The Eagles tour that Joe Walsh hated playing: “I had no idea what I was doing”
There don’t seem to be many things that can scare someone like Joe Walsh. As the American king of rock and roll wildmen alongside Keith Moon, some of his best moments stem from his tempestuous persona being channelled into great songs, whether flying solo on ‘In the City’ or contributing impressive licks to tracks like ‘Life in the Fast Lane’. However, Walsh has had his vulnerable moments. When the Eagles reunited and took to the road to celebrate, the guitarist was mortified every time he stepped onstage.
But if the reunion didn’t happen on Hell Freezes Over, chances are that Walsh wouldn’t be here to perform the last tour. Throughout his time with the group, Walsh was the wild man for a damn good reason, and the after-parties at every one of their shows showed him either holding court in the background or getting up to every bit of hijinx one could think of when he got back to the hotel.
Despite having the effect of becoming a tornado every time he entered a hotel room, the group’s fallout in the early 1980s led to him burying himself in the bottle. Although the reunion was always on the table, Glenn Frey and Don Henley remembered Walsh getting way too blitzed out of his mind when they first proposed the idea to him.
As Frey recalled in History of the Eagles, “Everyone was just going along with Joe. We scheduled a meeting in Aspen. Joe was buzzed, and it was two o’clock in the afternoon, and he would say, ‘Hey, I’m there, man, I’m fine, don’t worry about me’, but you could tell that he wasn’t fine.”
The Eagles eventually reunited for the one-off music video for Travis Tritt’s cover of ‘Take It Easy’, but if they were going to get a true reunion, Walsh would need to get sober first. And the minute that the guitar gid got back from rehab, work began on their special for MTV, where he would show his stuff on tracks like ‘Get Over It’.
But when Walsh decided to perform sober for the first time, he was absolutely terrified, telling 60 Minutes, “I was afraid that everybody on the planet would discover that, basically, I had no idea what I was doing. One thing that I found out in the music business is that if you pretend like you know what you’re doing, people just think that you do. But in retrospect, none of us really did.”
Although people still consider Walsh’s squawky delivery a bit of an acquired taste, his voice only improved with age. Outside of his incredible slide guitar playing, Walsh’s performance on tracks like ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’ only got more poignant with age, as he sings about the fallen friends that he wants to hear from and the passage of time that will eventually leave everything in its wake.
Walsh may have been blessed to keep his chops up all those years, but the Eagles reunion wasn’t just an opportunity to play with his friends again. By his own admission, it’s also the reason why he’s still alive today.
