{"id":206352,"date":"2025-10-17T10:52:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T10:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/206352\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T10:52:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T10:52:10","slug":"the-one-song-that-saw-joe-walsh-create-a-train-wreck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/206352\/","title":{"rendered":"The one song that saw Joe Walsh create a “train wreck”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Joe<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Jim Summaria)<\/p>\n

Thu 16 October 2025 20:42, UK <\/p>\n

There were a couple of different points in his life where it might have been accurate to call\u00a0Joe Walsh<\/a>\u00a0a \u201ctrain wreck\u201d. <\/p>\n

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Walsh\u2019s intake of drugs and alcohol was legendary, so much so that he took the opportunity to play off his own notorious reputation in the song \u2018Life\u2019s Been Good\u2019. After\u00a0the Eagles<\/a>\u2018 breakup in 1980, Walsh pushed the boundaries of intoxication to dangerous levels.<\/p>\n

But while Walsh might have labelled himself a \u201ctrain wreck\u201d at his lowest points, there was one instance where Walsh was credited for creating a \u201ctrain wreck\u201d. <\/p>\n

The wreck itself wasn\u2019t literal: nobody would be dumb enough to let Walsh behind the controls of an actual train. Instead, the credit referred to an audio effect that Walsh created with his guitars at the end of one of his most famous pre-solo, pre-Eagles songs.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve kinda gotta put on headphones to hear it, but I took a guitar and did a full-on Pete Townshend with it in the background, where I put everything on ten and turned the fuzz tone all the way up,\u201d\u00a0said Walsh<\/a>. \u201cI took the guitar off, threw it up in the air, put it on the ground, and jumped up and down on it. I didn\u2019t light it on fire, because you can\u2019t see that on an album. That would have been stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n

While recording the James Gang\u2019s third album in 1970, appropriately titled Thirds, Walsh composed the hard rock track \u2018Walk Away\u2019. Detailing the aftermath of a breakup, Walsh channels the anger and bitterness of the event through his guitar, ripping through solos, riffs, and chord changes with palpable anger. The song was all but finished when Walsh began concocting an ending for the track.<\/p>\n

Wanting to channel even more chaos and destruction into the song, Walsh began overdubbing layers and layers of discordant guitar lines. Some parts were achieved using slides; others were simply feedback-laden monoliths of sound. The main wah-wah riff begins to bleed into multiple different careening guitar lines as the song comes to a clattering finale. Walsh is clearly having a ball creating as much sonic destruction as possible.<\/p>\n

As a joke on his arsenal of guitars that close \u2018Walk Away\u2019, Walsh is officially credited with creating a \u201ctrain wreck\u201d in the liner notes of\u00a0Thirds. When Walsh left the James Gang the same year to pursue a solo career, \u2018Walk Away\u2019 remained on his setlist and would later be picked up by The Eagles as one of Walsh\u2019s spotlights during the band\u2019s concerts. <\/p>\n

The album would be Walsh\u2019s last with the band. \u201cIt became a quest to find a suitable replacement for Joe Walsh,\u201d said Jimmy Fox of The James Gang. \u201cWe\u2019d try some guys and do an album or two, but it wasn\u2019t quite what we wanted and so we\u2019d move on to something else in the hope of recapturing the old spirit. Some of the albums were good but we were always looking to find that particular thing we had with Joe and I don\u2019t think we ever found it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you catch Walsh playing a solo show, there\u2019s a decent chance you\u2019ll hear him bust out \u2018Walk Away\u2019. He may even replicate that \u201ctrain wreck\u201d as well.<\/p>\n

Check out the studio version of \u2018Walk Away\u2019 down below.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Jim Summaria) Thu 16 October 2025 20:42, UK There were a couple of different…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[42201,96,89072,89073,42016,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-206352","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-1970s","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-guitar","11":"tag-hard-rock","12":"tag-joe-walsh","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}