“No doubt in my mind”: The main reason Joe Walsh first joined the Eagles
Even though the Eagles had multiple lineup changes in their early years as a band, when they came towards the end of the 1970s, they’d finally seemed to find the right combination to elevate the group to the next level.
With Glenn Frey and Don Henley always at the helm, a lot of focus is always placed upon the primary songwriting duo from within the band’s ranks, but that doesn’t mean that other members who had played a role in the group weren’t as crucial to their development over the years. Don Felder and Randy Meisner both had lengthy stints in the band, and Bernie Leadon was integral in the early days, but after the release of One of These Nights, they ended up recruiting a replacement for Leadon who seemingly changed everything for the band.
While that album had transformed them into a more commercially successful act, there were still some frictions within the ranks that saw Leadon depart the band due to what he perceived as a diminishing amount of creative control being afforded to him. Frey and Henley were becoming increasingly responsible for driving the direction of the band, and they clearly needed someone who was comfortable going along with their executive decisions as co-leaders.
Luckily for them, they had just the right person waiting in the wings to be anointed as their new guitarist; someone who could write his own material but was also content with being an auxiliary part of the group rather than a member who directed things. Joe Walsh had already established himself as a solo artist in his own right prior to joining the group, but there were plenty of things beyond his abilities as a musician and writer that the members saw in him that made him the ideal candidate.
Officially becoming a member in 1975 prior to the recording of Hotel California, Walsh knew that this was exactly the right move for him at the time, and knew that the Eagles would offer him a new challenge that being a solo artist never gave him. “We had known each other for a good year before anything came down, and I always felt that it was compatible,” he told BBC reporter John Tobler in 1977. “A lot of people said, ‘well, how can this work’, but having hung out and known everybody individually, I knew it would work. There was really no doubt in my mind, I wanted to join real bad.”
While some may have been questioning the decision that Walsh made to join an already successful band with a history of ruthlessly dismissing members, he knew that it was the right choice. “The solo career’s glorious and all that,” he continued, “but putting out two or three albums where you’re the boss and make all the decisions and hire and fire yourself, the emphasis comes off the music. I just wanted to take a sabbatical and play some music, which is what I’m doing.”
While he contributed two songs each to Hotel California and The Long Run before the band’s eventual split in 1980, he was seemingly happy just playing along with a bunch of people who shared the same passion as him, and without the pressure of being in charge of all of the creative decisions, he was free to show off his chops as an instrumentalist instead.
