The 1991 song Joe Walsh wrote about his mid-life crisis: “Pick up the dog doo”
It’s no secret that Joe Walsh lived a wild rock and roll lifestyle back in the day. In 1975, the musician joined the Eagles just in time for their incredibly successful album Hotel California.
Although Walsh is best known for being a member of the Eagles, he began playing in bands in the 1960s, performing lead vocals and guitars for the James Gang, and has since been a member of Ringo Starr and His All-Star Band, Barnstorm, Herbs, The Best, and enjoyed a prolific solo and session career.
During rock and roll’s heyday, Walsh indulged in the hedonism and grandeur that came with being a rock star. A notorious hotel trasher, the musician told Conan O’Brien that he and John Belushi once racked up a $23,000 hotel bill after ripping the wallpaper off the walls of a penthouse suite, leaving so much damage that he could “see where the plaster guy wrote 5 3/4 inches” on the drywall.
In another interview, Walsh revealed that he “started up the chainsaw and made my own door” in a Holiday Inn room after he realised he and manager Irving Azoff didn’t have connecting rooms as initially promised.
Much of Walsh’s wild behaviour stemmed from his intense drug and alcohol abuse, for which he has been in recovery since 1993. Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler even stated that every time they entered the studio after the Eagles, they’d have to scrape cocaine out of the mixing board. In 1978, the musician summed up his crazy lifestyle in the song ‘Life’s Been Good’, singing, “I live in hotels, tear out the walls/ I have accountants pay for it all.”
“I wanted to make a statement involving satire and humour, kind of poking fun at the incredibly silly lifestyle that someone in my position is faced with.”
Joe Walsh
In a 1991 interview with the BBC, Walsh explained the song’s sentiment, “I wanted to make a statement involving satire and humour, kind of poking fun at the incredibly silly lifestyle that someone in my position is faced with. […] It is a strange lifestyle – I’ve been around the world in concerts, and people say, ‘What was Japan like?’ but I don’t know. It’s got a nice airport, you know… so it was kind of an overall statement.”
Part of what made Walsh so compelling throughout his career was his ability to balance outrageous behaviour with a strong sense of self-awareness.
Unlike many rock stars who embraced excess without reflection, Walsh often seemed fully conscious of how absurd his lifestyle had become, turning those experiences into self-deprecating humour rather than self-mythologising. Songs like ‘Life’s Been Good’ worked because listeners could sense that he was laughing at himself just as much as the culture surrounding him.
That humour became increasingly important as Walsh grew older and began confronting the darker consequences of years spent living recklessly. By the time he released ‘Ordinary Average Guy’, there was a noticeable desire to reconnect with normality and everyday life, even if expressed through exaggerated comedy. Beneath the jokes about bowling alleys and picking up dog mess sits a musician attempting to redefine himself outside the chaos of rock stardom, something that would become even more significant following his eventual sobriety.
However, in 1991, Walsh penned a track that starkly contrasted ‘Life’s Been Good’. Appearing on an album of the same name, ‘Ordinary Average Guy’ details Walsh’s mid-life crisis. He asserts that despite his rockstar status, he’s just a normal guy, singing, “We all live ordinary average lives/ With average kids/ And average wives/ We all go bowling at the bowling lanes/ Drink a few beers/ Bowl a few frames.”
He even throws in some humour-laden lyrics, such as “And every Saturday we work in the yard/ Pick up the dog do/ Hope that it’s hard (woof woof)/ Take out the garbage and clean out the garage/ My friend’s got a Chrysler/ I’ve got a Dodge.” The album was Walsh’s penultimate release before he took a twenty-year absence from making solo music, spurred by 1992’s Songs for a Dying Planet, which was received overwhelmingly negatively.
Walsh bounced back in 2012 with Analog Man, which peaked at number 12 on the Billboard 200 chart.
