Joe Walsh interview with Melody Maker 1975: Lonely Leader

From Melody Maker, 2 August 1975

IT’S A BIT disconcerting when you’re having a perfectly innocent conversation and the guy you’re talking to suddenly brandishes a knife beneath your nose. Not just any knife, either – there’s the Nazi swastika emblazoned on the handle, and its proud new owner Joe Walsh is affectionately stroking the sinister blade.

“Do you like this knife I’ve got?” he asked. Yeah sure, Joe, very nice (edging away). “I like to collect Nazi things. I’m not concerned with the ethics of the war but the era of Nazi Germany is fascinating. I was gonna go to Germany to collect some stuff but I understand that people don’t really like to talk about it.”

His present band has been together for a little over six months and he’s quite satisfied with the current line-up, although he admits to getting tired of being boss man all the time. He’s the writer/singer/lead guitarist/producer/leader of the group and it drains the energies after a while. He’d like to adopt a less prominent role.

“I wanna get away from the spotlight, but that’s not permanent. For a while I’d like to go on somebody’s tour and play guitar with some sunglasses on and just be able to play without having to sing. If we have a bad night, the bass player is no problem – it’s Joe Walsh who stinks. So I get all upset.

“Like at Wembley, I thought ‘Oh God, what if I blow this.’ That bothers me a lot, and in the last year or so I’ve got more and more successful, so it gets worse and worse. As you play bigger concerts it gets harder and harder to control. I just wanna take a break from that, just go out and get it back Into perspective.

“I don’t want to burn out. I’ve seen people burn out and I don’t want to go that way. It can catch up with you if you let it. One of the main problems with the James Gang was we started making it real big and we got to the point where the business was more important than the music.

“When the music stops, why play? So I’ve been careful not to do too many interviews, and stay in the background and not let the business catch up. I could do it now, just going out to play bigger and bigger places and keep playing, but why?”

The James Gang were the group that Walsh played with for several years and where he first established his limitation. He looks back on the band with a great deal of affection.

“It was a struggle, yeah, but I was playing and practising so much and just putting every bit of effort into the group and now I want to take a breather. There’s always a whole lot more focus when you’re trying to get something off the ground. The very first part of any romance is always wonderful and you work real hard at it and then it levels out.”

Solo success has taken him completely by surprise. He can’t fathom why anybody should ever want to listen to him singing for one thing. After he left the James Gang there was a long period of lull, but in the last 18 months things have clicked for him, culminating in the So What album going high in the American album charts, and accompanying single success there.

“It makes me feel good to get respect and recognition from other musicians that I really respect. That makes me feel part of it and give me confidence because they’re the real judges.

“You can fool the people sometimes, most of the time, but you can’t fool other players because they know the trip. If they give me that kind of respect then it’s verification of any doubts I may have.

“I don’t want to paint a whole picture of morbid, poor me, but it’s kinda lonely to be the leader and the lead singer and the songwriter and make all the decisions. Sometimes I don’t know what to do and I’m supposed to know. Every once in a while you get down or depressed.

“Having been on my own pretty much since the James Gang there was a lot of self-doubt. I just get discouraged sometimes when things don’t go too well and I don’t know what to do, but after a while you just learn to make believe you know and everybody thinks you know.”

“Nothing really freaks me out all that much now, although I was scared to death at Wembley. It was all right once we started playing though. I was just sorry we have to go so early. It seemed we were waking people up, and the Eagles took it on from there.”

Walsh’s influences range from classical composers like Ravel to country and western artists like George Jones, while his favourite guitarists include James Burton, Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck. Townshend, In particular, he enthuses about, not just for musical reasons but as a complete person.

“You can’t talk to that guy without learning something,” he says.

Recently he’s had outstanding success with his production of Dan Fogelberg’s chart album, Souvenirs. That was something he enjoyed working on and he nurtures plans to start a new record label to enable him to record and produce other new artists although there is nothing immediate on the schedule.

He likes the idea of producing other people but right now he’s got enough problems keeping his own ship on a straight course.

“When I finally burn out as a…STAR” – he says it wryly – “I’ll fall back on going into the studio and producing people. I’m leaving it there for the moment, though, just letting it be known that producing is something I can do. I’m sure I’ll produce somebody else in another year or something but I don’t know who.”

It’s three years since Walsh has been to Britain (“it’s so long ago that I can’t remember it, but it hasn’t changed all that much”), but chances of a quick return tour seem remote.

He’d like to but… “It’ll probably be another three years before I come back again. Hey, it’s not my fault, I want to come over. We were supposed to come over once before but that economy thing hit it with the three-day week so there was no point in coming.”

Joe Walsh Analog Man (2012)

From audiophilereview.com

Gosh, it’s 2015 and I just realized that this “new” album by Joe Walsh which I finally picked up recently came out in 2012!

Really? 2012? Maaaan… time’s a-flyin’!

I thought it just came out yesterday. It does underscore the fast pace at which new releases come out these days, so many each day, it is impossible to keep up with them. So, yeah, 2012 or 2015, does it really matter? Chances are, if you are like me, you also planned to pick up the album and then never got around to it.

I was honestly hoping to find a vinyl copy of the album but only saw that once at Amoeba and then have not seen it since.

So here I am listening to a CD I picked up on a recent trip to LA. And ya know what? It sounds nice to hear Joe’s voice again in any format.

The irony of the title of Joe Walsh’s latest release — Analog Man — isn’t lost on me as I’m listening to it on a 16-bit / 44.1 kHz Compact Disc and even contemplating how it might sound in the somewhat higher-resolution form of 24-bit, 48 kHz (as available on HDTracks).

All that said, I’m going to put aside any audiophile-type preconceptions and just try to enjoy this album for what it is: the first new music from guitar legend Joe Walsh in, like, forever.

Twenty years, to be exact…

Joe hasn’t really changed his feathers much. Perhaps the most interesting twist on this album is that it is mostly produced by Jeff Lynne — yes, he of ELO and Traveling Wilburys fame. Wisely, Lynne hasn’t gone overboard on putting his sonic imprint on this album, so it still sounds like a Joe Walsh record for the most part.

Joe’s brother-in-law — one Ringo Starr, a drummer whom you may have heard about from a band in the ’60s — actually “plays” drums on a couple of tracks and you can hear the difference between his performances and the sequenced stuff.

Still, all the tracks seem to flow fine together as a whole.

All in all Analog Man sounds great with some really lovely touches such as the sweet pedal steel guitar work on “Lucky That Way” and Joe’s trademark double-tracked harmonized lead guitar lines on “Spanish Dancer.” I really love how the latter song shifts grooves from a sort of ethereal slink into a harder funk; it makes you wonder what the James Gang (Joe’s original band from the early ’70s) might sound like if they were recording today.

To that, there is even a nod to that band on “Funk 50” (a fun reference to two James Gang tunes, “Funk 48” and “Funk 49,” from their first and second albums, respectively).

