“Needed more”: Why Joe Walsh was certain he couldn’t have stayed with James Gang
Not every band is meant to stay together forever. Whether it’s because of contractual obligations or because two of the band members can no longer work together anymore, it’s always a sad parting when the band of brothers decides that they have finally reached the end of the line together. Although Joe Walsh had a huge open road ahead of him both in his solo career and with Eagles, he knew that there was never going to be a future for him that featured James Gang as his sole outlet.
Granted, Walsh’s introduction to the world couldn’t have been more in line with what he wanted to do. He had always loved the idea of playing aggressive rock and roll, and when got a trio together for James Gang, a lot of what he was playing felt like the natural extension of what you heard out of bands like The Who and even some of the heavy melodic stuff that Jimi Hendrix was doing a few years earlier.
In fact, that’s the exact reason why the Eagles wanted Walsh in their band to begin with. He had been a solo star up until that point, but his focus on heavier rock was what gave them the edge compared to their country-rock ballads. They could play ‘Desperado’ beautifully, but it sometimes helped to have a tune like ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ or ‘Funk #49’ to sprinkle into the set every now and again.
But that was only one facet of what Walsh could do. He was always going to be a phenomenal guitarist, but his strength always came from him writing textures as well. You have to remember that while his first album with the band produced ‘Life In the Fast Lane’, his main writing contribution was ‘Pretty Maids All In a Row’, which is far more delicate than it had any right to be next to ‘Wasted Time’.
Walsh had even been building up to that throughout his career. He had some dark chapters of his life to work through, and while James Gang gave him an outlet to cry out in pain whenever he took a solo, it was going to be hard to support a tune like ‘Help Me Through the Night’ when there was only so much he could get out of his bandmates.
So, really, Walsh had felt like he had outgrown his band by the time he went solo, saying, “The songs I was writing needed more texture than a trio could offer. I was writing with harmony and nobody could sing them; I was writing for piano, and we couldn’t play one onstage. I was frustrated. I had just written and recorded ‘The Bomber’ and ‘Tend My Garden’ and couldn’t really re-create them onstage. Townshend had finished Tommy and was going through the same changes.”
Even when working on Eagles’ best material, there’s a reason why there are more than five of them onstage nowadays. Sure, Glenn Frey needed a lot of people to replace him, but when Walsh kicked into a song like ‘Life’s Been Good’, he would rather get more people to share the stage with than have to compromise what the song was supposed to be.
So, while it probably hurt Dale Peters and Jim Fox to know that their leader was going off on his own, it was almost a necessary evil. Walsh could have easily kept himself going for as long as he could, but there’s a certain layer of hell where artists are forced to stay in one spot for the rest of their lives.
