Room Service: Hotels In Song Trivia Quiz

Answer: Eagles

"Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year (any time of year)
You can find it here..."

The Eagles (aka Eagles) came together in Los Angeles in 1972 with the first line up of Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner. The musicians had initially been the backing band for Linda Ronstadt.

In 1977, "Hot California" became the fourth Eagles song to top the Billboard Hot 100. It went on to sell more than three million copies in the US alone.

The song has been much analysed. Don Henley, who co-wrote it with Frey and Felder, told the '60 Minutes' TV show in 2007: "It's a song about the dark underbelly of the American Dream, and about excess in America which was something we knew about."

True fans will recognise that the wrong answers were all bands that the fledgling Eagles members - The Eaglets? - played in.

Answer: Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen was probably writing from experience, he lived in the hotel for a time. He recalled: "I had heard about the Chelsea Hotel as being a place where I might meet people of my own kind. And I did. It was a grand, mad place."
The person who he remembered well was the enigmatic songstress Janis Joplin.

He spoke of meeting her in an elevator. He asked her "Are you looking for someone? She said, 'Yes, I'm looking for Kris Kristofferson.' I said 'Little Lady, you're in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson'. Those were generous times. Even though she knew that I was someone shorter than Kris Kristofferson, she never let on. Great generosity prevailed in those doom decades. Anyhow, I wrote this song for Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel."
[Quoted from his introduction to 'Chelsea Hotel #2' at a 1988 New York City concert.]

He later spoke of regretting how the song came to be written: "There was the sole indiscretion, in my professional life, that I deeply regret, because I associated a woman's name with a song..."

Answer: Elvis Presley

Hang your head in shame if you did not get this one.

As well as being the King's first US number one pop single 'Heartbreak Hotel' was the most successful song of 1956.

Written by Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden, the lyrics were allegedly based on a newspaper article about a lonely man who jumped from a hotel window.

Chet Atkins played guitar and Floyd Cramer was on piano in the recording session. The single topped Billboard's Top 100 for seven weeks, was number one on the Country and Western chart, and reached number five on the R&B chart and became Presley's first million-seller. In a 2015 'Rolling Stone' readers' poll of "The 10 Best Elvis Presley Songs", this was their number seven selection.

In later years a guest house named 'Heartbreak Hotel' was opened at Presley's Graceland theme park.

Answer: Ella Fitzgerald

"There's A Small Hotel" was just one of 33 tracks on the 1956 album "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book".

Ella Fitzgerald had a colourful life. She fled her parents' home to escape the violence of her father. While living with an aunt in Harlem, New York City, she embarked on a life of youth crime; being a bookie's runner and a lookout at a brothel.
She earned loose change singing on the streets and made her stage debut at an amateur's night in 1934, winning the $25 prize.

Her career took off and in 1958 she became the first African American woman to win a Grammy. Fitzgerald recorded more than 200 albums before ending her career with a Carnegie Hall concert in 1991. Ill health dogged her final years. She lost both her legs to diabetes in 1993, and died in 1996.

In 2021, ranker.com placed Fitzgerald at number one on their list of 'The Best Female Jazz Singers'.

Answer: Dan Fogleberg

"Heart Hotels" also reached number three on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart.

Born in Peoria, Illinois in 1951, Fogelberg's career took off in 1972 and he produced 13 albums between then and 2003. He died in 2007 through cancer, and another album was released in 2009.

Reporting his death, Associated Press (AP) noted that Fogleberg's hits "Leader of the Band" and "Same Old Lang Syne" helped define the soft-rock era.

AP continued: "Fogelberg's music was powerful in its simplicity. He didn't rely on the volume of his voice to convey his emotions; instead, they came through in the soft, tender delivery and his poignant lyrics."

Of course you knew that the wrong answers all hailed from Michigan.

Answer: Stevie Nicks

"Imperial Hotel" appeared on "Rock A Little", the third solo album from the Fleetwood Mac mainstay.

Fleetwood Mac had, it is fair to say, its shares of ups and downs and fragile egos. Nicks and Christine McVeigh left in 1990, though the best-known lineup was to perform again.

