Song notes

We had already cut the basic album, l think about eleven songs and we were going to pick the album from that. I was coming from the Holiday lnn in Muscle Shoals to the studio in a car service and all of a sudden l got this urge to work on a song that I’d been working on for over a year. By the time I got to the studio which was 15 minutes later I walked in and everybody said ‘You got a great album’ and I said ‘I’lI teIl you what, I’ll buy everybody a Cadillac if we cut this one’, just joking around, and everybody was O.K. I went to Barry Beckett with my guitar, hummed it out to him, played it out to him, and they still don’t know what the song sound like. I said 'This time I'm gonna do a vocal on it, make sure all the pots are clean’ cause I had only been doing scratch vocals up to then. They still hadn't heard the song, I just sung a dummy lyric when I ran it through to make sure the changes were straight. I went into the booth and I hit down on this song and when I sang the first lines the band was startled. When we got finished recording - on the ?rst take – everybody was on the floor. They were flabbergasted. I knew in my heart that this song was gonna be a hit. When I got back to Mercury, we sat down and listened to a couple ot fast things and they never heard me get into slow songs. Charlie Fach (Mercury's head man) said ‘we’ll come with ‘Stayed Away Too Long’, I said that I just wanted this song on the record.
A couple of days after the record was out the phones started ringing at Mercury, people wanting to know where they could get ‘The Hotel Song’. Charlie's trying to ?gure out what ‘The Hotel Song’ is so I can do a cover version, we're sitting there trying to pick a single from my album, and finally the secretary comes in and says ‘Guess What? ‘The Hotel Song’ is Don's record!’ In a couple of days it became a total smash down south and started moving across the country - Don Covay

Personnel & recording information

• Lead guitar – David Wolfert
• Rhythm session – Muscle Shoals Sound Band under the direction of Don Covay
• Vocals – Don Covay

Recorded at in Muscle Shoals, AL
String arrangements by Horace Ott
Produced by Don Covay