, though, the song tends to convey sunshine and listened to the YouTube video of it performed on traditional Chinese instruments (a performance that, by the way, really is a ‘‘freaking gem!!!!’’ as the Beijing Daze blog raved). The strangest Chinese ‘‘Hotel California’’ story, though, involves an American spy plane. As someone who teaches and writes about United States–China relations, I was intrigued by lots of things about the incident involving one of these aircraft that occurred in 2001, which began when an American EP3 collided with a much smaller Chinese plane, costing the pilot of the latter craft his life and requir- ing the former to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island. The American crewmembers were immediately taken into custody by Chinese authorities on the island, which is sometimes referred to as China’s Hawaii and is located well to the south of Hong Kong. The ensuing diplomatic crisis was resolved fairly quickly, but relations between Beijing and Washington stayed strained until 9/11 came along and triggered a reset in so many diplomatic relations, including ours with China. My interest in the incident was taken to a whole new level when ‘‘Hotel California’’ entered the picture. It did so when, after their release, some members of the American crew talked about the lighter moments in their otherwise tense In Xalapa, Mexico. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CHRIS DIERS.

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In San Jorge, Nicaragua. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ERIC MOLINA.

rather than noir. In every version of the spy plane tale that Schwarzenegger, describes Beach Boys songs about the state I’ve seen, the intent of the guard or guards is friendly, not meaning to her during her East Coast childhood. She recalls threatening, even if the song refers to prisoners who, as we ‘‘California Girls’’ marking a turning point in her early tra- all know, check out but never leave. vels via flights of imagination. Until she heard it as a pre- ‘‘Hotel California’’ is often misread in the same way as teen, she had been steeped in books that took her to ‘‘Born in the U.S.A.,’’ another dark song that is often treated a favorite period and locale: England in the days of Roche- as if it were a rousing patriotic number. When I mention ster and Heathcliff. The music of the Beach Boys, though, ‘‘Hotel California’’ to people in China and say that I am from ‘‘sounded clean and happy’’ and set her ‘‘red-sneakered the state referred to in its title, they tend to look at me as if foot’’ tapping to new rhythms. She was drawn to the image I am lucky to be from such a wonderful place. The word of the bright place the Beach Boys sang about, which ‘‘California’’ is linked to so many positive images that the seemed strangely ‘‘more alien’’ even than the land of the song’s cynical take is either not grasped, or is understood Beatles. The song made her dream of becoming a ‘‘Califor- but ignored, or, perhaps, embraced as part of our state’s nia girl’’ who was part of an exotic ‘‘geography and vernac- weird charm. ular’’ defined by sunshine and joy. ‘‘Hotel California,’’ it seems, has come to signify to many My sense is that ‘‘Hotel California’’ does the same thing people around the world what Amy Wilentz, in her insight- for many people now, despite its lyrics sketching out a night- ful and amusing book I Feel Earthquakes More Often marish scenario. If the song’s dark lyrics were taken seri- Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of ously, would people around the world keep opening up new

8 BOOMCALIFORNIA.COM places to stay called ‘‘Hotel California’’? Some hotels with I tried to shake off my dispirited mood by reminding that name predate the Eagles song (one opened in Mexico as myself of why the invitation to come to India had seemed far back as 1950), but others, including a recently opened so appealing when it was initially delivered—in a cafein´ hotel in Bangkok, postdate the recording. At least some of Germany not unlike the one I was entering in Delhi. I’d these—and I’d bet most—seem to have taken the name just given a series of invited talks in Heidelberg, and these because—not in spite—of the song. The first thing you see talks inspired a local anthropologist, who studies Indian on the website of the Bangkok hotel is the phrase ‘‘Welcome middle class life and religious traditions, to think that I’d to the Hotel California.’’ be a good addition to a workshop on global cities that she When I heard the first strains of the song in that New was planning to hold in New Delhi in collaboration with Delhi cafe,´ and saw a smile come over the face of Ravi local universities and the Goethe Institute. When she and Sundaram, the man I was meeting there, I took it as an a colleague asked me if I’d be willing to give a talk, I agreed indication that ‘‘Hotel California’’ was as popular in India readily. I’d grown interested in China-India comparisons, Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/3/381610/boom_2014_4_1_3.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 as it is in other Asian countries. I’d later learn, though, that wanted to get to see Delhi, and found appealing the notion hearing the song takes Ravi to a different South Asian of getting to South Asia this way. I often come back from country. trips with new stories about the workings of globalization. When the song started playing, I was feeling strung In this case, I’d even be able to dine out on a good shrinking out—and not just because of the long series of flights that world tale before going, telling people that it was a sign of our I had taken to get to India. I had arrived around midnight times that I, an American China specialist, would be mak- and, though it had been great that a driver met me at the ing my first trip to India courtesy of a German university. airport, it had been disconcerting when his car wouldn’t Remembering that chain of events put me in a better start and he asked me, sheepishly, to please get out and help mood, and I began to think about the embellishments I’d a couple of passersby push it in the pitch-dark parking be able to add to the tale when I got home. I’d begin, of garage in hopes of getting it going. Luckily, this worked, course, with the oddity of a McDonald’s being a key provider but, unluckily, he had no idea where my hotel was. He got of local knowledge right after I landed on the other side of us to what he assured me was the right general neighbor- the world. When ‘‘Hotel California’’ began playing, right as hood, but it didn’t look promising, with rundown buildings Ravi and I had begun talking about plans for our China- and stray dogs prowling the streets. Fortunately—it was India panel, I smiled in part because I knew that hearing a night of many ups and downs—he found a McDonald’s it would give me another global story to tell when I got that was still open, and one of the workers there told him the home, and in part because I was in need of comfortingly hotel was right down the road. A boutique hotel in an old familiar sensations of any kind just then. colonial building, it turned out to be delightful and my room There was so much that needed to be sorted out about had a comfortable bed that looked very inviting when I saw our activities, that Ravi and I kept talking while the song it. Unfortunately, jet-lagged, wiped-out, yet keyed-up, I had played, though each of us stopped from time to time mid- trouble falling asleep, woke again soon after nodding off, sentence to listen to a favorite line. I didn’t know Ravi well and couldn’t get back to sleep. enough to slip out of our professional conversation right Not long after that, I was out in the street again trying to then and ask him what the song meant to him and what lay figure out how to hail a taxi, so that I could make it to the behind his smile. But when I got back to California, I felt cafe´ to meet Ravi—an urban studies and new media scholar we’d become good enough friends that I could ask him via whose work I admired but whom I didn’t know well, having email to tell me about his relationship to ‘‘Hotel California.’’ just met a couple of times in the United States. I felt good about making it to the restaurant without incident, but walk- ing in I found myself wondering why the hell I had agreed The sound of longing for to make the trip. It all seemed too much, especially since everything that California I knew I’d have to start the series of long flights back to California in just a few days. represents.

