Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns

Does narcissism have a sound? If it does, it is surely a dulcet, soft, melodic, tender sound. The music - for narcissism is nothing if not awfully musical - is shaped by the strumming of acoustic guitars, singly or in banks, and the deployment of lightly struck drums in the most regulatory and unobtrusively supportive style. And let's not forget the closely harmonised voices that are heard everywhere in chorus, standing as they do in the mind's ear for the close working of angelic inner feeling. The music will need to be brightly lit too, both from a high sun and from within. And the words will be poetically revealing. They will reveal only what is important and true about the self. The singer will have a centre parting. Occasionally a moustache.

The sound of smug. The music of self-satisfaction. That's how the music seeded in the LA Canyons of the late 1960s and early 1970s resounded to the Year-Zero punks of 1977. And that's how a lot of it still resounds. Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Stills-Young, Crosby and Nash, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, J D Souther, the Souther Hillman Furay Band, the fact that they were all in and out of each other's bands (and beds) like ferrets - it was vile, it was incestuous, it was the displacement of hippy idealism by self-congratulation. It was, to put the finest possible point on it, The Eagles.

So it's about time someone wrote a decent book about the whole fetid scene - not merely a critical analysis, nor a cheap journalistic exercise in smug-raking (though both of these approaches are amply justified by the subject matter), but a rounded, sober chronicle, taking in the unbridledness of the subject matter as matter-of-factly as it took itself. After all, between them the attendees at Asylum Records' annual Christmas bash may have honked up the gross national product of Bolivia and then sung with unprecedented gravity about the fuzzy contents of their navels, but hey, they were people too; even The Eagles.

This is a very sober chronicle. In fact, Hoskyns' journalistic, rather colourless prose is a perfect fit for the elven-but-steely folk he describes with it. He registers the modulation from Laurel Canyon idealism into snitty corporate cat-fighting with the kind of cool distance which is proper and, more importantly, properly revealing of the human currents that singular world expressed. To begin with, he resists the temptation to make Hotel California into the David Geffen Story. Geffen was the short, unprepossessing hustler who founded Asylum, nurtured the genius of Joni Mitchell in his own living space, fostered the entire West Coast "me"-sensibility as a business-cum-lifestyle strategy and in due course became ferociously litigious. "This is one of the few places in show business," he told Time magazine, "where an executive like me can be a star too." He is, of course, a lovely man. But that story has rather been done (most notably by Fred Goodman, in the crushingly depressing Mansion on the Hill).

Rather, Hoskyns lines up his main players and let's them run off at the mouth, culling his material from a mixture of press cuttings and his own interviews. Best bits? There are too many to mention. But I don't think you can beat the moment when David Crosby compares Crosby Stills Nash & Young, as purveyors of mass culture, to the Gutenberg Bible.

You've got to love 'em, even as you loathe them. Because the best achievement of Hotel California is that it draws an overdue humanising line under the whole Hotel California scene. Come on, the book says subtextually: throw enough sunshine, money, sex, coke, comfy living and social status at anyone in the fall-out from the summer of love - with all its attendant questions of creative probity and aspiration - and this is what you'll get.

It's a story of moral delusion and social weakness. And those failings do not disbar Joni Mitchell from being counted one of the half-dozen most talented non-genre songwriters to have come out of post-war America, nor Don Henley of The Eagles from having a beautiful voice. Though it pains me to say so.