I think this song is dismissive of religion, particularly Christianity, but I don't think that's its main purpose. There's a great deal going on in the song and a lot of subthemes. However, I think the overarching theme is a criticism of the way people raze nature in order to accommodate their own agendas, be it for the purposes of colonization, evangelism, immigration, mining of natural resources, or simply a desire for better real estate; he argues these activities ultimately lead to the destruction of the beauty that attracted people there in the first place. It's along the same lines as Joni Mitchell's "pave paradise, put up a parking lot" lyric. Man thoughtlessly and selfishly corrupts natural beauty. The ending verse cynically implies that even Heaven is not safe from the inevitable corruption brought on by mankind's greed and arrogance.
This is from the Very Best of the Eagles booklet, and gives you Glenn and Don's thoughts on it. GLENN: "The Last Resort" was the final piece of the Hotel California puzzle. We started the song early in the record, and Don finished seven months later. I called it Henley's opus. I helped describe what the song was going to be about and assisted with the arrangement, but it was Don's lyrics and basic chord progression.
One of the primary themes of the song was that we keep creating what we've been running away from -- violence, chaos, destruction. We migrated to the East Coast, killed a bunch of Indians, and just completely screwed that place up. Then we just kept moving west: "Move those teepees, we got some train tracks coming through here. Get outta the way, boy!" There were some very personal references in the song, including a girl from Providence, Rhode Island, who Don had dated for some time. She had taken an inheritance from her grandfather and moved to Aspen, Colorado, in search of a new life. Look where Aspen is now. How prophetic is "The Last Resort" 28 years after it was written? Aspen is a town where the billionaires have driven out the millionaires. It was once a great place. Look at Lahaina; look at Maui. It's so commercial. It's everything Hawaii was not supposed to be. Whether we're carrying the cross or carrying the gasoline cane, we seem to have a penchant for wrecking beautiful places.
DON: The final burst on this one happened in Benedict Canyon at a house I was living in with Irving [Azoff, the band's longtime manager and friend]. I was thinking of all the literary themes based on nature that I had studied back in school -- the awesome beauty and the spirituality inherent in the natural world and the unrelenting destruction of it, wrought by this thing that we call civilization or progress.
Some years earlier we had done a couple of benefit concerts with Neil Young for the Chumash Tribe, Native American people who are indigenous to California. We became friends with an elder in the tribe named Samu, and, eventually, we were invited to attend some tribal rituals and drum ceremonies. Samu was on a mission to raise funds for an education program which would teach the young people in the tribe about their language and their culture. The old man feared, rightly, that the white man's culture was stripping his people of their identity. They were losing the memory of their language, their ceremonies, their history. We were fortunate enough to be able to help.
Also, I'd been reading articles and doing research about the raping and pillaging of the West by mining, timber, oil and cattle interests. But I was interested in an even larger scope for the song, so I tried to go "Michener" with it. I remember going out to Malibu and standing on Zuma beach, looking out at the ocean. I remember thinking, "this is about as far west -- with the exception of Alaska -- as you can go on this continent. This is where Manifest Destiny ends -- right here, in the middle of all these surfboards and volleyball nets and motor homes." And then I thought, "Nah, we've gone right on over and screwed up Hawaii too."
I still think, though, that the song was never fully realized, musically speaking. It's fairly pedestrian from a musical point of view. But lyrically it's not bad. Especially the last verse, which turns it from one thing into another and it becomes an allegorical statement about religion -- the deception and destructiveness that is inherent in the mythology of most organized religion -- the whole "dominion" thing. The song is a reaffirmation of the age-old idea that everything in the universe is connected and that there are consequences, downstream, for everything we do."
The Last Resort
Reply With Quote
) that these are the greatest lyrics ever written:
Originally Posted by thelastresort
But seriously, I do think that this was an interesting new paragraph to the Eagles saga - whether we choose to believe Don F's influence in this case or not.
