“I was too in tune with him”: The one musician that scared off Joe Walsh
There’s always been an unspoken rule in rock and roll that no musician can show fear in the public eye. While a lot of that is chalked up to the backwards logic of toxic masculinity, it also has to do with the kind of persona that many artists like to create of the stoic badass who doesn’t seem to care about anything. However, love is a powerful thing for anyone, and it was enough to scare off Joe Walsh when he hit one of his lowest periods in the 1980s.
If you look at any of Walsh’s performances over the last 50 years, you will swear that he has never had a bad day in his life. He has been the most unassuming guy at every show he plays, and even in a band that can take themselves seriously like Eagles, Walsh is the kind of court jester in many respects, always throwing in some strange lick to keep the band on their toes.
But that kind of dynamic only comes from someone who has gone through some serious pain in their lives. After all, Walsh had witnessed the shootings at Kent State before he had even started taking music seriously, and even when he started making his own classics with the James Gang, he wasn’t in the clear when it came to darkness following him throughout his life.
He already had to deal with his label refusing to promote some of his solo records once he broke up the James Gang, and once he started building a reputation for himself in the public eye, he had to deal with the kind of tragedy no artist should have to endure when his daughter Emma was killed in a car accident. He had been more than a little bit damaged over the years, but Stevie Nicks knew that kind of pain like the back of her hand.
Although Nicks left nothing to the imagination when working in Fleetwood Mac, she knew that she had found a kindred spirit in Walsh when they began their relationship in the late 1970s. There was already some electricity there, but Walsh knew that he couldn’t commit to anything serious with Nicks, even after she wrote him the ballad ‘Has Anyone Written Anything For You’ in the 1980s.
If you were to ask Nicks, though, one of the reasons why they grew apart was because Walsh became more protective of getting hurt again, saying, “I took really good care of him, and I think that is what scared Joe the most because I was too in tune with him and he was too used to being out of tune with everyone. I really understood him well. I was really hard-nosed about him. If my house was full and Joe called, I would tell everyone to get out.”
It’s not like Walsh’s fears were unfounded, either. Both of them knew what it was like to have an innate musicality whenever they performed, and since Nicks left her heart on her sleeve every time she sang, part of Walsh’s reluctance may have come from the fact that he wasn’t ready to commit to something for fear of what would happen if they managed to emotionally fall out of sync with each other.
The relationship may not have worked out, but the fact that Walsh could open up was a lot different from the boisterous guitar slinger that everyone knew onstage. He could shred with the best of them and look like the guitar equivalent to Keith Moon at times, but he was as human as anyone else around him.
