Just what does “colitis” mean? In the song “Hotel California” by the Eagles the first lines are, “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitis rising up through the air.” I remember I tried looking it up at a university library years ago and couldn’t find the answer. I know songwriters sometimes make up words, but I didn’t see a Dr. Seuss credit on the album.
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As for “Hotel California,” you realize a lot of people aren’t troubled so much by colitas as by the meaning of the whole damn song. Figuring that we should start with the general and move to the particular, I provide the following commonly heard theories:
(1) The Hotel California is a real hotel located in (pick one) Baja California on the coastal highway between Cabo San Lucas and La Paz or else near Santa Barbara. In other words, the song is a hard look at the modern hospitality industry, which is plagued by guests who “check out any time [they] like” but then “never leave.”
(6) My fave, posted to the Usenet by Thomas Dzubin of Vancouver, British Columbia: “There was this fireworks factory just three blocks from the Hotel California…and it blew up! Big tragedy. One of the workers was named Wurn Snell and he was from the town of Colitas in Greece. One of the workers who escaped the explosion talked to another guy…I think it was probably Don Henley…and Don asked what the guy saw. The worker said, “Wurn Snell of Colitas…rising up through the air.”
This E-mail just in from Eagles management honcho Irving Azoff: “In response to your [recent] memo, in 1976, during the writing of the song ‘Hotel California’ by Messrs. Henley and Frey, the word colitas was translated for them by their Mexican-American road manager as ‘little buds.’ You have obviously already done the necessary extrapolation. Thank you for your inquiry.”