Sobriety and life peace is a recurring theme for many artists celebrating the wonder and joy of surviving, as they find themselves alive, clean of drugs and drink for the first time. Thus don’t be surprised to find Joe’s heart-felt ode to his “Family” tucked in amidst the rock here.

“One Day At A Time” is an upbeat and optimistic tune with a positive message of survival. This song sounds quite a bit like the Traveling Wilburys, in fact — I guess it was the one point on the album where Jeff Lynne couldn’t help himself but to produce it this way. It’s not a bad thing, mind you! In fact, it is exciting to speculate on the potential for a new incarnation of that super group with Joe filling in for Roy Orbison and George Harrison (both of whom have passed). Think about it — that could work really well: Dylan, Petty, Lynne, Keltner and Walsh.

I’d buy that record!

Perhaps the only extraneous tune on the album is album’s instrumental closer “India,” which dabbles in electronica / EDM type beats; it’s OK, but doesn’t quite fit the feel of the record. That seems to happen a lot on albums I’ve heard from older artists experimenting with modern computer-driven technologies — you get the obligatory dance track tacked on there at the end of the album. It’s not a bad thing, but not really good for the cohesion of the album as a complete statement.

Of course, one could argue that these days… well… who actually listens to whole albums anymore? And therein lies the rub, kids.

Anyhow, Analog Man is a fun and good-sounding album even on the lowly CD. And I venture to speculate that it probably sounds just ducky on the 24/48 HDTracks download or the 180-gram vinyl edition.

If you like Joe Walsh, you should pick it up. It’s not a life-changer kind of record but then it is not supposed to be. It’s more of a life-affirmer, really.

And that alone is something worth celebrating.

Joe Walsh – James Gang Yer Album (1969)

From classicrockreview.com

Yer’ Album is the debut album by James Gang,  displays this power trio’s genius and raw power through the compositions but also shows  their lack of recording experience due to the various filler throughout. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, it is clear that the group looked both to the East and the West for musical inspiration. This applies to their original compositions as well as the pair of covers. With a healthy dose of British heavy rock and California folk rock topping the trio’s Southern blues-flavored core, Yer Album is a celebration of all elements of the expanding world of rock and roll and the end of the sixties.

James Gang drummer Jim Fox was a member of the band, The Outsiders, who had a national hit, “Time Won’t Let Me”, in the mid sixties. After leaving that group, Fox wanted to form a group oriented towards British rock. He recruited bassist Tom Kriss and a guitarist and keyboardist to form the original incarnation of the James Gang. After several lineup shuffles during the group’s first year, Fox was approached in 1968 by guitarist Joe Walsh who wanted to audition for the group. As the group narrowed from a five piece to a trio, Walsh assumed lead vocal duties and would eventually be their most identifiable member.

ABC Records staff producer Bill Szymczyk was assigned to the group, a serendipitous move that began a long professional relationship between Szymczyk and Walsh. Szymczyk would go on to produce all three of the James Gang’s albums which Walsh played on as well as many of his solo albums through the 1970s and later albums by the pop group the Eagles, which Walsh joined in 1976. But long before the group was posthumously dubbed “Joe Walsh’s James Gang”, they were a legitimate power trio, with each given their own space to jam and demonstrate their musical chops.

First the frivolous and annoying. In the grooves of the at the ends of each side of the original LPs were the infinite spoken messages, “Turn me over” and “Play me again”. Such antics also pertained to the opening tracks of each side. “Introduction” starts the first side with an improvised string quartet which cross-fades to a strummed acoustic riff which then roughly dissolves into the first proper song. It is a bit ironic that the first proper song by a group featuring a guitar legend like Joe Walsh is so keyboard dominated as “Take a Look Around”. The verses and chorus are dominated by an out-front organ and a piano holding the back end, all built on calm textures and acid rock ambiance. The song is strong on melody and mellow throughout with the middle section cut by a slow but piercing electric guitar lead, which returns again in the outro with a fuller arrangement. After this song is an odd, but interesting, section with competing spoken words and phrases.

“Funk #48” contains the simplest of grooves and lyrics in the simplest of songs, albeit still very entertaining and a great contrast from the previous song. Szymczyk commented that the song started as a sound check warm-up riff but quickly developed into the funk/rock groove, driven by the rhythm section of Kriss and Fox. The second half of the first side contains a couple of extended renditions of contemporary covers. Starting with a grandiose intro of piano and strings and interrupted by wild guitar interludes, the group eventually kicks into a rock-oriented version of Buffalo Springfield’s “Bluebird”. After a few verses, the song slowly meanders into a middle jam with exquisite drumming by Fox and texture-based guitar phrases by Walsh. The Yardbirds’ “Lost Woman” provides an extended showcase for each musician, particularly bassist Tom Kriss, who starts his showcase with a hyper-riff on bass and provides, perhaps, one of the most extensive bass solos in rock history. Most of this nine minute is an extended jam where each member leaves it completely out on the floor, especially the rhythm players, as the entire jam is much more than self-indulgence, it builds in tension and intensity throughout.

Side Two starts with more ambient noise, in the totally annoying “Stone Rap” before the beautiful, moody, and dark “Collage”, co-written by Patrick Cullie. This track could be the theme song for the entire album, as it truly is a collage of musical styles. The calmly strummed acoustic is accented by poignant but moody bass and strong drums and later some high strings and slight electric guitar join the mix. Overall, the tune is a real sonic treat and is original like no other. “I Don’t Have the Time” sounds (early) Deep Purple influenced as it is fast paced heavy rock, dominated by guitar overdubs and a furious drum beat, all while Walsh’s vocals carry an even keel, keeping the whole song grounded.

The final filler piece, “Wrapcity in English” goes back to the piano and string quartet with a melancholy, minor note and not quite as frivolous as the rest of the filler on the album. “Fred” is one of the odder songs on this oddest of albums. The organ returns (although not as much presence as on “Take a Look Around”) and first two verses have long and deliberate vocal lines for a somewhat psychedelic effect. In contrast, the middle bridge features an upbeat jazz/rock section with harmonized guitars. The twelve minute “Stop” feels like the most natural song for the band on the album – a totally legitimate power trio jam, which seems like it will never actually “Stop”. A great track for jam-band enthusiasts, especially those who lean towards the heavy rock/blues side, the group provides a parting shot to show the great promise for the future.

However, Yer’ Album would be the one and only album to feature these three together, as bassist Tom Kriss departed from the group by the end of 1969, making this a true capture of lightning in a bottle.

Joe Walsh – James Gang Live in Concert (1971)

From acousticguitarforum.com

First the history: The James Gang Live in Concert was intended to be the pinnacle of the band’s career. After nearly a year of constant touring, including a long tour of Europe fronting the WHO, the band was going to show the North East how it was done, as main act in the very first rock concert staged at Carnegie Hall. This was a big stinkin’ deal, and the time fronting the WHO had finally payed off.

The James Gang and producer/engineer Bill Szymczyk scheduled two mights of performances with a remote truck and planned to take the best takes from the two nights. Unfortunately, that first rock concert at the Carnagie was extremely unpopular with classical purists. The first night, just before show time, someone cut the mic cables leading from the stage to the truck, preventing them from getting a recording.

