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October 20th, 2026 · 1:30am BST
Nothing that Don Henley ever did with the Eagles was done by accident.
Even though he tried his best to make the catchiest tunes that anyone had ever heard, there was a certain flow that came with the music that ended up working wonders whenever he and Glenn Frey started writing tunes together for the band to play. But Henley was always the first one to say that there was no way that the band could have made it without the rest of their bandmates around them filling out everything.
As much as Don Felder felt that he wasn’t being appreciated like he should have throughout his time with the band, it’s not like Henley ever tried to take them for granted. Frey always liked to equate a rock and roll band to a football team, and if Henley and Frey were the star quarterbacks who were throwing the ball downfield, people like Randy Meisner and Felder were the linebackers who helped move the chains forward and didn’t have to always worry about singing everything.
But it’s no surprise when some people started to get pissed that they didn’t get to have the spotlight as much. Not that the Eagles were star performers or anything, but when you look at the direction they were heading as a rock and roll outfit, Bernie Leadon didn’t see himself fitting in that kind of group at all. He wanted to play country music, and the idea of being forced to play rock and roll guitar solos for the rest of his life wasn’t what he had in mind.
Besides, the band was already getting a little too crowded. Frey was the one driving the rhythm guitar right up the middle, and since he and Felder were both fans of rock and roll guitar players, Leadon seemed to feel like a spare part whenever he tried to lay down any number of his country bends or the occasional banjo part into any number of the songs that they were making. But the band probably didn’t think they’d actually hit the jackpot when Joe Walsh joined.
Walsh was already a massive star in his own right, and there was no reason for them to think that he would have joined them, no questions asked. But since they were under the same management, it didn’t take them long to start talking, and Henley knew that Walsh was the man for them when they first started to jam together on occasion when he made a cameo at their concerts to play ‘Rocky Mountain Way’.
The sound was unbelievable, and considering how well they sounded, Henley figured that it was in Walsh’s best interest to join the band, saying, “Joe was getting tired of being the leader of a group and feeling that he just wanted to be in a group for a change. He was to be a participant rather than a chief who hired and fired people. Writing all the songs gets to be a big burden on any solo artist.” And it’s not like the rest of the world needed to wait long to hear what Walsh could do.
Further reading: From The Vault
It’s one thing to have one of the greatest hits albums of all time, but off the strength of one album alone, Walsh managed to find his way onto a record that went on to sell over 75 million copies when he played on Hotel California. And while Frey and Henley were already making classic songs, there’s no way that record would have been half of what it was were it not for what Walsh was laying down on his ballad ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’ or the guitar chops on ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ and the title track.
Everything seemed to be falling into place, but even if the good times didn’t last long, Walsh was always going to be a central part of the Eagles. Every other one of their albums had the potential to be a little too serious, so having Walsh be the musical clown in the middle of everything was what broke up the monotony every time you heard them perform live.
