How joining the Eagles helped save Joe Walsh’s life: “I didn’t care”
No one is really thinking of joining a band as a life-or-death situation. The financial incentive might be good if it happens to be one of the biggest groups in the world, but it’s always about trying to find the right bunch of people that you can jam with rather than thinking about the beach house that you can buy once you have the big bucks rolling in. Joe Walsh didn’t need to care about such things when he joined the Eagles, but he definitely needed an emotional canopy over him so he wouldn’t lose himself.
If Walsh ever had a problem in his life, though, you wouldn’t know it from how he talked half the time. He was the court jester of the group whenever he played live, and even when everything seems carefully choreographed and nailed down to the letter, Walsh is always the one throwing some different shapes at the rest of the band, whether it was the early days with Glenn Frey or messing around with Vince Gill whenever performing with him now.
Then again, Walsh had that down to a science before he had even joined the group. His solo career was shaping up to be a good time no matter which way you looked at it, and despite becoming one of the seminal solo acts of the 1970s, he always did have a vulnerable side. For every ‘Rocky Mountain Way’, there would be a ‘Help Me Through the Night’, but even when balancing out his emotions, nothing could prepare him for losing his daughter, Emma, while he was on tour.
That kind of body blow is enough to break anyone down, but Walsh knew better than to let that tragedy define him. ‘Song for Emma’ was always going to be his personal mantra to get him through those dark days, but even if the world was weighing him down most of the time, it certainly helped when he got his pair of wings when Don Henley called him up.
The band were looking for a guitarist after Bernie Leadon wasn’t working out, but as Walsh remembered, the call couldn’t have come at a better time, saying, “I didn’t care about nothing. I didn’t have any emotions, and I wasn’t strong enough to continue a solo career. [My daughter] died…nobody knew that. That squashed me like a bug, and I tried to kill myself for 18 months. I forgave God and joined the Eagles just to get going again.”
Those wounds were bound to be raw when he joined, but Walsh’s trademark humour fit like a glove. Not everything about recording Hotel California was going to be easy, but by writing songs like ‘Pretty Maids All in A Row’, Walsh may have been spiritually trying to recover, still, especially as he sings about the tragedies that befall everyone and those that we lose contact with throughout our lives.
But whatever hangups he seemed to have were gone in a flash as soon as But Seriously Folks came out. ‘Life’s Been Good’ is still among the greatest tunes he has ever written, and since he was living life as if he were Keith Moon’s younger brother, he took a lot more pleasure in trashing hotel rooms than trying to think about his problems.
He still had a long way to go before he was fully healed, but listening to the riffs in ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, this was the collaboration that both he and the Eagles needed to make. Because if Walsh didn’t have some new people to fall back on, who knows whether he would have gone past the point of no return.
