What are "colitas" anyway? And what do they smell like?

When it comes to The Eagles, just about anybody can name a half-dozen of their greatest hits. Before Springsteen and Mellencamp paraded into our consciousness, The Eagles were almost the voice of Americana itself, albeit with a heavily white-bread accent and a John Wayne sense of fashion. However, the sad truth about Henley & Frey, Inc. is this- the songs you didn't hear on the radio were a bunch of real horseflies.

"Hotel California" has gone down as some kind of snapshot of the decadent 70's in America. I don't personally believe that they intended it that way, but Don Henley wouldn't have us believing otherwise. There's nothing about the album that strikes me as all that conceptual, with the exception of the title track and "Life In The Fast Lane". But let's let Henley have it his way.

Nineteen hundred and seventy six was a big year for The Eagles. They had traded out guitarist Bernie Leadon for slurring drunk Joe Walsh, who has to be somehow related to Keith Richards. They were already successful, but poised to reap the mega-millions if they could manage to pull it together. And boy, did they ever- just ask your nearest FM station, if you don't believe me.

The first three songs on "Hotel California" all hit number one, but the rest of the album is simply awful. Well, I guess "Victim Of Love" is OK, since it kind of points to the direction they'd pursue on "The Long Run", but the others truly suck. And let me tell you why.

After you've lived through the heady epic that is the title track, it's hard to sit through an overblown ballad like "Wasted Time" (or its string-addled reprise) and not sink into slumber. Something about Glen Frey playing a piano to Don Henley's lyrics about not caring much for a stranger's touch just leaves me reaching for the crack pipe, if only to stay awake.

The similarly slow and bad "Pretty Maids All In A Row" happens to be Joe Walsh's one contribution to the album. Again, if you like songs that crawl and moan in an ambitiously arthritic way, then boy, get all over it. To me, Joe's voice sounds like a tree frog being slowly strangled.

Even worse would have to be "Try And Love Again" and "The Last Resort", two of the most slug-ugly compositions to ever leave a rehearsal space. The former was bassist Randy Meisner's last gasp (he quit the band after the tour), and it's nothing more than a loping Crosby, Stills, & Nash wanna-be. Meisner was either trying too hard to compete with Henley, or doing his best to make Joe sound better; basically, the tone of his voice reduces my hammer, anvil, and stirrup to a fingernail's worth of pixie dust.

"The Last Resort" is the last track on the album, and another f-in' ballad to boot. It's just seven minutes plus of a band running out of gas, with the added minus of Don trying to get all socially-conscious. He even goes so far as to pick on the white man for some unspecified sins, which is the very demographic that made his stupid azz rich. Know your audience, moron.

However, don't go thinkin' that "Hotel California" has nothing going for it. No matter how many times the radio stations have flattened the title track, it still ranks as one of the greatest songs to come out of the 70's. Not only does it have neat guitar work and semi-spooky lyrics about beasts and inns you can't get away from, it also boasts the second most memorable drum fill in rock history (the first would have to be the one in Phil Collins' "In The Air Tonight", with those rolls in "Tom Sawyer" pulling up for the bronze medal).

"New Kid In Town" is pleasant enough, though it does find them lapsing into their country ways. If I hear one more person refer to the song as "Johnny Come Lately", I might just have to jam a soldering iron into my eye socket. I was surprised to find that it was also a number one.

Also classic is "Life In The Fast Lane", where Don humors us with a tale of sex and self-abuse in the heart of the cold, cold city. I like the man so much better when he wraps his message in twenty-five feet of poetic doublespeak. I'd say that some of his wittiest lyrics are found herein.

Fans of 70's rock have turned this album into a living god, while critics and anti-Eagles diehards love to shoot it down. I'm pretty much in the middle, with a slight lean towards the naysayers. There's a compilation called "The Eagles Greatest Hits, Volume Two" that makes owning this album completely unnecessary. The hits are partly why I think so highly of the 70's, while the others give pretentious ballads a bad name.

Unless you actually like the sound of Walsh and Meisner's wretched voices, seek the hits out elsewhere.