The musician that gave the Eagles the respect of rock ‘n’ roll
If you are ever looking for a zen music experience, you should put on a pair of the best quality headphones you’ve got and play the Eagles’ debut self-titled album. That’s a record indescribable in its beauty. By today’s standards, it’s a relatively simple album, yet it still has a charm and appeal that transcends time. Whether you were listening in the 1970s or right now, it’s a record that stays with you.
Of course, while we still recognise that album as a good piece of music now, our reaction is nothing compared to what people thought of it when it first came out. Eagles didn’t just make a decent record, they merged two genres of music that people had been scared to merge, creating a new enticing sound that took America by storm.
The two biggest genres at the time were rock music and country. People were incredibly passionate about them both, which means that they weren’t always massively open to the idea of someone messing with them. Strict parameters were set on these styles of music, and if artists deviated from them, they were often ignored. A few bands slipped through the cracks and showed listeners how beautiful it can be when various styles contort and overlap. These include The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and, of course, the Eagles.
People were excited about the way they merged country and rock to create a subtle and pretty style of music. It wasn’t long before the band were one of the biggest in America, with a lot of people comparing them to The Beatles, not just in terms of sales and commercial success, but because of the fact that they changed the way that people viewed and made music.
Of course, also similar to The Beatles, the Eagles weren’t happy with sticking with the same style of music throughout their career. While they had been innovative with their first album, they weren’t satisfied just churning out the same style of music constantly. They were also looking for a unique way to present things, and one of their most influential members, in that sense, was Joe Walsh.
Walsh had a style of playing guitar that allowed the band to lean heavier into their rock side, without completely abandoning the blend of music they had become famous for. The first album that he worked on was Hotel California, and it’s no coincidence that the record ended up being their most successful. What people loved about the band was still present, but the way in which it came across was a lot more exciting.
It turns out that Walsh didn’t just add to the band in terms of the music they made, though. He also gave them a great deal of respect as a rock band, as he brought an edge to them that wasn’t there before. A lot of the founding members of the band had never been into the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, but Joe Walsh insisted on it, which made a lot of people view them differently.
“Don and Glenn never approved of the room trashing, but they understood it,” Irving Azoff concluded when discussing what Joe Walsh brought to the band outside of their music. “They wanted respect as rock and rollers, and Joe brought that respect.”