Nicks wrote three songs and co-wrote a fourth on Fleetwood Mac's massive 1977 hit album "Rumours". Her song "Dreams" topped the Billboard Hot 100.

While Nicks had a productive solo career, she rarely, in her own view, got any recognition from the mainstream media. ""I learned a long time ago that I'd have to work very hard to get even a blink from any of them, not as a woman or a performer, but as a writer," she told 'US Magazine'.

Annie Zaleski wrote in the 'Guardian' in 2019 Nicks had a poetic songwriting style more idiosyncratic than that of other prominent female musicians.

It was not all in vain, though. Nicks became the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice.

Answer: Golden Earring

Through a variety of line-ups, Golden Earring (aka Golden Earrings) had a string of European hits between 1965 and 2019. They hit the US Billboard Hot 100 top 30 with their number 13 "Radar Love" in 1973.

"The Last Frontier Hotel" was a track on their 2019 album "Millbrook USA".

You probably knew that there was actual Hotel Last Frontier that opened on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, in 1941.

And you probably also knew that A-ha were a group from Norway; Ace of Bass were from Sweden; and Wonderwall were a trio from Germany.

Answer: Gordon Lightfoot

Now that was a question heavy on the clues.

In 2019, classicrockhistory.com placed "If You Could Read My Mind" at number two in its list of 'Top 10 Gordon Lightfoot Songs'. The number one was "Sundown", which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA in 1975.

Lightfoot was a talented musician from a young age and moved about in Canada, to Los Angeles and to England. It's fair to say that hearing Bob Dylan songs influenced him towards the acoustic folk style of the 1960s.

His breakthrough came when Ian & Sylvia Tyson heard him sing in Toronto and introduced him to their manager, Albert Grossman, who signed him up. The first album was "Lightfoot" in 1966.

Soon other artists were beating a (metaphorical) path to his door. Among those to cover his songs were Ian & Sylvia (naturally), Peter, Paul, and Mary, Marty Robbins and...Bob Dylan.

When CBC issued a list in 2019 of the '25 best Canadian songwriters ever', they placed Lightfoot at number five.

Answer: David Blue

At a time when it seemed that everyone wanted to be a folk singer, David Blue wanted to be one particular folk singer: he wanted to be Bob Dylan.

Dylan had moved his songwriting away from his early topical and protests imagery into the more surreal. Others followed, but it was David Blue who proved he could match Dylan.

Hailing out of Rhode Island, Blue (birth name David Cohen) was a friend of Dylan's and claimed to have helped write "Blowin' In The Wind" by playing chords on his guitar while Dylan found the words.

Between 1968 and 1976, Blue released seven solo albums. The eponymous debut album contained some of his best songs, including "Grand Hotel", "The Gasman Won't Buy Your Love", "About My Love" and So Easy She Goes By".

Earlier, he had sung on the compilation album 'Singer Songwriter Project' with Richard Fariña, Patrick Sky, and Bruce Murdoch.

Blue died in December 1982, of a heart attack while jogging in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Perhaps Blue tried too hard, but, 'Rolling Stone' magazine opined, his timing was always bad. "He was both behind and ahead of the times on a regular basis", David Browne wrote in 2020.

Answer: Graham Parker

Graham Parker was a talented songwriter who emerged amid the British punk scene of the mid 1970s. Parker was never punk, though. His songs were erudite and his backing band, The Rumour, were one of the tightest outfits around.

I love Graham Parker songs, and "Hotel Chambermaid" is GP&TR at their glorious best. But perhaps "Hotel Chambermaid", a product of the 1970s, might be dimly viewed in the "woke" days of the 2020s. (Couple "Lady Doctor" into that frame.)

However, as Parker has said in concert, "Hotel Chambermaid" was a song that audiences shouted out for when he had a band with him.

For all his popularity in concert, Parker found chart success elusive. His best UK release was in 1977 with a cover of "Hold Back The Night" (originally by The Tramps). It reached number 24 in the UK.