Bill Szymczyk stayed up all night with his soldering iron, splicing the cables back together. They set up security guards every six feet along the cable to protect it. The result was that they got exactly one night of performances to make this album, and it was mixed the very next day. This is a live album from the tradition of The Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East: They played, they mixed, you heard. There was no slick repackaging and overdubbing. What you hear is what they played.

How is the music? Glad you asked. Put on your paisley shirt before you listen to this album, because there’s a certain amount of psychedelia left over from the ’60s. Nevertheless, once you come to terms with the fact that this album is a creature of its times, from this album you get a great idea of how tight a band the Gang was. The album was recorded in ’71, right at the peak of the period when the guitar had transitioned from a background, rhythm instrument or a spinky little lead thing into an instrument that commanded the entire stage.

Bill Szymczyk wasn’t the only person involved who was handy with a soldering iron: To create his sound, Joe took old blackface Fender Twins and personally modified them to gain them up and make them brighter. The result is medium-high gain sound that was really amazing, individual, and powerful for the period. He also extensively worked with an Echoplex EP-2, and you can hear that right from the second cut, “You’re Gonna Need Me”.

But what was Walsh, in the scheme of rock history? First, he was the very first of the second wave of “guitar heros”. This album showcases his intricate lead capabilities with extended jams added to most of the guitar songs. His refinement, tone, and articulation are amazing for the period. This album, more than any of the band’s studio works, shows off exactly what he could do. Secondly, he was a one-man band.

He performed on both guitar and keyboards and sang lead vocals. I don’t mean to denigrate the other two musicans, Jim Fox (drums, vocals) and Dale Peters (bass, vocals) here. Both were my gold standard, by whom I measured all others, for years. But Walsh wrote most of the Gang’s studio material. Interestingly, in this live set, the Gang mine Albert King (“You’re Gonna Need Me”), Jerry Ragavoy (“Stop”), and the Yardbirds (“Lost Woman”) for songs that never made it into the James Gang’s studio albums. You may remember Ragavoy as a famous producer for several R&B acts and as the man who built the Hit Factory Studios. He was also a mentor to Bill Szymczyk. I love connections.

Which brings us to the reason why this material may have not made it onto studio albums: While the rest of the band were thinking of this album as the band’s big breakout, Walsh went into the performances knowing they were the end of something big. The truth was that the long tours had used Joe up like nobody’s business: He was sick to death of being the front man for a power trio. Having been there, I can understand: except for the bass and drum solos, you are always in the spotlight and under the microscope. He was also tired of all the touring.

In a song written later in his solo career, “Life’s Been Good”, Joe describes this year: “I have a mansion, forget the price/Ain’t never been there, they tell me it’s nice”. Joe was also writing material that was too involved to be executed by a power trio, but at that point, the band wasn’t interested in growing. So, within hours after the performances, Joe announced his upcoming exit from the band. It became an ugly breakup. While the band continued on, they were never the same. Joe, however, went on to a successful solo career and eventual membership in the Eagles.

As one would expect from producer/engineer Bill Szymczyk, the album is cleanly recorded and well mixed, according to the standards of the time. Amazingly, the master tapes survived the demise of two record companies (ABC/Dunhill and MCA), as did Joe himself. Now, as the MCA catalog and name have been brought back, some of the more obscure titles (such as this) haven’t had a lot of attention to detail in re-mastering to CD.

What we have here is a very clean, noiseless reproduction of the album mastering job. With forty-three minutes of material on a single album, something had to give. The usual vinyl mastering method to squeeze extra material on was to cut bass and treble, and that was done here. Expect to need to restore the bass by hitting the loudness switch or cranking the bass control.

So, this album should be seen as both the peak and the swan-song of the most successful iteration of the James Gang. Perhaps it can also been seen as a preview of Joe’s coming-out as a solo guitar hero and the appearance of his alter ego, the “clown prince of rock and roll”. It provides an extensive catalog of Joe’s lead guitar licks, many of which show up again in his works down the road. Since it is an inexpensive “Nice Price” selection, it is a great addition to your library. Happily, these guys were all personally reconciled a short while back.

Joe Walsh – James Gang Thirds (1971)

From ultimateclassicrock.com

The James Gang was seemingly on the road to career prosperity after the success of their sophomore album, Rides Again. Unfortunately, that didn’t necessarily pave the way for a predictable, or even smooth process when time came to record their next studio record, the obviously named Thirds.

In fact, the power trio composed of vocalist/guitarist Joe Walsh, bassist Dale Peters and drummer Jim Fox were somewhat short on new material, as Fox recalled when speaking to UCR’s Matt Wardlaw: “Thirds was a little tougher to finish, because we felt a little low on songs we felt strong about [and Joe said] ‘I don’t want to be the only writer in the band. You guys have to contribute.’ I’m not sure we were up for it.”

Then the band made their lives more difficult when they decided to dispense with longtime producer Bill Szymczyk (renowned for his work with Elvin Bishop, B.B. King and the Eagles) and attempt to produce themselves. As Szymczyk himself described it to Wardlaw, “We went into the Record Plant and cut three or four tracks, [but] then they had to go back on the road. So time passes and they call me up and say, ‘Well, we decided that we want to finish the album on our own.’ I went, ‘Okaaaay.’”

Fox continued: “We were so naive and so happy to be doing what we were doing. Having a guy like Bill on our team, you know, who would fight the battles with the label. … [He] just made it easy. And how did we repay him? We got smart-assed and said, ‘Uh, we’re going to produce the third album ourselves.’ And then of course, went back to him with our collective tails in between our legs and said, ‘Would you mind mixing this for us, Bill?’

The good news for James Gang fans was that all involved ultimately made it work, by hook or by crook, emerging with another eclectic set of songs ranging from the riff-driven muscle of “Walk Away” to the grandiose, Beatles-esque “It’s All the Same”; from the funky licks and soulful organ of “Things I Could Be” to rural sounds of “Dreamin’ in the Country”; from the Southern rock of “Midnight Man” to the church-like social consciousness of “White Man/Black Man.” Oh, and there was also Little Richard.

“We’re playing in Pittsburgh and Little Richard was on the bill,” Fox said. “We had played on the first night and all three of us said, ‘We have to stay and see Little Richard.’ We’re sitting out in the audience and a note was put in my hand and it says, ‘Little Richard would like to see you after the show.’ I looked at Joe and I said, ‘This is a joke, isn’t it?’”

When the startled James Gang made their way to Richard’s dressing room, Fox told Wardlaw that the rock legend surprised them even more by saying: “I love you guys, I want to make a record with you. When are you going to be in the studio?”

Fox continued, “Our jaws are on the floor and I finally manage to croak out, ‘Well, Richard, we’re recording tomorrow night in Cleveland.’ He said, ‘Cleveland – I’ll be there! You tell my people what time!’” Sure enough, as the band resumed their work on Thirds the following evening, in burst Little Richard with a huge entourage. “There must have been 15 people,” Fox said.

