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Soeder answered the call in March 2009, when he put the question directly to Henley in an e-mail interview. Wine, Soeder wrote, “isn’t a spirit. Wine is fermented; spirits are distilled. Wine also has a lower ABV (alcohol by volume) percentage than spirits. Do you regret that lyric?”Check and mate. You or I, shown evidence of our shoddy work, might at least pretend to be gracious about it, especially if that tossed-off work had made us wealthier than one hundred sultans. “Shucks,” you or I might say, “you got me!” But unlike us, Don Henley is a real asshole. You can hear his teeth grinding as he types his reply, telling Soeder that he’s “not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor,” as if the careless misuse of words were the same thing as metaphor.“But that line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages,” Henley continued. “It's a sociopolitical statement. My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes.”Get it? It’s a literary device. So, like, the “captain” is Henley’s prostate gland, and the “wine” is the prostate fluid he hasn’t secreted since that grisly accident at Woodstock. Except it’s not just about his prostate—it’s a coded statement about social and political issues, a statement so profound that it can only be expressed in metaphor. It’s a poetic truth, so even answering the question would take the discussion to a “lower” level. Though he pisses ink like a squid in this exchange, Henley fails to obscure Soeder’s point: that it is a terrible, lazy metaphor. At best, the captain’s response is a non sequitur; at worst, it is a truly pretentious clod of purple bullshit.
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Don Henley’s reggae arrangement of “Hotel California”Actually, the sociopolitical statement of “Hotel California” is, Me Don Henley of world famous Eagles. Me shit on sofa, me fuck you wife!!! Me pork women in 1960s L.A. for free, now me suck big dick for dollars. Malibu not same. Life sad. Thanks to John Soeder’s work, now the whole story can be told.Previously – Moe's Mailbag