Joe Walsh returns to scene of life-changing “spiritual awakening”
The guitarist of the Eagles, Joe Walsh, played at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, just last month with his legendary rock band. This weekend, though, Walsh again returned to the stage for a very different kind of performance.
At Ōtātara Pā, a Māori hillfort on the Tūtaekuri River in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, Walsh joined a group of music students to perform in front of 300 audience members. The location, in particular, holds special significance to the guitarist as it was the place at which he had an epiphany.
Touring with the New Zealand reggae band Herbs in 1989, Walsh realised that he needed to give up alcohol and drugs. Ever since that moment, Walsh’s life has significantly improved for the better and Hawkes Bay continues to hold a special place in his heart.
During his performance on April 21st, Walsh told the crowd, “What happened to me was kind of a spiritual awakening. The spirit of this place talked to me and told me who I had become was not me.”
“And the spirit that was here gave me power over all that, that I took back to the United States and I stopped drinking and doing drugs,” the guitarist added. Walsh also noted that he had begun to “help people” with similar problems to his own and soon “paid a lot less attention to being famous and having fun spending money.”
Walsh had lost his “perspective” in the 1980s, but in New Zealand, he “got it back”. He signed off on his former “epiphany” by noting, “I’ve been 30 years sober now and that’s because I came here, and where we are right now has so much good energy and spirit.”
The Eagles guitarist had previously spoken of his addiction problems in an interview with Billboard. “My higher power became vodka and cocaine. I burned all the bridges,” he said. “Nobody wanted to work with me. I was angry. I turned into this godless, hateful thing.”
Walsh admitted that he had turned to alcohol in order to ease the pressures of stage fright. After hitting a low and having his New Zealand epiphany, Walsh turned sober in 1993 after a period of recovery.
He had admitted that his addiction was a “disease” in another interview with Rolling Stone and explained how he had lost several of his friends to the affliction. “It gets bad beyond your wildest imagination and then you crash and burn and then it gets worse than that,” Walsh said. “An awful lot of my buddies died before they hit bottom. I hit bottom before I died.”
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