BOOM | SPRING 2014 9 ‘‘I heard it when I was a kid in Nepal in the 1970s, on an are moved and sometimes perplexed by the warmth and LP,’’ he replied, ‘‘and immediately became an Eagles hospitality they receive at almost every turn of a country groupie and a Don Henley fan.’’ we associate with our assaults. But that particular song, in Which brings me back to Kathmandu and Pico Iyer. As a chill mountain climate where almost every couple was I was finishing this essay, I finally wrote and asked him dressed in their best clothes for photographers, carried with where ‘‘Hotel California’’ takes him. He wrote back imme- especial potency the sound of longing you hear across the diately saying he was rushing out the door—to the corner country—across the world—for everything that California store? Nepal? With Pico, one never knows. represents (ironically, the freedom and sense of possibility ‘‘The first place that ‘Hotel California’ takes me is the and a future tense that the song so unsparingly negates).’’ dreamy lake in the hill-station of Dalat, in Vietnam, where Pico then turned quickly: ‘‘I also can’t help think of the I heard the haunting chords of the Eagles’ song (in cover- Tibetan refugee from Amdo who, with no prompting, would version) drifting across one of the country’s most other- burst into every last verse of ‘Hotel California’—not an easy Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/boom/article-pdf/4/1/3/381610/boom_2014_4_1_3.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 worldly honeymoon locations in the spring of 1991, on a chill song to have by heart—and then ‘Californication’ by the Red Alpine night,’’ he wrote. ‘‘For someone living in America, Hot Chili Peppers, though both slurred together in his ears, returning to our best-known recent enemy only sixteen as if the words were less important than the easy-riding, years after combat had concluded, it was already a charged Beach Boys sunlight they suggested to him. His delivery experience to walk around the places that had serenaded one of the song was not unlike a love-call from a wolf, of course, from the nightly news during formative years—Da Nang, but the poignancy of his choice of material was that, Hue, My Lai. Even now, most Americans going to Vietnam although he knew he could try to win Western girls over with stark, unaccompanied Amdo nomad songs, he some- how chose the Californian threnody as his way to try to get to California (a trip he would regularly make, and return from with head hung between the knees).’’ ‘‘I suppose I relate to the song in part because I am an immigrant, too,’’ he continued, ‘‘drawn by the California that exists only in the head when my parents moved here in the 1960s. And then, as a student reading English at Oxford in the mid-seventies, when the Eagles (Little Feat, Jackson Browne, even J.D. Souther) were at their peak, I remember how all of us eager literature students exchanged phrases, snippets, news of ‘Desperado’ or ‘Take it Easy’ or some such, and the Eagles seemed a shorthand for the worldliness we coveted (even in such songs as ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ and ‘The Last Resort’). The first literature student I ever met at Oxford—from Liverpool no less—started reeling off the names of California small towns as soon as we were intro- duced and he heard my parents lived in California. Of course, he’d never been there, except via the turntable. And of course, he made his way over to my home as soon as he could, if only to set the reality against the exportable dream. Just a small reminder—as is touchingly, complexly visible if you spend days on end in the Arrivals area at the Tom Bradley Terminal in LAX, as I once did—of all the baggage Hotel California, the lowest base camp on Mount Everest. even those from the most privileged and cultured of places

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PETE&BROOK. bring to Hotel California when they come here.’’ B

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