“They wanted respect as rock and rollers”: Why the Eagles counted on the antics of Joe Walsh for credibility
Eagles had it all. Fame, success, record-breaking sales figures, money. What more could an artist want? Well, credibility and the approval of their peers, probably, so in that sense, they didn’t really have it all, after all.
In the Coen Brothers classic The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges’ character, The Dude, spoke for a lot of us when he asked his cab driver to change the channel on the car radio at the sounds of ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’. “Jesus, man,” he says. “I’ve had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man!”
In the scene, the driver doesn’t appear to be sticking as close to the middle of the road as the Eagles do, and he promptly pulls over to kick The Dude out of his car for the musical indiscretion. The scene in the movie sums up the wider conflict in the music world over the perception of the Eagles. To their die-hard fans, they’re one of the greatest bands ever, but to the more discerning listener, they are just another 1970s acoustic-rock act making musical wallpaper.
Eagles might be among of the biggest-selling bands of all time, but The Dude was not alone. Tom Waits—one of the more creative, inventive and incredible artists of our time—has expressed similar feelings about the band. “I don’t like the Eagles,” he told NME after the group had covered his song ‘Ol’ 55’. “They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry.”
T-Bone Burnett’s feelings towards the band were even harsher, and he believed that the group “sort of single-handedly destroyed that whole scene that was brewing back then.” And the Eagles were aware of their reputation. At times, no one hated the band more than its own members, and no one has railed harder against their soft-edged, easy-listening labels more than Don Henley and Glenn Frey. But it was another one of their number who they believed gave them the most edge, the most grit, and subsequently, the biggest shot at getting some rock and roll credibility from the outside world.
The band may not have approved of the reckless antics of guitarist Joe Walsh—who was famous for trashing hotel rooms and smashing up his instruments—but they privately hoped that stories of his rough and rowdy ways would help them to shake off some of the more clean-cut, boring or scene-killing tags they’d been labelled with.
“The band never approved of [Walsh’s] room trashing, but they understood it”, their manager Irving Azoff said. “They wanted respect as rock and rollers, and Joe brought that.”
Summing up the contrast between Walsh’s rebellious role in the group and Henley’s more safe, straight and narrow personality, the drummer and singer said, “It was fun, depending on how much you had to drink, to watch a TV go out a hotel window and into a pool”, before adding, “as long as nobody got hurt.”
