The Eagles member Don Henley couldn’t stand listening to
If there is one thing that the Eagles are going to be known for, it’s the harmonies.
When all is said and done and people look back on the work that every member has left, there’s a good chance that the sound of their isolated vocals on songs like ‘New Kid in Town’ would be equally as iconic for fans as the guitar solo in ‘Hotel California’ or those opening strums at the beginning of ‘Take it Easy’. But even if Don Henley made sure to make everything sound perfect, he did think that some band members should have gone in a different direction when it came time to work on new material.
The band had already fallen out over tensions between Don Felder and Glenn Frey, but even if that tension turned up again when they reunited, the band could at least find a way to keep the train running even without one of their key guitar players. Because, really, there’s no reason to think that there needed to be too many other gigantic personalities onstage when they had Joe Walsh to work with.
Even if you’re channelling your inner Lebowski and can’t stand anything the band does, most people can admit that Walsh is just out there to give people a good time. He was everyone’s favourite drinking buddy back in the day, and now that he’s cleaned up and reached his twilight years, a lot of his time onstage makes him look like rock and roll’s resident bumbling grandfather that has more than a million stories about what he and his buddies used to do back in their day.
Once the band decided to call it a day, though, Walsh seemed more heartbroken than everyone else. His solo career was doing fine well before he joined the California rockers, but when you’ve reached the level of writing tunes with Frey and Henley, it’s hard to really go back to the drawing board all over again. ‘Life’s Been Good’ did keep him afloat when he was still in the band, but if he couldn’t reach those same heights, he could at least remind people of why he was in one of the greatest bands in the world.
Halfway through his live shows during the 1980s, Walsh would end up throwing in bits and pieces of Eagles songs amongst his hits. There’s a good chance that he would have been boo’d if he attempted to play ‘Hotel California’ all by himself, but ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ seemed to suit him fine. He had come up with the riff, and his reckless lifestyle at the time seemed to mirror what the lyrics were talking about, but Henley wasn’t exactly thrilled to hear his song being heard in a different light.
The whole tune was meant to be a critique of that kind of lifestyle, and while Walsh’s name is in the credits, he felt that listening to him sing this tune was never going to work, saying, “That’s not his song to do. Glenn Frey and I wrote 90 percent of that song, and I sang it on the record. Joe wrote the opening guitar riff. Joe had his own solo career before he joined the Eagles, so I don’t understand why he doesn’t do a song that’s more his, instead of doing that one. Besides, he sounds like he’s got a clothespin on his nose.”
Walsh doesn’t do a horrible job of singing the song or anything, but a lot of that anger might have been because of his state of mind at the time. Walsh was going down a very dark path once the band broke up, and while there were probably still some tensions there between he and Henley, it probably didn’t help that Walsh was playing a tune trying to glorify partying when he was already dangerously close to becoming a rock and roll casualty.
The guitar slinger has since been on the road to recovery ever since he joined the band again on Hell Freezes Over, but chances are this version of the tune was a reminder of how far the band had fallen. They had already gone out with a whimper instead of a bang, so this only served to remind everyone of the damage that the bandmates had left on each other after they stepped off that stage for the last time.
