Rock Stars in Hotels: ‘Whatever Happened to the Good Old Days?’

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  11.29.07 | 12:21 PM ET

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Photo of Hotel Chelsea in New York City by Ten Safe Frogs via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Trashing a hotel room like a wild animal is so 1990s. Today’s rock stars want the same things many of us want in a hotel—clean and quiet rooms without intruding housekeepers, high-speed Internet access, an in-hotel gym and maybe some San Pellegrino in the mini-bar, writes David Browne in The New York Times. “These guys want to go back to their rooms and have peace and quiet,” Jennifer Chiara, a travel agent who works with musicians, tells Browne. “Gone are the days of people riding a motorcycle down the hallway.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Led Zeppelin and the Who used to hurl television sets out of hotel windows and cement furniture to ceilings. In 1992, Nirvana caused $18,000 worth of damages to a hotel room. Rock stars were such undesirable hotel guests that organizers booking rooms often had trouble getting their calls returned.

Now rock stars are loathe to do such an uncomfortable thing. “I’d have to sleep in my own filth,” said Chris Urbanowicz, a guitarist for the British band the Editors. “What’s the point?”

Even the Hotel Chelsea, the “sleaze-rock emporium where Sid Vicious may or may not have stabbed his girlfriend,” is going to be renovated by an upscale hotel management company.

Chiara, the travel agent, laughed at the changing times. “Whatever happened to the good old days?”

Tags: Hotels, Music, Pop Culture Travel, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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