According to Fox, “The result was about three hours of tape and we wanted to use it terribly. The record company was reluctant. We were going to make a three-sided double record [with] Thirds as you know it and the Little Richard jam on one side of the other disc – maybe 20 minutes that contained a song, but a lot of playing.” Alas, contractual issues forced the tapes into unreleased limbo for decades, instead, until they were finally unearthed, remixed and overdubbed for inclusion in Joe Walsh’s 2012 album Analog Man.

Meanwhile, Thirds rose all the way to No. 27 on the album charts after its release in April 1971. But that initial excitement, coupled with the “Walk Away” single’s all-time high of No. 51, soon subsided. In its place came Walsh’s surprising announcement that he intended to leave the group at year’s end to explore new sounds beyond the restrictive power trio format.

As Fox recalled it in his conversation with Wardlaw: “Joe came to us and said, ‘Look, I’m hearing stuff that requires keyboards and horns and extra stuff [and] the way we’re structured, I can’t do both at once.’ He couldn’t have been more upright about it.”

Fox and Peters eventually decided to carry on, first with lead singer Roy Kenner and guitarist Domenic Troiano, then with Tommy Bolin, but none of it captured the magic of the original James Gang lineup. That magic is still evident on Thirds, for all the confusion and unbelievable all-star jams surrounding its recording.

Joe Walsh: James Gang Look Back on ‘Rides Again’ at 45

From ultimateclassicrock.com

On record, the James Gang excelled at wresting rock ‘n’ roll glory from the jaws of seemingly certain chaos — and that’s exactly what they did behind the scenes during the months leading up to the release of their second album, 1970’s James Gang Rides Again.

To celebrate Rides Again‘s 45th anniversary, Ultimate Classic Rock’s Matt Wardlaw talked to James Gang drummer Jimmy Fox, bassist Dale Peters and guitarist Joe Walsh, as well as producer Bill Szymczyk, all of whom shared their memories of how the album came together — and how, not long after its success seemed to poise the group for greatness, they started coming apart.

Label expectations were fairly minimal for James Gang Rides Again, which arrived a little more than a year after the group’s debut, Yer’ Album. But if following up their first record was feasible from a sales standpoint, it proved a far more complicated prospect in terms of establishing just who was in the James Gang — starting with the abrupt departure of bassist Tom Kriss, who Fox says tendered his resignation before Yer’ Album had even arrived in stores.

“He just spilled his guts,” recalls Fox of a band meeting called after he and Walsh realized Kriss “hadn’t said s— in six months.” “‘I hate this band. I hate the music we’re making. I don’t think I can play it anymore.’ Joe and I were blindsided. You know, it was like, he was, I thought, a very fine player. ‘Tom, aren’t you somewhat equally responsible for the music we’re making? What do you want to do?’ ‘Well, I don’t know, but I can’t take this anymore.'”

Fortunately, Fox knew just who to call: Dale Peters, who had replaced him in a college band at Ohio State University a few years before. Although Peters had been drumming at the time, he’d since picked up the bass — and Fox happened to know he was at loose ends with his own group, the Case of E.T. Hooley.

“I said, ‘What are you doing? I know the band is not doing well.’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’ve kind of split up. I was thinking of going back to school,'” recalls Fox. “I said, ‘Well, there’s a situation here. We have an unhappy bass player, who I think we’re going to have to replace. Why don’t you come down tonight after the gig and we’ll play for a while?’ And he did and it was magic. It was instantaneously an upgrade, which we never expected. It was like, ‘Well, Tom’s got his wish.’ The next day, we sat Tom down and we said, ‘Tom, you know, we talked to Dale Peters, another bass player, and you’re free to go.’ He goes, ‘Wow, thanks man, that’s a load off my mind.’ Literally, the following night, Dale was in the slot and we never looked back.”

“We could just play instantly,” Peters adds. “I mean, we had the same record collections, we liked the exact same kind of music — we could just play. We can still do it. If we got together tomorrow, it would just work. It just works, I don’t know why. We’re completely different people and we never really hung around together, but we could always play together. So it was great. It was great fun. It was easy. It was fabulous. It was just natural right from the beginning.”

Peters’ addition was an obvious fit for the James Gang, but the same could not be said for vocalist Kenny Weiss, who was briefly brought in to try and relieve Walsh from the double duty of singing and playing guitar. As Walsh says, he only took over vocals for the band because the group’s last singer quit the night of a gig.

“I couldn’t sing — well, I didn’t sing — I had never been a lead singer, I just played guitar. But I sang a lot better than the other guys,” he says. “We got a standing ovation and an encore, and we got gas money to go home. When we got home, we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, do we really need anybody?’ We just decided we’d do it as a three-piece, and that was really the beginning of the James Gang. But I never would have learned how to play and sing if I didn’t have to — then I never would have been the singing guitar player unless I had to, but I had to and so I did. That’s the reason for my style, which is kind of Pete Townshend-ish. It’s kind of ‘lead rhythm’ in the James Gang. I’m grateful that happened, because being in a three-piece band, there’s nothing better on a good night. And on a bad night, there’s nothing worse.”

Walsh’s gratitude in hindsight aside, he wasn’t entirely comfortable being the James Gang’s lead singer at first. “Joe comes to a gig one day and says, ‘I’ve been thinking. I’m not up for this job as a lead singer. I’m no good,'” laughs Fox. “I said, ‘I’m not sure what to say.’ He said, ‘Look, I’m not fooling anyone — I have an odd voice. I think I might be stronger concentrating on the instruments. Who do you know?'”

Walsh is a fine singer, but as Peters points out, he’s a truly singular guitarist. “Joe’s a phenomenal acoustic player. You know, there’s guitar players that are great electric or great acoustic or great slide [players]. Joe is the only guy I know that’s a phenomenal slide player, a phenomenal acoustic player, a phenomenal electric player,” he enthuses. “He’s the only guy I know who does all three about as well as they can be done. And I’m comparing him to everybody, you know, Clapton and everybody else. I mean, Joe … man, he can play.”

Fox turned to his grade school buddy Weiss after his conversation with Walsh, and invited him out to sing with the James Gang — a gig that lasted about as long as it took Weiss to track a couple of cuts for Zachariah, a movie Szymczyk was working as the music director. The band members were hired to perform the songs in the film, but by the time the cameras rolled, Weiss was already out of the lineup — a decision Fox says started with Walsh and manager Mike Belkin.

“The hardest call of my life was at 4 in the morning, calling Kenny at his house and saying, ‘Kenny, don’t get on the airplane,'” says Fox. “He sued us for $50 million — a whole big bulls— thing.” Fox remembers that Szymczyk, unnerved by the lawsuit, offered to mix the band’s next album for free if he settled with Weiss, so he did what he had to do.

“We settled for literally pocket money. It was so embarrassing and so sad. I literally took my share out of my pocket to pay the settlement, and it was a couple of hundred dollars I probably had,” says Fox. “It was stupid. Just stupid. And at a certain point, his attorney knew that and knew it was time to cut bait.”

