September 18, 2002
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There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell. And I was thinking to myself, “This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”
Then she lit up a candle
and she showed me the way…
Mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice. And she said, “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”
BACKGROUND FROM DON HENLEY
ON “THE GARDEN OF ALLAH”
“The song is loosely based on a recently published book (actually, I wrote the song before I read the book), The Death of Satan (How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil), written by Andrew Delbanco….
…we land at last smack-dab in the ‘culture of irony,’ which is where we sit, like Job, in dust and ashes.
THE STORY LINE OF THE SONG
“THE GARDEN OF ALLAH”
Satan is quite frustrated because things have gotten so bad that even he is confounded….
He waxes nostalgic about the good ol’ days when he hung out in Hollywood with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Aldous Huxley… [at] the historic Garden of Allah apartment hotel.
THE L.A. GARDEN OF ALLAH
A 3 1/2-acre hotel complex of Spanish-style bungalows that once stood on Sunset Boulevard…. During its three-decade heyday, the Garden of Allah was the site of robberies, orgies, drunken rages, tense honeymoons, bloody brawls, divorces, suicides, and murder.”
