The best guitarist to surface in the 1970s, according to Eric Clapton
In the 1970s, boxing was enduring what many critics considered its “golden age.” Muhammed Ali, Joe Frasier and George Foreman led an era of charismatic and bullish heavyweights, bludgeoning each other time and time again, with compelling skill.
It seemed that to keep up, music decided to mirror boxing’s story, cultivating a string of heavyweight guitarists who would front what many would later consider a golden era for music. These titans of the industry would spoil fans, with catalogues of music that would compete with each other with unrelenting greatness. Like the gladiators of the ring, they would operate with power, style and compelling drama.
With Jimi Hendrix’s passing at the start of the decade, the crown was set to be seized. But by whom? For many, the most obvious successor was Eric Clapton. He took the traditional blues format and elevated it into something hypnotic. Solos would ascend to eye-watering intensity, and he played every single one of them with an outrageous sense of precision.
No matter where music was taken in the 1970s, blues always remained the bedrock, for it was the technical backbone that allowed any exploration of genre to remain popular and accessible. But for the guitarists uninitiated to that concept, it was Clapton who became the vehicle through which this could be understood.
Eagles’ guitarist and stalwart of the 1970s scene, Joe Walsh, admitted, “I began to study the guitar like mad, buying records and reading all I could. I wasn’t even aware of BB King until I read an interview with Eric Clapton where he talked about stealing his licks. I had a lot of catching up to do. After a while, I started to branch out and write my own music.”
It was time well spent for Walsh, who quietly rose up the ranks to threaten Clapton’s crown as king of the axe. Long before he joined the Eagles, Walsh was cultivating a healthy reputation for blending pentatonic licks with a funk-inspired rhythm that critics were lazily dubbing a “drunk” sound. Either way, it was characterful and captured something completely unique in comparison to his 1970s counterparts.
So much so that he garnered the attention of Eric Clapton, who, despite unknowingly inspiring him to study blue, was in awe of his skills. He said, “He’s one of the best guitarists to surface in some time. I don’t listen to many records, but I listen to his.”
Whether Walsh knew what he was doing or not, he undoubtedly brought a sprinkling of magic to whatever project he was in. But it was undoubtedly his work with the Eagles that garnered him the much-deserved critical acclaim.
In fact, the band’s leader Don Henley, cited Clapton himself when describing the essence of Walsh’s brilliance, saying, “Sure, he introduced some harder guitar playing even though he didn’t put it on this album in the way of songwriting, but I think he and Felder played some killer guitar for us all. To me, it’s like Duane Allman and Eric Clapton together.”
