The one Eagles member that left Joe Walsh speechless
There’s a certain chemistry that comes with being a member of Eagles that Joe Walsh never took for granted.
He may have been the resident wild man and could take the band into a million different directions with the solos that he played, but he understood better than anyone that the songs Glenn Frey and Don Henley made deserved the most tasteful playing that he could think of. But even when the legends in the band started to fade away, there were always kids from the new school that made Walsh look on in amazement.
Then again, Walsh was never one to go too sentimental behind the scenes. In his prime, this was a guy who could hang out with Keith Moon and manage to hold his own, and while he has successfully cleaned up his act, you can’t help but love the goofball energy that he brings to even the most serious songs in Eagles’ catalogue. He’s the court jester of the band in many respects, but there are more than a few times where all of the good times needed to be put on hold.
Not a lot of smiles were going around the room when Don Felder had to be let go from the band in the late 1990s, and even before the band started picking up the pieces from Hell Freezes Over, Walsh needed to make sure that he was sober well before he even thought about breaking out the lick from ‘Life in the Fast Lane’. After all, it was still about Frey and Henley being satisfied, but what happens when one of the leading members of the band isn’t there anymore?
Because when you think about it, Frey’s passing in 2016 should have been the death blow to the group. His partnership with Henley was as important as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in The Stones or Steven Tyler and Joe Perry in Aerosmith, and while the drummer made it clear that the band wouldn’t be making any new music without their leader, there was a sense of life after death when Deacon Frey stepped in for his old man when he first started performing with them.
It takes a lot of courage for anyone to get up there in front of thousands of people, but Deacon did manage to match his father’s parts perfectly, only with a little bit more grit in his voice than usual. The rest of the band were able to work well enough, but getting Vince Gill in the band to sing some of Frey’s higher parts was enough to make Walsh rub his eyes and wonder what the hell he was seeing.
Gill was already a veteran of the country music circuit, but seeing someone with that much expertise was enough for Walsh to take a step back, saying, “He’s just a guy but, boy, he plugged right in with the vocals and playing. I feel like I’m related to him — we’re related but not to each other, really. I’m speechless when he sings. To join a band when he hadn’t been in a band for 30 years, and trying to replace Glenn…not easy.”
While Walsh never felt any sense of competition, there’s a good chance that Gill could have given hima run for his money as a guitar player as well. For all the great vocal chops he has, Gill might actually be a better guitar player, and while he does a great job locking in every single tune that the band throws at him, there comes a point when he’s playing with Walsh where you have to wonder whether he’s holding back at all.
He’s a true tour-de-force every time he steps onstage with the band, but, really, would you expect anything less from the California rockers? Henley was never going to be satisfied getting just any fly-by-night singer to step into his partner’s unfillable shoes, and even if Gill isn’t close to the same stature as Frey, it’s hard to deny that the shoes do fit him pretty well.
