Some hotels are famous for one great rock'n'roll story: the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam where John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged their Bed-In, for example, or the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan where Keith Moon claimed to have driven a Lincoln Continental into a swimming pool.
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Others, however, become regular playgrounds for pop and rock stars, and have a book's worth of tales and secrets hidden in their walls, like the Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, about which Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales recently released the concept album Room 29.
But the Chateau isn't even the only rock haven hotel in Hollywood. Here's some more of what the chambermaid saw...
Originally opened by singing cowboy Gene Autry, the Continental Hyatt House's prime position towards the eastern end of Sunset Strip made it handy for the rock clubs.
It was its forgiving attitude towards excess, though, that made it a firm favourite with musicians. Little Richard lived at the hotel in the 80s and 90s, and Lemmy wrote the song Motorhead there while still a member of Hawkwind.
Jim Morrison was moved to a back room after dangling out of the window over the Strip, while Spinal Tap were interviewed by the Hyatt pool in This Is Spinal Tap (the hotel also features in Cameron Crowe's film about a teenage journalist writing for Rolling Stone, Almost Famous).
New York's most legendary hotel, the Chelsea was originally built as a commune inspired by the ideas of French philosopher Charles Fourier, a radical utopian socialist credited with the coining of the word 'feminism', but also with the belief that mankind, on achieving the perfect social order, would grow tails with little hands at the end.
Things initially didn't get that weird at the Chelsea, but after its conversion to a hotel in 1905, it certainly
thrummed with creative energy and attracted residents such as musicians Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Nico, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and writers Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller and William Burroughs.
Madonna shot photos for her Sex book at the Chelsea, while Andy Warhol superstar Viva, on deciding that her room should be bigger, simply knocked a hole through to the empty room next door. Sadly, the hotel is also notorious as the place where Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen and the hotel is namechecked in many songs, including Dylan's Sara, Nico's Chelsea Girls (written about Warhol's film of the same name) and Graham Nash's The Chelsea Hotel.
Then there's Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel No. 2. Written two years 
after Janis Joplin died of an overdose in a Hollywood hotel, the Landmark, it recounts an encounter between the two young stars. According to Cohen, as reported by Rolling Stone, the two met in the elevator. Joplin told Cohen she was looking for Kris Kristofferson. "Little lady, you're in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson," he told her.
The Riot House, as it became known (it was renamed the Hyatt on Sunset in 1976 and the Andaz West Hollywood in 2009) is perhaps the most notorious in a city full of hotels with a rock'n'roll reputation (despite keen competition from the Sunset Marquis, just around the corner, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers once cannonballed from the roof into the pool on a video shoot). And the band probably responsible for most of its legends are Led Zeppelin, who travelled with an accountant to tot up damages. They could have afforded a much more luxurious hotel, but preferred to rent out whole floors of the Hyatt and throw foam parties in the rooftop pool.
John Bonham rode his motorbikes down the hotel’s corridors, while Robert Plant allegedly shouted, "I am a golden god!" from one of the hotel's balconies (a scene repeated by character Russell Hammond in Almost Famous). They were also generous with their destruction: according to their tour manager Richard Cole in the documentary Sunset Strip, when a hotel employee told them how envious he was that they could smash the rooms up, they told him to pick a room of his choice, vent his frustrations to his heart's content and add it to their bill.
