“He was instrumental in the disintegration”: The Eagles member Don Henley grew to resent
Based on their music alone, Eagles seem like the last band that would ever be looking to stir up some controversy. They may have had their moments when they could rock out, but listening back to their records, there are hardly any songs that warrant anyone getting out of their deck chair and starting to throw their mimosa at someone. But the goal of making a song sound seamless took hard work, and Don Henley had no time for goofing off whenever the band got into the studio.
Granted, it’s not like the band were all serious either. They weren’t afraid to get a little word in the studio to blow off steam, and judging by the strange tunes that turned up on The Long Run like ‘The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks’, they were at least willing to stretch themselves. But whenever that red light came on, Henley would never settle for anything less than perfection.
Then again, it would be hard for anyone to get any kind of work done with Joe Walsh around. While the guitar legend took his craft very seriously when the time called for it, he quickly became the court jester for the group after Bernie Leadon left the band, always cracking wise onstage and hiding behind all of his own personal hangups with the right kind of comeback that could leave everyone else in stitches.
Even though they had never had a bona fide wild man in their ranks, Henley and Glenn Frey weren’t about to lay down the law whenever they got on the road. They were always kept at arm’s length by many rock fans, so by having someone like Walsh in their ranks, they could get a small bit of respect as badasses that was normally reserved for Led Zeppelin and The Who.
Once the band called it a day, though, Walsh was not going to take it well. He already had a stellar solo career to return to, but this was the first time he truly felt at home in a kickass rock and roll band, and as his drinking started to get out of control, he decided to open his mouth a little too much, and it didn’t take long before some of his swipes got back to Henley in the late 1980s.
Henley had already built up a slew of hits of his own like ‘The Boys of Summer’ and ‘The End of the Innocence’, but when talking about Walsh at the tail end of the decade, he started to have a problem with him running his mouth a bit too much, saying, “I resent some of the things he said in the press when the group broke up. Joe Walsh was one of the reasons the Eagles broke up. He was instrumental in the disintegration of that group. He was an insidious troublemaker. He would split the band into factions. He was a very divisive presence and very covert about it. Glenn and I used to laugh and say, ‘Yeah, Joe’s a very interesting bunch of guys.’”
The wounds may have been raw at the time, but that was only to disguise the real pain going on in Walsh’s private life. He was slowly drinking himself to death, and by the time the band reformed for the Hell Freezes Over reunion, the only way that they would go through with it was to make sure that Walsh got sober before he stepped out on that stage.
It’s never easy when bandmates fall out, but since the 1990s, Walsh has been more than happy to be a part of the Eagles’ family. Henley had seen his friend on a self-destructive path after their breakup, but once Walsh got his wings back, he would never let them go again.
