The time Black Sabbath recorded in the same room as the Eagles and found one of the consoles faders “so clogged with cocaine it wouldn’t move”
In 1976, Miami’s Criteria Studios became a hotbed for massive rock albums, when both Black Sabbath and the Eagles converged on the facility to record their respective albums, Technical Ecstasy and Hotel California.
As the story goes, Black Sabbath caused considerable issues for the Eagles, mostly due to excessive noise, which would bleed through the walls and force the band to halt recording and wait for windows of quiet.
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But the Eagles themselves weren’t exactly squeaky-clean in terms of their professionalism, as hard drugs formed a large part of the day to day while recording Hotel California, an album now cemented as one of the greatest of all time.
Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler even once claimed [via MOJO in a new feature] that they once entered the control room the Eagles had vacated to find one of the faders “so clogged with cocaine it wouldn’t move”.
Indeed, one of the biggest songs on Hotel California, Life in the Fast Lane, was heavily inspired by the band’s drug use, with one lyric reading: “There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face.”
“Life in the Fast Lane turned into a celebration of what we were trying to warn people about,” says Eagles founding member Don Henley.
“I could hardly listen to that song when we were recording it, because I was getting high a lot of the time, and the song made me ill.”
Excess was a common thread for the Eagles in the ‘70s, and Don Henley recalled in a recent interview with Guitar World their habit of getting banned from their favourite hotels.
“Keith Moon [The Who drummer] and Joe [Walsh] were good buddies, and that, of course, led to some mischief,” he said.
“It was amusing for a little while, but it eventually became a very expensive hobby, and we were beginning to get barred from some of the hotels we liked to stay in. So after a while, the chainsaws got locked away in storage and other kinds of dramas replaced the ‘remodelling’ of rooms and hallways… But, at least Joe got a hit song out of it! [1978’s Life’s Been Good].”
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