Henley Takes a Dispirited Look at L.A. : Pop Music: Two decades after “Hotel California,” the songwriter’s newest single, “The Garden of Allah,” offers a satiric view of a hardening society.

For almost two decades, the Eagles’ “Hotel California” has stood as a landmark in modern pop . . . a record whose importance reached beyond the fact that it reached the top of the pop charts and won a Grammy in 1978 as the year’s best single.

“Hotel California” was the most distinguished in a series of Eagles songs, including “Life in the Fast Lane” and “Desperado,” that defined lost innocence, personal aspirations and moral temptations in the ‘70s with much of the insight and grace that such novelists as F. Scott Fitzgerald defined similar elements of American society in the ‘20s.

Though the song was meant as a metaphor for America rather than a literal commentary on Southern California, it always seemed chiefly to be about this area, which in the late ‘70s was still basking in the belief that it was, truly, the promised land.

So, it’s sobering to hear Don Henley’s new “The Garden of Allah” single, which seems in many ways the long-awaited sequel to “Hotel California.”

The tune, one of two new songs featured on a Henley greatest-hits album due Nov. 20, is a dark, satiric look at a hardening society. Unlike “Hotel California,” which Henley wrote with Glenn Frey and Don Felder, the new song was written with Stan Lynch, John Corey and Paul Gurian.

“I don’t want to bill this as a sequel,” Henley, 48, says, sitting in a West Los Angeles studio following a rehearsal for the Eagles’ upcoming tour of Australia and Japan. “I don’t like sequels. It is just the same writer looking at the same place 20 years down the line . . . looking at good and evil, dark and light.”

Still, the images strike hard and close to home: references to the region’s natural disasters (fires to earthquakes), the legendary, but long-gone Garden of Allah hotel in Hollywood and, most strikingly, the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Indeed, “The Garden of Allah,” released to radio stations last week, is the first song by a major pop figure to refer to the unprecedented trial.

Henley strikes out at expert witnesses ( “I can get any result you like/ /What’s it worth to ya?” ), and at lawyers and profiteers:

No shame, no solution

No remorse, no retribution

Just people selling T-shirts

Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus

And winning, winning, winning.

Henley wrote the song over the summer, watching the trial and the circus atmosphere. “People selling buttons and pendants and T-shirts and people buying them,” he says angrily. “People forgot that two people got brutally murdered.”

The references to expert witnesses, he says, is not meant solely as an attack on the Simpson defense team.

“The defense stooped pretty low, but I’m really talking about expert witnesses, and they were on both sides,” he says. “The whole concept is a joke. You can hire somebody to corroborate anything.”

But the legal system is just one element in a song that tells of the devil visiting a large Western city called “Gomorrah-by-the-Sea” and finding that he is obsolete. There are references to corporate greed in the record business and elsewhere, environmental destruction and a ruthless spirit. “What the song ultimately says is the lines between good and evil have become blurred . . . and we’ve lost our moral compass, I think,” he says. “And I see it everywhere . . . in small acts . . . the way people drive . . . the sort of ruthless, get- out-of-my-way-or-I’ll-walk-right-over-you mentality that is becoming more pervasive.”

Henley, who lived for years on Mulholland Drive in Sherman Oaks, twists a bit in his chair when asked about Los Angeles.

Should we assume from the song’s acidic tone and the fact that he and his wife, Sharon, have moved to Dallas that “The Garden of Allah” is a condemnation of Los Angeles?

“No, no,” he says, quickly. “We’ll still be out here [some]. I feel just as romantic about Los Angeles and just as disenchanted with it. In, fact, both feelings are probably intensified. I probably love it more and hate it more than when I wrote ‘Hotel California.’ ”

Henley--whose greatest-hits album ends his ties with Geffen Records and makes him a valuable record-industry free agent--pauses, as if summarizing his thoughts about the city. There’s a touch of sadness in his voice as he continues.

“This place was a lot friendlier and a lot nicer when I came here 26 years ago,” he says. “There are still pockets of civility here, but they are rapidly disappearing as neighborhoods and ethnic groups get more and more polarized, and as the city gets more and more crowded. I think the violence and the ruthlessness is going to increase. . . .

“But again this song and ‘Hotel California’ are metaphors for what is happening all across the country. I am simply moving to Dallas because my wife wants to live there and I want to raise our child [due next year] near her grandparents and her aunts and uncles and cousins. That is very important to me . . . that love and support.”