Firmly resettled as a power trio, the James Gang entered the studio to record Rides Again — but first, they booked a spring 1970 U.S. tour opening for the Who at the personal invitation of Townshend, who Szymczyk guesses had been infected by the “amoebic success” of Yer’ Album.

“Townshend heard them and put them on a Who tour opening for them, and that’s all it took in those days and they were on their way. So when it came time for Rides Again,” he recalls, “they had … especially Walsh, he had a giant head full of ideas. I don’t mean a giant head, but he had a head full of ideas.”

“We learned a ton from Pete,” says Peters. “You know, when the Who played back then, I used to love to watch the people in the first row. Because when they started playing, it was like an avalanche, these people, the energy would just blow them back in their seats. It was incredible and it was great to watch. Because they would always start full-tilt.”

Even though Fox recalls the band having merely “a couple of ideas” for Rides Again when the recording process started, Szymczyk saw a group firmly positioned to take a step forward; looking back now, he identifies a few key ingredients, starting with the addition of Peters and including the new — and eventually signature — James Gang songs “Funk #49” and “The Bomber.”

“I liked Dale immediately, and he had a much better personality. They were prepared. They had played for a year on the road and their chops were really up,” recalls Szymczyk. “Walsh had a bunch of ideas and … ‘The Bomber’ they were playing live. They had put that together themselves on the road and it was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s just amazing.’ ‘Funk #49’ was initially their warm-up that they would do in sound check, just a riff that they’d jam on and then Walsh wrote six lines and that was the end of it,” he laughs. “The story of ‘Funk #49’ is six lines and a great guitar lick.”

“With Dale on the same page, there didn’t seem to be direction issues,” adds Fox. “It all seemed to be pulling in the same direction and that was very helpful during those days, because it went together more easily. Joe for instance, was less likely to say, ‘Listen, Tom, I want you to do this, Jimmy, I’d like you to do this.’ Because what we were playing was organically more naturally right to us all.”

As Peters recalls, the band saw a turning point in its audience at the gigs leading up to the Rides Again sessions, which fed into the energy surrounding the sessions.

“We were doing real well in the clubs, and you could do that back then. You could show up at a club and put 700 people in, just jammed to the rafters,” he says. “When I knew things were different, we played somewhere in Pennsylvania, maybe Beaver Falls — some college — and we played at the field house, and I think we had a $1,500 guarantee against the door. The guy expected a thousand people, and that would have been a good crowd for back then. When we showed up, there were 7,000 people. And it was like, ‘Who are they here to see?’ To me, that was the gig that turned everything. After that, we were surprised at how well we started doing, quickly.”

Amid all the growing buzz, the members of the James Gang found time to buckle down and write new material for the next record. “We jammed in the dressing rooms before each show, so that’s kind of where it all came from. All of those riffs and all of those little things we had thought about month after month, just to get warmed up, they turned into tunes,” adds Peters. “I mean, it was easy. Bill got a great sound and he was really great to work with. You know, he was really loose and never said, ‘No, we can’t do that’ or ‘We don’t want to do that.’ We could do whatever we wanted.”

“We recorded at a studio called the Record Plant in Los Angeles — it now is legendary,” says Walsh. “Stevie Wonder got the studio next to us and was in there for a month. Marvin Gaye was in another studio for two weeks. Everybody was recording at the Record Plant. … It was a brand new studio and it was state-of-the-art, and being in that environment creatively was like a B-12 shot. We didn’t know how to record, but we could do anything we wanted, so we did. We tried a bunch of stuff out and a lot of that was not knowing exactly what we wanted to do, but just, ‘Well, why don’t we do this?’ ‘Okay.’ And then we’d record it. That’s what’s special about Rides Again. When you know how to make records, you do it totally different.”

As Fox tells the story, one of those “totally different” moments included the recording of the Rides Again instrumental track “Asshtonpark,” which he says was named in honor of Zachariah production designer Assheton Gorton and the night the band got him “good and high.”

“We were popping cassettes in and out, just to have music to listen to while we were hanging out and talking and eating potato chips or whatever it was. The spool slipped on the cassette and started coming out of the machine,” says Fox. “We thought that was funny, so Bill grabbed the tape and he strung it around the lamp and then he strung it around Assheton’s foot and then he strung it around my neck, and then he took it over to Joe and strung it around a finger and took it over to Dale and then to another lamp and then to the bedpost, and this and that. We made a jungle of cassette tape out of our hotel room. When we were done, no one could move and we were all stuck in this thing and we looked around. Bill said, ‘What do we call it?’ One of us looked at Assheton and said, ‘This is Assheton Park.'”

Lest that create the impression that the Rides Again sessions were defined by goofing around, Szymczyk is quick to note that much of the record was very deliberately crafted — right down to the sequencing, which split the album between “electric” and “acoustic” sides.

“That was kind of the game plan from the get-go,” he insists. “The way that I always like to sequence stuff is that you have a hard hitter in front — you’ve got a good lead-off man. And it’s got to be short and to the point and it’s got as much of what the band is about as you can put into the first song. … When you’re at the end of almost 20 minutes, then you’ve got to have a great closer — you’ve got to close out the first half. And then the same on the other side, you’ve got to open big and you’ve got to close strong. The four corners, as I used to call them, would take care of themselves. Then it was strictly a matter of filling in the blanks.”

A big “blank” was filled with “The Bomber,” which took up more than seven minutes of Rides Again‘s 35-minute running time, and ended up spawning a couple of classic James Gang stories in the process — while triggering a decades-long copyright battle and paving the way for the invention of industry standard speakers in the bargain.

“The guy who owned the Record Plant had just put in these new expensive monitors, and Bill was the first guy to use them, which was a real mistake, because you know, Bill’s original [motto was] ‘Made Loud to Be Played Loud,'” laughs Peters, recalling the moment during “The Bomber” playback when “the speaker just physically blew out of the wall.”

“We blew eight of those speakers up,” adds Szymczyk. “The next day, [Record Plant co-founder] Gary Kellgren went to his maintenance guy, his head tech, who was Tom Hidley, and he said to Tom, ‘Make me a monitor that Szymczyk can’t blow up!’ That was the birth of the Hidley monitor, which is in hundreds of studios around the world at this point.”

In addition to speaker-destroying frequencies, “The Bomber” also included a passage from Ravel’s “Boléro,” which ended up costing the James Gang a fair bit of legal drama. “Ravel was French, and French copyright law and French law in general is insane. The French copyright, Ravel’s heirs and Ravel’s estate stipulated in the French copyright law that the piece had to be played in its entirety, top to bottom,” recalls Walsh. “You could never play little parts of it. And it had to be played by the full orchestra that it was written for. Well, we didn’t know that!”

The band members were forced to remove the offending portion from the song, but it was eventually restored when The James Gang Rides Again made its way to CD. “The copyright length ran out. It was like 60 years or something and it got to the point where it was 60 years and it kind of became … you know, at the time, this was for albums. CDs didn’t exist when they wrote the law,” explains Walsh. “So when CDs replaced the albums as a format, there’s nothing that said we couldn’t do that!”

