Credit: Far Out / Jim Summaria
Mon 28 September 2026 22:00, UK
When it comes to rock-and-roll hellraisers, the Eagles probably aren’t the first band that springs to mind.
Not that they were clean-cut. Like much of the 1970s Los Angeles scene, the soft rock stalwarts’ taste for cocaine was legendary. According to pop lore, Black Sabbath had to scrape an alleged pound of coke out of the mixing desk when they took over Miami’s Criteria Studios after the Eagles had cut Hotel California, and partied hard during the sessions.
Yet tales of televisions flung out of hotel room windows don’t lend themselves to Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s harmonised croon. Until Joe Walsh, that is.
Walsh, who brought a harder rock edge, joined the Eagles in late 1975 after Bernie Leadon’s bluegrass commitments pushed him to walk away from the band. He already possessed a prestigious tutelage in the art of hotel destruction from none other than The Who wild man Keith Moon.
Before entering the Eagles’ fold, Walsh had played guitar and fronted James Gang, a hard rock trio from Cleveland who wound up supporting The Who on the UK leg of their Tommy tour. Moon’s passion for obliterating hotel rooms rubbed off, and Walsh carried it with him into the Eagles at the peak of their fame.
It was the summer of 1977; Hotel California was selling in ungodly numbers, and all in the Eagles were thrown a likewise amount of silly cash. Staying at Chicago’s Astor Tower, Walsh received a knock on the hotel door from none other than Saturday Night Live star John Belushi, who likewise was known to dabble in recreational destruction. The initial plan was to dine in some of the city’s swankiest restaurants, yet the pair’s jeans resulted in a swift refusal of entry, no matter how famous the pair were, and even after Belushi’s attempted $300 bribe to the maître d’.
What to do? It was Belushi who dreamt up a madcap idea to pass through the restaurant’s doors without a wardrobe change. “…the next thing I knew, we were standing in the alley, and he spray-painted my jeans black, and then he made me do his,” Walsh recalled on 2013’s History of the Eagles documentary. “And we went back, and we got in. We were sitting in these Queen Anne period chairs that had needlepoint, and when we stood up, that was all black, and the butts of our pants were jeans again. So, we had to kind of back out of there and leave fast.”
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Then came the carnage. Back at their penthouse suite, the pair began to destroy furniture, tear down custom wallpaper, and hack away at the walls with such frenzy that the building’s structure was exposed.
However, this was no mere luxury hotel room. The trashed suite was, in fact, the hotel owner’s private residence, resulting in damages totalling $28,000. Neither realised mid-wrecking, prompting swift legal advice as to how hard the law might come down on Walsh and Belushi.
No criminal charges were brought, and a sufficiently large cheque was handed to the furious hotel owner, but Walsh found himself blacklisted from many high-end hotels, sporting the distinction of having played his role in the most expensive night of rock and roll destruction there’ll likely ever be.
