Joe Walsh
One day at a time
By Massimo D'Angelo
On the afternoon of July 20th,
1969, everyone was looking up at the sky: Neil
Armstrong was taking his first steps for mankind on the moon. A day to
remember. A historic day (one that will never repeat itself). The whole world
had their eyes glued to their televisions, their ears trained on their radio
sets…the more romantic of them gazed up at the stars, as if from where they
were standing they could see something. Everyone was waiting for the 'small step
for man, one giant leap for mankind'. Well, nearly everyone. Actually, there
were 2,574 people that weren't. They had paid $5 to see a different kind of
event (sold out, of course). But these stars were made of flesh and blood.
We are at the Warrensville Heights Musicarnival in Ohio, USA, some 1,000 miles
away from Cape Canaveral, Florida, from where Apollo XI had blasted off four
days before. The Brits Jimmy, John, John
Paul and Robert, with their first LP which had been out on the streets for
a few months and the second about to be recorded, go up onto the stage…'Ladies
and gentlemen, Led Zeppelin'. Jimmy Page and company are ready to
strut their stuff in front of a crowd that is already wild with delight. They
have been set on fire by the warm-up act, a local band named James Gang, led by a youthful Joe Walsh (who would celebrate his 22nd
birthday exactly four months later, on 20th November) on guitar and
voice, with Jim Fox on drums and Tom Kriss playing the bass. Walsh was on a high – his new band had
just released their first LP (Yer' Album, with such tracks as Funk
#48 and I Don't Have The Time) and are about to go back to the studio
to record their second (James Gang Rides Again, with tracks including
Funk#49,
The
Bomber and Woman). Sales are good, the public are loving their live
performances, his left hand glides over the neck of his Gibson Les Paul with an effortless ease that will stay with him for
many years to come. His creativity when songwriting is out of this world. It
doesn't matter if his voice is 'different' (neither good not bad, as he himself
says) – his guitar will get to the notes that his vocal chords can't.
That 1969 was to be a great year – James Gang opened for Led Zeppelin and on 26th
October of the same year, they did the same for The Who in their first North American tour to promote Tommy,
the British band's fourth studio album. The band wowed Pete Townshend so much that he would then want them to be the
opening act for all the dates of their European tour.
Joe Walsh is a likeable type. A down to earth, 'ordinary, average guy', an analogical artist. And his sound…what he
did was the sound of the '70s. A sound that convinced the critics on the one
hand and the world's guitar greats on the other (clearly he had earned the
admiration of Page and Townshend, but also that of musicians
such as Eric Clapton, who years
later would say that he is one of the best stage guitarists there have been for
a long time: "I don't often listen to many records, but I do his").
Joe's sound had something special to it, as if he could transmit some
of the magic in his fingers to the instrument itself, and lock it in there forever.
As if it were voodoo, Joe Walsh's rock
impregnated the instrument's wood. Perhaps it was no coincidence that one
of his Gibson Les Paul (seemingly,
made in 1959) would end up being Jimmy
Page's famous #1, bought from him sometime in April, 1969 for $1,200. Nor
that The Who's sound in their
'post-Tommy' era en Who's Next (1971) and Quadrophenia (1973) came from a '59 Gretsch 6120 'Chet Atkins' Hollow Body
that Walsh gave to Pete Townshend together with a '59 Fender 3x10 Bandmaster in 1970.
A good friend of John Belushi, partner and lover of the queen of Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks (who remembers him as 'the great love of my life'), Joe Walsh was a man of excesses who has
survived a life in which he has climbed mountains of drugs, swum rivers of liquor
and had his way with endless queues of groupies and prostitutes. And there has
been death, too: that of his three-year-old daughter, Emma, who died in a traffic accident when a drunk-driver collided
head-on into the car driven by the girl's mother (who was soon Joe's ex-wife).
Joe
Walsh is the comical genius who has penned such great songs as Life's Been Good in 1978 and I.L.B.T.s (I Like Big Tits, that
he himself admitted 'started off as a love song, but something got twisted
along the way') in 1983. In 1980, despite not having the minimum legal age
requirement to be president, he presented
himself as an independent candidate for the presidential elections in 1980
(later won by the dire actor Ronald
Reagan, despite the good musician's unbeatable offer of 'free gas for
all'). Walsh was the first guitarist to
literally give voice to his guitar through the Talkbox in his '73 classic, Rocky
Mountain Way.
His versatility with the six strings ranges
from the crystal clear sounds on his acoustic (especially during 1972-73, his Barnstorm
years after James Gang and some
tracks 'dangerously' similar to the style of the folk singer James Taylor) to the ballsy rock that electrified
the Eagles in the second half of the
70s.
Joe had been a friend of the Eagles
for some time. They had shared a stage on more than one occasion before 20th
December 1975, the day on which Irving
Azoff, the manager of both parties, announced the guitarist's incorporation
into the band, replacing Bernie Leadon.
Quite a Christmas present!
Walsh's unbridled energy and uncontrollable personality was not a perfect
match for the boring, measured precision and executive perfection of the
country/rock birds of the famous Take it Easy. After a few inevitable
clashings of heads, Walsh finally learnt
to play his part and tow the line on stage under the orders of the two leaders
of the Eagles, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, allowing him his crazy moments of
spontaneous and exhilarating schizophrenia during the band's down-time. Being a
member of the band (that reached its height with the LP Hotel California in
December 1976 before imploding just four years later during their The
Long Run tour) was good for him. The rest is history: The Eagles went flying each their own way, Joe leading a solo career until all
(well, nearly all) flew back to their communal nest first in 1994 and then
again in these years of the 21st Century.
It doesn't matter what guitar he hangs
round his neck – be it a Gibson, a Fender, a Gretsch, a Carvin or a Duesenberg. The only thing that matters
to him is being able to plug it into an amp and play - with or without a slide,
with or without a tube in his mouth. It doesn't matter if he's playing Ravel's
Bolero in the middle of his never-ending The Bomber or the best
guitar duo in Rock history (in Hotel California with Don Felder). Joe Walsh was born to play and enchant his snakes.
Now older, Walsh has gotten over his dark years, his addictions, his excesses.
In this way, he is not the same man as he was. He doesn't even dress the same –
gone are the loud, gaudy shirts and trousers, '70's cowboy boots and aviator
glasses. Now, the musician has a serious dark-suited 'MiB' look. In November
2008, he married once again, for the fifth time (he is now brother-in-law of
ex-Beatle Ringo Star). His wife, Majorie Bach, is the person to be
thanked for pushing the guitarist, now at the ripe old age of 66, back into the
recording studios to record his first new material in 20 years.
What is most promising about our hero's
story up to now is his most recent work (Analog
Man, 2012), in which we find links to his past, such as Funk
#50 and Lucky That Way, the younger brother of Life's Been Good, both full
of the spirit of that magnificent guitarist from the 70s, that
extraordinarily likeable guy, always able to bring a smile on his public's
faces from up on the stage. A faithful public who will wait patiently (as if it
were for some cosmic event, like that 1969 moonwalk) for the arrival of a Funk
#51, a #52 and a #53…
Massimo D'Angelo
@massimo_dangelo