When sessions wrapped for Rides Again, Fox says the James Gang was ready to conquer whatever came next. “We felt we were going from a position of strength. When we were working on the record, it felt very much like we were pulling in the same direction. It felt very much like we were doing positive things,” he says now. “When it was finished, we think we did it well. Our attitude was, ‘We’ve accomplished it.'”

Unfortunately, that didn’t translate to a ton of chart success. Though future FM standard “Funk #49” was a minor hit, peaking at No. 59, James Gang Rides Again wasn’t the game-changer the band needed at that point — particularly for Walsh, who was tiring of the grind that chewed up countless bands at their level during the ’70s. This iteration of the group managed to muddle through two more releases — Thirds and James Gang Live in Concert, both released the following year — before he tendered his own resignation.

“Joe came to us and said, ‘Look, I’m hearing way more than we’re playing and I’m hearing stuff that requires keyboards and horns and extra stuff. The way we’re structured, I can’t do both at once. I can do both — but I can’t do them at the same time,'” says Fox. “‘I’m going to leave the band. I’m going to finish the year with you — I’m not pulling any power play.’ He couldn’t have been more upright about it. He gave us a good five or six months.”

Fox admits he didn’t view Walsh’s departure as a “life-altering” development. “I was egotistical about the band,” he laughs. “I even called Pete Townshend, and I said, ‘Pete, what do you think?’ He said, ‘Man, get yourself a kick-ass guitar player and you’re all set.’ Well, he was wrong and I was wrong.”

The James Gang would continue to soldier on for awhile, releasing six more albums with a shifting lineup that at one point included Tommy Bolin, but they never managed to recapture the spark they’d struck with Rides Again — a missed opportunity Peters still rues today.

“It was horrible,” he says of Walsh’s departure. “It was like going to the electric chair. It was like, ‘Now what?’ Because it was all working. Everything was working. We had found our sound, we had a good recording thing going, we had the right agents, you know, all of this stuff was in place.”

The James Gang have since reunited with Walsh on a handful of occasions, playing assorted dates and even reconvening in the studio to re-record old songs, but they’ve never come close to rebuilding the momentum they had going into Rides Again. Looking back, Szymczyk agrees the album remains their defining statement.

“You have to understand, this is my first hit band that I found and discovered, signed to the label. You know, these guys were my baby. So yeah, I was like, ‘Oh goodie, I’ve got my Beatles,’ you know? ‘I’ve got my Led Zeppelin, I’ve got my something.’ I thought we would be at it for a long time,” he laughs. “That was it. That was it — that was the great James Gang album. Period.”

Joe Walsh’s Long Run interview Oct 2012

From interviewmagazine.com October 2012

“Where are you?” Joe Walsh asks me over the phone. “I’m in Los Angeles,” I reply.

“I wish I was,” Walsh says. “I’m in New York City, and it’s raining.”

Perhaps the sentiment is unsurprising, given that Walsh is best known as the guitarist for the Eagles, one of the quintessential LA bands of the 1970s. He has arrived early in New York in anticipation of his solo performance Monday at the Iridium. Earlier this year, he released Analog Man, his first solo album since 1992. It’s an album of renewed vigor and some unexpected nods to contemporary music trends, although he is lyrically preoccupied with being a 64-year-old artist who pines for the days of long hair, vinyl albums, and old school rock-‘n’-roll radio.

The one aspect of his heyday he doesn’t miss is the drugs. Walsh battled alcohol and cocaine addiction for over two decades, finally cleaning up before the Eagles reunited in 1994, after 14 years and the declaration that they would get back together “when Hell freezes over.”

“We went out and toured around the world at least three times. It’s been a full-time job,” he says. “But I love it. And now I have lived sober long enough and learned how to do it all without drugs.” With this mindset, Walsh plans to keep busy with another solo release and a possible Eagles 40th anniversary tour next year.

DANIELLE BACHER: You recorded your last solo album 20 years ago, while you were still struggling with drugs and alcohol. What’s it like doing it completely sober?

JOE WALSH: I’ve been sober for 18 years now. It wasn’t like you flick a switch, and you’re sober. It takes a while. You have to learn how to do everything all over again. You can measure how long that takes in terms of years. What I didn’t know at the time was how to write music and do rock-‘n’-roll and live rock-‘n’-roll and record sober. I didn’t try to do that at first. I learned how to take care of myself and then play in front of people. I didn’t tackle going back to rock-‘n’-roll until I had some sobriety under my belt.

BACHER: Why was it the right time for you to put something out on your own?

WALSH: The timing last year and this year was really good for me to not just work on a solo album, but to actually finish it and put it out. You can work on an album forever, but finishing it is a whole different deal. [laughs] Once I got into that mode, it moved along, and it’s done really well. The message from Analog Man is that I’m back, and it won’t be 20 years until the next album.

BACHER: How was it working with your brother-in-law Ringo Starr on “Band Played On” and “Lucky That Way” from the new album? 

WALSH: Well, we are involved with each other’s projects. I’ve played on his last couple of albums, and we’ve known each other since the ’80s. It turned into family business. He played on my album, so I had to play on his album. Then I played on his album, so he had to play on mine. We really enjoy working together. We always have, but now it’s special because he’s my brother-in-law.

BACHER: You had a lot of famous musicians appear on the album. One that stuck out to me was Tim Armstrong from Rancid. How did you two hook up?

WALSH: Well, that’s a funny story. We actually have the same lawyer, and our lawyer told us that we should work together. I thought, “Why would I want to work with that guy?” We got together, and we got along great. We have a bunch of musical stuff in common. “Hi-Roller Baby” was the song he had been working on with this up-and-coming female artist L.P. (Laura Pergolizzi). They needed someone to sing on the demo. I really got to know the song and it came out really good–it’s different than anything else on the album. I hope I get a chance to work with him some more. He’s a good songwriter and musician, and very underrated.

BACHER: Was there a hesitation to work with him because you are so different in terms of your musical styles?

WALSH: Well, there wasn’t really a hesitation. If my lawyer had not recommended it, it would have never occurred to me. He said to me, “You guys should really work together. I think it would work.” And I do well when I listen to my lawyer. I thought it was something that I should check out, and, in retrospect, he was right.

BACHER: You’ve been in three successful bands: the James Gang, Barnstorm, and the Eagles. Which was the most enjoyable?

WALSH: Well, they all were enjoyable. The one that achieved the greatest amount of success is the Eagles. And because it was really successful, it was a lot more fun. It still is. We get a chance to play music that a lot of people really relate to, and to play places all over the world. That’s fun.

BACHER: How about your solo work?  What do you like about it?

