Life in the Fast Lane: the warm-up lick that became an Eagles song
Joe Walsh had a guitar exercise, and Don Henley heard a song. Walsh was warming up with a coordination drill when Henley asked what he was playing. The figure became the riff at the center of "Life in the Fast Lane," a track on the Eagles' Hotel California.
Walsh told Guitar World that the figure began as "a coordination drill that I'd come up with on guitar to warm up to play live." He was playing it one time when Henley said, "What the hell is that!" Walsh described it to Rolling Stone, as Ultimate Classic Rock quotes him, in more detail: he was in his dressing room getting ready for a show with "this one lick I'd play over and over as part of warming up," because it is a hard lick to play. Henley fetched Glenn Frey, and Walsh played it for both of them. They asked if it was his, and when he said yes, the answer was, "Well, there's our Joe Walsh Eagles song!" Songfacts adds that the band made him play the riff again and decided to develop it.
The band needed it. Walsh recalled that the Eagles had been looking for something from "Joe Walsh, rocker" that could be the foundation for one of their songs, and that a couple of false starts had gone nowhere. Joining the group had been a fairly natural step. He had shared bills with the Eagles on the road, and they had the same manager, Irving Azoff. Guitarist Bernie Leadon, a country purist, had grown uncomfortable with the more rock-oriented direction Henley and Frey wanted. When Leadon decided he was not interested in continuing, Walsh said, Frey and Henley thought he would fit where the band was heading, and the result was Hotel California.
The phrase itself came from Frey. Ultimate Classic Rock reports that the phrase came from a ride on a freeway: Frey was riding with a friend who was driving too fast, and when Frey told him to slow down, the driver answered, "What do you mean, man? We're in the fast lane!" Frey held on to the phrase for months. He and Henley imagined a song about "some Hollywood couple that has everything and takes it all to excess and destroys their lives." What they lacked was a riff to bring that story to life, and Walsh's lick was it.
Walsh remembers the lick passing through shared hands, with Henley as the lyricist, though Ultimate Classic Rock traces the phrase to Frey. "With the Eagles, we would all bring in bits and pieces of music, throw them in a big pile and sort through them," he told Guitar World. "Don and Glenn got a hold of that riff. Glenn kinda arranged it, and we did a demo of it. Then Don had the idea of 'life in the fast lane.' He put the words together, and we recorded it for real. And then Don Felder and I figured out the guitar work." Once it was clearly an Eagles song, he said, they turned him loose a little bit. The credit reads Walsh, Frey and Henley, and Walsh has said he is proud of it as a "Walsh/Henley/Frey tune."
Walsh and Felder formed an effective team. "We worked really well together," Walsh said. "It was competitive. We brought out the best in each other. He would play something, and I'd get an attitude like, 'Oh yeah? Listen to this.' And he'd go, 'Wow, listen to this!'" Guitar World describes the same partnership on the title track, where the two weave intertwined leads. That song began as a twelve-string acoustic demo that Felder put together; the Eagles called their early arrangement "Mexican Reggae" until Henley wrote the lyric. Walsh said his part and Felder's were distinct sections that the pair merged into the song's dual-guitar passage.
The lyric is a warning rather than a celebration. Songfacts says the song describes a man and woman who had everything and lost it because of their lifestyles, and that the phrase became shorthand for a jet-set way of life even though the track was meant as a caution about excess. Frey explained in a 1981 BBC interview that it expressed a stereotyped Los Angeles "24 hour boogie mode" that he found disturbing in its extremes. Henley told Mojo, "'Life in the Fast Lane' turned into a celebration of what we were trying to warn people about." Walsh agreed that his bandmates may have recognized themselves in it, saying the band came to see that parties and fast cars "are really not the answer."
The recording came together on the album that introduced Walsh to Eagles listeners. Hotel California was released in 1976 and was Walsh's first album with the group, replacing Leadon. Producer Bill Szymczyk had made the band's two previous albums, and the recording was split between the Record Plant in Los Angeles and Criteria Studios in Miami. Besides the title track and this song, the singles included "New Kid in Town." Don Felder told Songfacts that once the title song was in place, a theme developed: arriving in L.A. as the "New Kid in Town," living "Life in the Fast Lane," and then wondering whether the time spent in bars was just "Wasted Time."
Walsh also wrote the album's "Pretty Maids All in a Row" with Joe Vitale, according to Ultimate Classic Rock. Guitar World credits him with giving the Eagles a grittier rock element on top of their polished sound.
- Guitar World, Joe Walsh discusses his career and Analog Man — www.guitarworld.com
- Songfacts, Life In The Fast Lane by Eagles — www.songfacts.com
- Ultimate Classic Rock, The Story Behind Every Song on Eagles Hotel California — ultimateclassicrock.com
- Guitar World, The Eagles are the undisputed masters of harmony lines blending country and rock — www.guitarworld.com