The band Joe Walsh simply never understood: “I’m not sure they knew”
To understand why the Eagles prove so divisive to many, you have to dig a little into long-forgotten history.
These days, it is begrudged, but shruggingly accepted as an offshoot of capitalist realism, that to see a big act, you’re perhaps going to have to cash out three figures. That wasn’t always the case. When David Bowie played Newcastle City Hall in 1973, tickets were £1. That’s £15 in 2026 – £15 to see the world’s hottest emerging talent isn’t bad.
So, aside from the world changing in general, what happened in music shortly after Bowie’s affordable breakthrough that meant concerts began busting the bank of the proletariat? In short, the Eagles happened. While that might be unfair – maybe price hikes were always inevitable – they certainly became the first to flog gig tickets at a newly eye-opening rate.
It’s a forgotten fact in the history of rock ‘n’ roll that the Eagles once hit the headlines as the first rock band to charge over $100 for tickets. This sudden price hike prompted T-Bone Burnett to proclaim, “[The Eagles] sort of single-handedly destroyed that whole scene that was brewing back then.” In his view, the idealism of music went out of the window when popularity became a vehicle for profit rather than positive change.
It hadn’t always been that way. While Paul McCartney might’ve said that The Beatles were always very monetarily driven, that didn’t seem to apply to every band. As Pete Townshend once said of the Grateful Dead, “The big thing about the Dead I remember, was that they gave their road crew the same share that they got themselves, did you know that? Yeah, it was a true cooperative, so nobody got rich, nobody. They made a living but they didn’t get rich.“
Musically, they were a real cooperative, too. While Jerry Garcia might have been their leader ostensibly, they were built on the collaborative jug band method. Even their audience was put on an equal footing with the band. While the Eagles might have similarly been an ensemble, Joe Walsh still craved compositional structure even within that setting, and he was puzzled by the Dead’s lack thereof.
“Some improv bands I like. I love the Allman Brothers and I was listening to a lot of blues and, of course, that’s all improv,“ before informing the Hartford Courant, “I never really quite got the Grateful Dead.” Commercially, compositionally, and perhaps even when it came to haircuts, they were simply more unorganised and footloose than Walsh’s country-rock gang, and that left him perplexed.
“I have a lot of respect for Jerry Garcia, but I could never tell what the hell they were doing. I’m not sure they knew either,“ he added. Wasn’t that part of the fun? For Deadheads, the beauty of the group was that they broke up the humdrum order of everyday life in the most blissfully blistering way. There was a utopian idealism to their traveling socialist show that felt powerful and hopeful.
For instance, Robert Mooney was a homicide detective who presided over 1500 cases in New York, and he told Far Out just how vital the “250 or 300“ Dead shows he attended over the years became in his life. ”The community that exists at the shows, and even when you’re not there, is everybody’s just nice to everybody else,” he explained. ”There’s a lot of kindness. There’s a lot of concern for other people.”
That’s not exactly how you’d describe the feuding lore of Walsh’s band. And maybe that’s what makes them inverse cousins of each other in the great American jamming scene.
