So I'm trying to look up info on other stuff, and I keep finding interesting tidbits about HC that are new to me. Perhaps they are new to others as well. This is from a 2012 GuitarWorld article about Joe and his then-new album, Analog Man.
About "Life in the Fast Lane":
About "Hotel California":Among his songwriting contributions was the signature guitar riff for the hit “Life in the Fast Lane.”
“That was actually a coordination drill that I’d come up with on guitar to warm up to play live,” he says. “I was just playing it one time and Don Henley goes, ‘What the hell is that!’ Well, it was just an idea floating around. With the Eagles, we would all bring in bits and pieces of music, throw them in a big pile and sort through them.
“Don and Glenn got a hold of that ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ 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 we knew it was an Eagles song, they turned me loose a little bit.”
Walsh and Eagles co-guitarist Don Felder coalesced into a formidable team. “We worked really well together,” Walsh says. “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!’ We would work that way. You can kind of hear that.”
I love reading Joe's perspective about how the Eagles came up with song ideas. http://www.guitarworld.com/interview...bum-analog-manThe Eagles began to craft an arrangement, using the working title “Mexican Reggae.” After Henley came up with the song’s masterful lyric, Felder and Walsh were once again let loose.
“Don had his distinct part and I had my distinct part in the body of the song,” Walsh recounts. “And we thought, What if we merged those together? And that was the dual guitar work that develops during the course of the song. Felder had a lot of ways to go with it, and I tried to focus on that.”
The track’s unforgettable dual-guitar harmonies were played live in the studio by Walsh and Felder. “We took a couple of hours to work all those harmonies out and put them on,” Walsh says. “But over that we did individual solos. Like I said, Felder and I were competitive, but in a good way.”
To the best of Walsh’s recollection, he played a Telecaster on “Hotel California,” while Felder played a Les Paul, and of course the 12-string acoustic part. “We always tried to have a single-coil and a humbucker as the personalities of the guitars,” Walsh explains.
“We found that with two Les Pauls, you couldn’t really hear either of them, and two single-coils was too thin. So I ended up being the single-coil guy on ‘Hotel California.’”