The guitarist Joe Walsh said showed him “the secret” of playing guitar
No guitarist is just born with a natural talent on the fretboard. Most people are only as good as the musicians they’ve grown up listening to, and as long as there’s access to the greatest in blues and jazz, the rock and rollers of the world were going to take those licks and shift them around until they came out with something that sounded a little more dangerous. While Joe Walsh was about as rock and roll as someone could get in the late 1960s, he admitted that he took virtually all of his cues by listening to what Pete Townshend was playing.
Then again, Townshend never necessarily showed off whenever he was in The Who. For the longest time, he considered himself a songwriter first and a guitarist second, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to just play chords straight up the middle while John Entwistle and Keith Moon did a lot of the grunt work.
Though Townshend didn’t pretend to be the greatest guitarist in the world, it was about the innovative ways that he used his instrument that inspired his contemporaries. ‘My Generation’ already sounded gigantic from the moment it was released, but throughout their epics like Who’s Next and Tommy, Townshend developed an uncanny way of playing through the cracks every time there was a lull in the music.
Take ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, for instance. While it would always be tricky only having one guitarist in the group, Townshend found a way to sprinkle in a couple of lead lines between his chords, like those little stabs in the chorus where he sings about picking up his guitar and playing.
When putting together the James Gang, Walsh knew that Townshend was the model that he had to follow if he wanted to be heard in a one-guitar band, telling Consequence, “In a three-piece band, it’s kind of hard to navigate. [Pete Townshend] showed me how to play. We call it lead rhythm, where you play rhythm guitar and lead at the same time and just kind of wander back and forth. And that’s the secret of a three-piece band.”
That may have served Walsh fine working in a three-piece act, but once he transitioned to the Eagles, he turned that style of playing into something completely new. The Eagles didn’t need anything too flashy now that they had three guitarists in their ranks, so whenever Walsh did step up to the plate with a great lick, he was still filling in the cracks just like Townshend had done on his classic records.
And it’s not like Townshend wasn’t taking notes, either. The Who guitarist would only complement Walsh on his playing technique, and when listening to the more ambitious guitar passages he created on Quadrophenia, it’s hard to think that Walsh didn’t have much to do with his desire to be a guitar hero again.
But having those superstar moments as a musician and showboating for anyone within range wasn’t how Walsh or Townshend saw themselves. They were forever indebted to the song, and when listening to their classics, they knew that they didn’t need to play a hundred notes if the tune only called for three or four.