WALSH: I enjoy my solo career because I get to play smaller places like clubs and theaters, and the interaction with the audience is much higher quality. It also sounds better than a baseball stadium. Everybody has a good seat, and I don’t have to play a specific part like I do in the Eagles. When I go out and play solo stuff like the Analog Man tour, I get to play it differently every night, make up parts as I go along and play more freely, which is really rewarding. I have the best of both worlds. I’m in a really big, popular band, and that’s really good for my ego, but I also get to play my solo stuff and a lot of fans come out. It really makes me feel good.

BACHER: Would you ever consider recording an album with your daughter Lucy Walsh?

WALSH: Yeah, I would. I would like to work with her more than I have. She’s been kind of on her own path. She’s done a lot of work in Nashville and gotten to know some songwriters down there and written with them. I never really took on a project with her, but I guess that’s because we haven’t gotten around to it. I would like to go in the studio with her and oversee and produce her, and I don’t see why she couldn’t sing on some of my songs, too. She has a great voice, and I’m very proud of her.

BACHER: I know your daughter Emma passed away in 1974 at a very young age. Has that affected your songwriting and life perspective?

WALSH: It affected my life perspective in that probably the worst thing that can happen to someone is losing a child. That happened to me, so I know. That was a long time ago, and I’m at peace with it now. I wrote a song for her on my album So What. It’s called “Song for Emma,” and it was a kind of goodbye to her. That song was good because it gave me closure on it, and I could move on. I think of her often, and she was a good little kid. Having had that experience, sometimes I am in a position to be able to comfort people. I’m in a position to put an arm around them and tell them they are not alone. I’ve talked to several parents whose sons were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they know about my daughter. Sometimes they’ll contact me to let me know their kids were killed in the war and that they were fans, or that my music really helped them deal with their grief. That’s a good thing that came out of it.

BACHER: Stevie Nicks has described you as the “great, great love of [her] life.” What do you think of that statement?

WALSH: [laughs] I’m very humbled by it. She’s a great songwriter, a great singer and a great person. We spent about a year together, and she helped me write a bunch of music, and I helped her write her music. We had a great relationship. Romantically, it shifted, but in terms of friends and respect for each other, that’s all still there. She’s really a great person. Anybody who knows her will tell you that. And she’s a national treasure. Anything she sings, you immediately know it’s her. If it’s on the radio, you don’t change stations, you listen to it.

BACHER: You’ve been married several times. Is your current wife, Marjorie Bach, the one?

WALSH: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Marjorie, I feel, is a part of me that was missing and I guess when you find the right partner, you realize that this is the part of you that was missing. So what I’m doing now, I didn’t know how to do before I was with her. She made it possible.

BACHER: Do you have any major regrets in your career? Is there anything you could have done, but didn’t?

WALSH: I don’t have a lot of regrets. One thing I always really wanted to do was play guitar for Ray Charles. I grew up with Ray Charles, and of course, he was as good as it gets. I always wanted to play for him, but he passed away before I got a chance. I wish rather than waiting for that to happen, I had called him up and said, “Ray, I’m coming over!”

BACHER: Do you have any Eagles-related news you would like to share? Can we expect any new music in the near future?

WALSH: Eagles plans? Well, here is what we are doing: we have archived everything from day one with the Eagles. We have it on the shelf somewhere, and by that I mean interviews and live performances and discussions and videos of us on the road.

BACHER: I heard the group was planning to release a two-DVD documentary that would cover its entire history. Is that still happening, and when can we expect it?

WALSH: Yeah, it’s about 80 percent done and should be out in January. I’ve seen a bunch of it assembled, and it’s pretty powerful stuff. It’s also going to be our 40th anniversary as a band, and, because of that, we are probably going to tour next year. No albums yet, but I am going to probably do a blues album that I’ve wanted to do for a long time with a lot of people you would recognize. I am going to start looking at that around the end of the year.

BACHER: Tell the truth: are you sick of “Hotel California” by now?

WALSH: No. I should be, but I’m not. That song is really hard to play the right way. Some of the other songs are automatic, and it’s not as exciting to play them as it used to be. But with “Hotel California,” I really have to sit up straight and pay attention to play it right. That’s one of the songs I look forward to because that it’s still a challenge.

Joe Walsh interview: Keith Moon taught me the basics of hotel damage

From loudesound.com November 2017

Life’s been good to the Eagle, but being ‘chaperoned’ by Keith Moon didn’t help the “pitiful” booze-and-substances bad bits

Like a rock King Canute, Joe Walsh is attempting to hold back the waves of 21st-century technological progress. “I’m an analogue man,” declares the Eagles guitarist, neatly referencing the title of his new album, Analog Man. “When I started on the album I listened to what was out there to see if I could fit in and it kinda scared me. So I thought: ‘You know what? You’re better off doing another Joe Walsh album than trying to be something else.’”

His first solo record since 1992’s Songs For A Dying Planet, it marks the end of two decades of what Walsh calls “semi-retirement”. But, given that he recorded and toured with the reunited Eagles, kicked both booze and substances, and married Ringo Starr’s sister-in-law during that time, calling it a “retirement” of any sort is a bit of stretch.

Why has it taken you 20 years to make a new solo album?

Two reasons. One is that I’ve been a full-time Eagle – in the last 10 years we’ve been around the world twice. The other reason is that I got sober in 1994 and I had to take time out to learn how to live. I discovered this whole new life in sobriety, and I wanted to go and check it out. Also, going into the studio still had some triggers – I’d get frustrated trying to write some stuff and my mind would say: “Well, you know what would work…”, and that wasn’t an option.

Where do you fit in the musical landscape in 2012?

I guess I’m a senior member of the rock’n’roll community I’m trying to represent. I don’t hear that much out there in terms of rock’n’roll albums, so I’ve decided that’s what I should do.

You say you’re an “analogue man”, but you have a website, a Facebook account and you’re on Twitter.

Well, yeah. It’s a digital age, there are no record companies. We’ve all had to make some adjustments and I’ve got to keep up with it. I’m just commenting on the fact that there are two worlds. There’s the one that I’ve always written about, which is reality on earth, and then there’s this whole other place, a computer-created illusion. People get on the internet playing these games and they’re in there for days. Meanwhile, reality goes on. And I’m just trying to write about it.

You wrote Life’s Been Good in 1978. What’s been the best part?

Being inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame was good for my ego, but I don’t know how much it really means. I think having been a part of the making of Hotel California and then having it succeed beyond any of our wildest dreams, that was truly a high point.

What about the worst bit?

The low point was probably my last three years of vodka and substance abuse. I was pretty pitiful. I had lost myself. I always thought: “Well, if I need to, I can stop.” And then I realised that wasn’t the case, and I did not know what to do. That was pretty awful and I don’t want to go there again. There’s life after that and it’s good. There’s a notion that sobriety can kill your mojo.

Do you think there’s a link between creativity and excess?

I do. Could Hendrix have played like that sober, straight and without acid? I don’t think so. Could Hemingway and Faulkner have written like that unless they were alcoholics? Probably not. I always used that as a crutch in my denial – that artists should experience all extremes. But it never occurred to me that all those people are dead. Being a rock’n’roller and partying was part of the times back then. I took it as far as I could go and it almost killed me.

