LIQUOR: In 1977, Don Henley sings, "So I called up the captain: 'please bring me my wine', He said: 'we haven't had that spirit here since, nineteen-sixty nine," from their hit single Hotel California.
+ Urban legend has it that the "Hotel California" is actually the popularly known California State Mental Hospital at Camarillo, which was shamed for maul-practice. During an upset, patients were fed wine to calm them before dinner.
CIGARETTES: Hunter S. Thompson allegedly spent 36 straight hours in a motel room in Nevada "feverishly writing in a notebook" about some recent experiences. Later in another room in Arcadia, CA these notes were adapted into a manuscript for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
+ Thompson's infamous cigarette holder was a "TarGard Permanent Cigarette Filter System," employed by his literary and cinematic alter-ego Raoul Duke as played by Johnny Depp.
TOILET: In 1960, Psycho's Marian Crane played by Janet Leigh is stabbed to death in a motel bathroom. Alfred Hitchcock's shower-scene becomes regarded as one of the most frightening sequences in cinema history.
+ Leigh was said to have been so affected by this scene, that she no longer took showers unless she absolutely had to. Then she would lock all the doors and windows and would leave the bathroom and shower door open.
BIBLE: Beatles' member Paul McCartney sings of a deadly showdown: "Rocky Raccoon checked into his room, Only to find Gideon's Bible." Rocky comes to the hotel in attempts to catch his cheating "Nancy" in the room adjacent to his.
+ Gideon International was founded in 1899 in Boscobel, Wisconsin as an early parachurch organization dedicated to Christian evangelism. Members began distributing free Bibles in 1908, when the first Bibles were placed in the rooms of the Superior Hotel in Superior, Montana.
DOOR: Jack Keroac, embarking on his famous road trip across mid-America, writes: " In a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds."
+ While many of the names and details of Kerouac's experiences are changed in the novel, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts.
SUITCASE: Elvis Presley sings of a metaphorical place where the lonely lovers of the world find refuge, in Heartbreak Hotel from 1956: "Well, since my baby left me, I found a new place to dwell. Its down at the end of a lonely street, at Heartbreak Hotel."
+ The once fictional hotel manifested physically, located across from Elvis's Graceland Mansion, in Memphis, Tennessee.
