The guitarist Joe Walsh never understood: “I could never tell what the hell they were doing”
Following the death of Glenn Frey in 2016, Joe Walsh and Don Henley agreed to step away from the Eagles for a year and consider their best paths forward, but the idea of staying at home and mourning in silence was never going to work for Walsh.
“I thought I should get a band and get out and play live this summer and put some time between me and the Eagles,” Walsh told the Memphis Commercial Appeal later that year, “I thought that would be healthy”.
Hoping to create some positivity in a dark time, Walsh recruited a backing band of friends and former collaborators, including guitarist Waddy Wachtel, bassist Larry Young, and drummers Joe Vitale and Chad Cromwell, with Wachtel, in particular, a musician Walsh trusted to keep him on his toes, and to keep each night’s setlist fresh and different.
“I gave him the freedom to translate my songs and figure out what he thought he should play,” he said of Wachtel, “And it’s great. It makes it newer for me… The whole band, they’re really pushing me. We’re also improvising a lot—they’re my songs, but the middle of them is different every night. I wouldn’t say it’s a jam band, but there’s a lot of room for improvising, which is great.”
Improvising was rarely an aspect of the Eagles’ highly structured performance style, so this comparative spreading of the wings (bad pun intended) was clearly an uplifting change of pace for Walsh at the time. It was also a bit of a left turn for a musician who freely admitted to feeling a slight disconnect from the improv-heavy jam band scene that had developed simultaneously with the Eagles in the 1970s.
“Some improv bands I like,” Walsh told the Hartford Courant in 2015, “I love The Allman Brothers, and I was listening to a lot of blues and of course, that’s all improv. I never really quite got the Grateful Dead, though.”
As if he could sense the possibility of Deadheads coming after him with pitchforks after that comment, Walsh quickly clarified. “I have a lot of respect for Jerry Garcia,” he said, “but I could never tell what the hell they were doing, and I’m not sure they knew either.” Oops, he just re-dug the hole, after which he course-corrected with, “But I was open to their input”.
Walsh might well have come to a different understanding of the Dead’s methods had he jammed with them back in the day, but the SoCal Eagles and NoCal Grateful Dead carried on mostly parallel existences in the ‘70s, respectful to one another but rarely crossing over. He also had his own time-tested philosophies when it came to improvisational playing, and as an outside observer, he couldn’t quite interpret the improv language that Jerry Garcia was speaking. He was of the opinion that to improvise, it’s necessary to observe and pick cues from other acts, be unafraid and have an open mind, with enough in your back pocket to show you’re capable, for which he “was studying Cat Stevens a lot [when I was younger], and of course, The Beatles. I studied all the Beatles songs because I was trying to figure out the craft also”.
Walsh might have been too far along in his own development to borrow much from Jerry Garcia, but one of the jam bands that followed in the Dead’s wake, Phish, clearly admired Walsh, who for or decades, regularly covered the song ‘Walk Away’, by his first band the James Gang, at their gigs, always adding their own freestyle touch to it, of course.