Is it true that on your first visit to England you were chaperoned by Keith Moon?

Oh yeah. The James Gang were opening up for The Who when they premiered Tommy in Europe, and Keith Moon decided that he liked me and that we should stay up for the entire tour. He taught me the basics of hotel damage, blowing stuff up and anarchic chaos in general. He was my mentor. And of course I embellished it later with things like chainsaws. You took a chainsaw on the road? Yeah. But I found that you didn’t have to really use it that much. Walking up to the front desk with one usually got a lot accomplished.

You actually ran for President in 1980. What are your feelings about the way the 2012 US elections are shaping up?

There’s a lot of stuff wrong and a lot of stuff broken. I was watching the debates and I was pretty sure that I could get elected if I just didn’t say anything. These guys are putting their foot in their mouths with every third thing they say. It’s hilarious but it’s also scary. I don’t know why anybody in the world would want to be president, but if the whole country begged me, I’d probably consider it.

What’s happening with The Eagles?

This year marks our 40th anniversary and we’ve decided to take some time off and chill. I think we’re going to put a show together based around that theme. But that’s going to take five or six months.

If I was a young musician about to join The Eagles, what advice would you give me?

Just smile and nod ‘Yes’. They’re just real alpha guys in the band. We’ve always been strong personalities and we’re all solo artists. Some of the tension between us has been really good creatively. We don’t fight so much any more; we agree to disagree. When we’re together – and we know this – it becomes something much bigger than any of us individually. There’s something special aboutthe band and we know that.

And what advice would you give to the 15-year-old version of yourself?

Wow. Work at your craft. You can’t be a legend in your parents’ garage. You’ve got to get out and play in front of people. Even if you stink. Hang in there, pay attention to the internet, and good fuckin’ luck because it’s not easy.

Joe Walsh Barnstorm (1972)

From therisingstorm.net

Joe Walsh is one of those artists that will always be remembered for classic rock radio hits Funk #49, Rocky Mountain Way andLife’s Been Good. Then of course there was his memorable stint in the Eagles, which yielded the highly successful Hotel California album. He was one of the prime architects of the classic rock sound and his radio smashes are stilled played every day at the top of each hour. Prior to the Eagles and Rocky Mountain Way, Joe Walsh made great music with the James Gang (Rides Again is one of the great classic rock LPs) and this, his first solo album from 1972, Barnstorm (the group is often referred to as the Barnstormers).

The Barnstorm group was put together shortly after Walsh left the James Gang.  The songs were recorded in Nederland, CO with the help of bassist Kenny Passarelli and drummer Joe Vitale, the latter had played with Walsh in 60s garage band the Measles. The trio recorded an album that rocks hard at times but also has a strong roots/country flavor. It’s a unique disc in Walsh’s varied discography, as he would never record anything like Barnstorm again. Turn To Stone, the hardest rocker on the album, holds up pretty well and is similar to something the James Gang might have recorded in 1970. Walsh would revisit this excellent track on 75’s So What but I feel the version heard here sounds best. 

Most of the album is earthy roots rock that retains powerful classic rock-like hooks, just listen to the album’s closing cut Comin Down. Here you have just Walsh’s vocals, guitar and harmonica but moving stuff nonetheless.  My favourite cuts on the album are Home, I’ll Tell The World About You, the psychedelic country rocker Midnight Visitor and the classic Americana of Birdcall Morning. The latter is truly amazing, highlighted by sparkling acoustic guitars and some rustic slide work – it should have been a radio anthem.

Barnstorm contains imaginative music, wonderful guitar solos, unique songwriting, great ensemble playing and sharp humour, really Joe Walsh at his best. Some songs have synth and hit a more experimental vibe but they work well in the context of this album. Barnstorm is a masterpiece, a must hear for fans of country influenced hard rock. Every track is worth multiple spins and listeners will immediately identify with the amount of thought and care put into each song and guitar solo. It goes without saying that this record is a lost classic.

Joe Walsh The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get (1973)

From classicrockreview.com

The second of two albums featuring singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Joe Walsh with his backup group Barnstorm, The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get features a fine selection of diverse rock, blues, folk and jazz. This diversity in style is parallel to the diversity of composers within Barnstorm as well as the multiple lead vocalists throughout the album. As a result, this 1973 album proved to be a commercial breakthrough for Walsh and the band, reaching the Top 10 in the United States.

After much success with James Gang, Walsh decided to leave that rock trio in late 1971. He relocated to Colorado, where he formed the band Barnstorm, with bassist Kenny Passarelli and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Joe Vitale. Very soon after forming, the group started recording their debut album, which was originally released as the eponymous Barnstorm (later listed as a Joe Walsh solo album) in October 1972. While a critical success, the album had only moderate commercial success.

The group immediately began work on a follow-up in late 1972 with producer Bill Szymczyk. Recorded throughout the winter of 1972-1973, this second album features a fourth Barnstorm member, keyboardist Rocke Grace, although the album is fully credited to Walsh as a solo artist.

The album begins with its most popular and indelible track, “Rocky Mountain Way”, compositionally credited to all four Barnstorm members. This entertaining, methodical rocker features a masterful coda section with an impressive talk box lead followed by Walsh’s signature slide guitar as the song fades out. Lyrically, the song was inspired by Walsh reflecting on his decision to leave the James Gang and move to Colorado and it became Walsh’s first Top 40 hit.

Vitale’s “Book Ends” is a Bowie-esque glam ballad with piano and nicely treated guitars on top, while the drummer takes on lead vocals duties, followed by the dark folk, almost pyschedelic vibe of “Wolf”, where the minimal arrangement lets the full sonic effect shine through as well as concentrate on Walsh’s vocal delivery. “Midnight Moodies” is a jazzy, piano-led instrumental composed by Grace, with some good rhythms, slight rock guitar as well as plenty of flute flourishes by Vitale. “Happy Ways” features lead vocals by bassist Passarelli along with plenty of extra percussion added by Vitale and session percussionist Joe Lala.

The album’s original second side begins with “Meadows”, a rocker with multiple dynamics throughout from the hard rocking chorus to the quiet acoustic mid section. “Dreams” may be the best overall song on the second side as a very unique track which highlights Barnstorm’s musical talent and versatility. It alternates from quiet jazz ballad to upbeat Gospel sound with piano and organ playing a large musical role throughout. Vitale’s “Days Gone By” is a pleasant enough jazz/pop/rocker but an odd one as the final proper song on the album, being a sort of fusion between the sounds of Moody Blues, Pink Floyd and a Broadway show tune. “Day Dream (Prayer)” was constructed as a stand-alone coda, featuring rich backing vocals by guests Venetta Fields and Clydie King and really only one proper verse before a long fade out ending the album.

In 1974, Walsh played slide guitar on Vitale’s debut solo album, Roller Coaster Weekend, continuing a decades long musical relationship between the two despite the fact that Barnstorm would break up following The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get. Later that same year, Walsh released his first totally solo record, So What, which was much more introspective and much less musically diverse than this final Barnstorm album.