(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 9 February 2026 19:22, UK
In the grand history of rock and roll, you’re not going to find a more easygoing legend than Joe Walsh.
He might have been able to throw down every single time he played guitar, but his behaviour onstage reads more like someone who’s more than happy to be having a good time onstage than the typical god-like genius that every other rock star turns into. Walsh was much happier to have fun playing with every other member of the Eagles, but that was probably because he had finally found a home after being on his own for so long.
Then again, it’s not like Walsh was hurting by any stretch when he first got that call from Don Henley and Glenn Frey to join the band. He was already one of the greatest guitarists that rock and roll had ever seen, and when you’ve become friends with Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix, there’s a good chance that he didn’t need to work a day in his life if he didn’t want to. But it’s not like Walsh didn’t have his fair share of ups and downs before joining the California legends.
So, what might have been one of the greatest albums that he made from around that time, but he would have probably traded every song that he ever wrote to have his daughter Emma back after she passed away in a car accident. He was already going through the darkest chapters of his life, so giving him a band to work off of was going to be much better than what he had been doing since the James Gang.
After all, the power trio had already gone as far as they could, and Walsh wanted the opportunity to stretch a little bit more. He had spent years honing his craft as a solo artist, but ‘Hotel California’ was his chance to make his guitar masterpiece alongside Don Felder. And when you look at the mellower side of Eagles, chances are Walsh wanted to take it down a notch after spending nearly a decade playing the most cutthroat hard rock that anyone had ever tried.
Sure, a song like ‘Funk 49’ might not sound like the heaviest thing in the world, but in a world before Black Sabbath had made their mark, Walsh could have earned himself a spot next to Townshend and Page as one of the first hard rock guitar heroes. But when bands like Sabbath and Judas Priest started to come out of the woodwork, Walsh wanted an excuse to strip every piece of metal from his DNA when the James Gang broke up.
Barnstorm still had a few heavy licks to go around, but Walsh felt that going solo was his way of walking away from the heavy metal crowd, saying, “Nobody really understood why I quit the James Gang, because we were doing really well, but I didn’t want to be in a three-piece rock and roll band anymore. I thought I was painting myself in a corner, in terms of being a musician. And I wasn’t really crazy about being a grandparent of heavy metal!”
But, really, what Walsh was doing had a lot more to do with what bands like The Who was doing than what Sabbath ended up playing later down the line. It’s not out of the question for some heavy metal players to be listening to a couple of James Gang songs back in the day, but Walsh’s music seemed to have the same kind of power that you’d typically hear out of a record like Live At Leeds or The Song Remains the Same than anything coming out of Tony Iommi’s amplifier.
Even if Walsh wanted to walk away from that kind of sound, there’s no shame in earning a spot in both chairs, either. Eagles might be known for giving the world a piece of California sunshine every time they played, but there was nothing wrong with them being able to hop on a few kickass riffs in between ballads like ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’ and ‘Tequila Sunrise’.