“He would show up in a station wagon full of Les Pauls, Teles and Strats. I bought probably 20 pieces from him over the years”: The classic (and unlikely) gear behind the Eagles’ Hotel California

“Joe Walsh and Don Felder would show up for a session and unpack a minimum of 30 guitars and five or six amps apiece,” Hotel California producer Bill Szymczyk says. “It was, ‘Let’s try this with that.’ What I remember most, though, throughout Hotel California, was a whole lot of Gibson Les Paul with a lot of Fender Telecaster.”

No one can be sure exactly how many – or which – Les Pauls make appearances on Hotel California, but we do know about one of them: Felder’s famous 1959 Burst, which was painstakingly reproduced by Gibson in 2011.

As he told Guitarist around that time, Felder bought the original guitar from a traveling dealer who was famous for his superb stable of vintage axes.

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“His name was Tony Dukes,” he said, “and every time we’d go through Texas, Tony would show up. He was a horse trader, and he always had something in his truck you wanted. He would show up in a station wagon or a truck that was full of Les Pauls, Teles and Strats, and I bought probably 20 pieces from him over the years.

“It must have been about 1974 or something, right after our first big hit, One of These Nights, when I started making money. He came round, and I think I bought three or four pieces from him – the Les Paul, a Tele, a Strat and some other stuff.” And, as he told Guitar World in 2013, he plugged his LP into a Fender Tweed Deluxe – “just kind of cranked up, with just the guitar into the amp.”

“The acoustic guitar in the intro to Hotel California is a Takamine 12-string with a DeArmond pickup,” Felder added. “We mic’d the acoustic and put that in the center of the mix. Then we took the pickup’s output and ran it through a [Maestro] Echoplex and a Leslie. We mic’d that in stereo so it has this left-to-right kind of swirling, ethereal characteristic.”

“For recording acoustic guitars, I usually used a Neumann KM84,” Szymczyk says. “Don had a pickup on his guitar running to a pair of little Orange amps, and we mic’d them in stereo. The initial opening-guitar intro is an acoustic guitar in the middle and an amp on both sides, with a chorus that is flowing back and forth between the two amps.”

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“Felder and I always found that if we both used single-coil or double-coil [guitars], there wasn’t enough contrast to give the songs any personality,” Walsh told Total Guitar in 2012. “It just turned into a guitar wall.” That’s why he famously played a Telecaster on Hotel California, which was perfectly paired with Felder’s Les Paul.

“I played a Tele, through – I think – the Roland Cube, which I used a lot back then,” Walsh added. It was most likely the same Roland Cube he and his Strat used on Life in the Fast Lane.”

On the Hotel California tour, Walsh also used a Fender Black Panel Deluxe Reverb, a Fender Tweed Deluxe and a Mesa/Boogie Mark I.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.