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Mon 7 September 2026 19:30, UK
All of the great rock and roll tales the Eagles wrote during the peak of their career in the 1970s came from years of experience.
In many ways, they were the ultimate rock and roll method actors, playing gigs and recording albums as frequently as they were attending Hollywood parties and snorting the finest cocaine celebrities had to offer. In fact, if you really wanted to gain an insight into what life as an Eagle was really like, then you only have to listen to their song ‘Life In The Fast Lane’.
But that life ran into an almighty crash by 1980, when the band played a now-famed show in Long Beach that ended in a fist fight. It was a dramatic and violent end for a group whose career followed the pathway of those two attitudes, and in many ways, it forced them to all take a much-needed breath.
But the opportunity from the break-up was only really afforded to Glenn Frey and Don Henley, the charismatic leaders who naturally carved out the figures of solo artists after the Eagles. The rest of the band were forced to confront the ghosts of their stardom, and for Joe Walsh, it delivered the darkest chapter of his entire life.
“When the Eagles stopped in 1980, I kept going,” he explained, but not persistence in the creative sense, “I didn’t really want to admit it had ended, so I just kept the same mentality and lifestyle. And the way I wound up was that the only thing that mattered to me was not running out of cocaine. And also vodka. Vodka, cocaine and Camel Light cigarettes. Those three things.”
The unwillingness to accept defeat in the face of his career changing affected everything in Walsh’s life, from the professional to the personal. Not only was he losing all credibility in the music industry, but his close relationships were falling apart around him as well.
He continued, “Gradually, I stopped writing music, and I stopped taking care of myself. I burned bridges. I was not dependable. I didn’t make any sense a lot of the time. Musicians didn’t really care to work with me anymore. I had an ‘I don’t care about anything’ attitude. My day, and it was really hard work, was spent trying to find a dealer who would front me some cocaine when I still owed him for the last batch. And if I was awake, I was drinking. I was just empty.”
Further reading: From The Vault
It was ten years of hard and fast living for Walsh, with no respite coming until the ‘90s when he experienced a frightening blackout on a flight to Paris that resulted in him waking up in the French capital without a single clue of how he got there.
At that point, an Eagles reunion tour was on the horizon and with the promise of the band getting back together, Walsh faced an ultimatum: clean his act up or continue sliding into a state of physical decline. After joining a rehabilitation group and utilising the support from his old bandmates, Walsh came out of the slumber and reemerged in the ‘90s as a member of the Eagles, once again.
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