The best songs Joe Walsh ever wrote, according to the guitar legend
It’s hard to really say that you hate Joe Walsh with a straight face. Even though there are many people who take the same stance as ‘The Dude’ and hate on the Eagles time and time again, there’s something about Walsh’s good-time spirit that has kept people wanting to watch him whenever he takes to the stage. The man can still play like a madman, but Walsh considered the real highlight of his career coming from two major guitar songs.
Because, let’s face it, Walsh feels most at home when he’s got a guitar across his back. He may have been able to make the audience surge and jump from behind a keyboard, but no one goes to a Joe Walsh gig to see him play the piano the same way that no one wants to go to a Billy Joel concert and see him strap on a six-string.
Walsh has adopted the guitar as his other half, and as soon as he joined the Eagles, he hit the jackpot with ‘Life in the Fast Lane’. This is strange, considering that Walsh wasn’t even thinking about writing songs when the riff came to him.
When talking about it in History of the Eagles, Walsh just wanted something that he could use to warm up his fingers before everyone heard it, saying, “It’s a coordination exercise. It’s one of these deals *pats stomach and rubs head*. And I started playing it, and everyone said, ‘Well what is that?’. ‘Well it’s something I have’, so there you go”.
Before Walsh was even in the Eagles, he already had plenty of classics under his belt. The James Gang had long since broken up, but ‘Funk 49’ was already a staple of any guitar shop, and when Walsh got into the California rock staples, his calling card was playing the song ‘Rocky Mountain Way’.
Whereas he got into the business with funk, this song is one of the best blues tracks that the 1970s ever spat out, featuring Walsh’s distinctive squawky vocal delivery alongside his trademark slide guitar. By the time he went out on the road with the Eagles as an opening act in the late 1970s, the band jamming with Walsh on ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ practically got him the gig in the group, with Frey wondering if he would be a good substitute for Bernie Leadon.
When stacked up against all of his greatest work, Walsh told Howard Stern that both ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ and ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ are the best he ever made, saying, “One of the things that makes it magic is that it’s a bunch of guys playing in a room. That groove, you ain’t going to do that with Pro Tools”.
For as long as Walsh may have slaved away with the Eagles trying to get an album like Hotel California right, ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ doesn’t sound like it does because of the thousands of overdubs they put on it. It works because of the hours they put into playing the song repeatedly until they finally had the magical take that everyone could be proud of.
