(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender / Joe Walsh)
Sat 28 March 2026 21:00, UK
It’s hard to really think of too many complaints when it comes to Joe Walsh.
He might not write the most thoughtful songs that the rock and roll world has ever known, but when listening to him performing with the Eagles, he always had the good-time spirit that tends to be missing more than a few times whenever Don Henley takes the mic. Walsh was out there to have a laugh from the very beginning of his career, but he always came by it honestly when he saw some band that didn’t really click for him.
But you’d be hard-pressed to find any rock star who seemed to have a bad time next to Walsh. Even when he was at the height of his drinking, he was more than happy to play a few pranks on his friends and study under some of the world-class partiers of the time like Keith Moon. When it came time to kick out the jams, Walsh did remind everyone that he still came from the same rough rock and roll background as a lot of his peers.
James Gang was on the cusp of creating hard rock when they first started writing their masterpieces, and even if it didn’t seem like the best fit when working with the Eagles, it made perfect sense once Walsh worked on ‘Life in the Fast Lane’. His riffs gave the band the edge that they needed whenever they started to venture towards straight-up rock and roll, but compared to his other projects, there wasn’t really much room for jamming whenever they got onstage.
Henley and Glenn Frey were very particular about what they wanted, and even on a song like ‘Hotel California’ that was meant to be the vehicle for a guitar solo, Walsh didn’t have much room to venture off on his own. He and Don Felder had created a work of art with the solo they laid down on record, and even if it got boring trying to match the same riffs that they played on the record, there was a certain fluidity to their playing that they weren’t going to capture anywhere else.
But even if Walsh had a stricter way of playing, he could still admire when bands like the Grateful Dead could cut loose a little bit more. Jerry Garcia was never going to play the same show twice whenever he played with them, but even if playing along with them seemed like a lot of fun, Walsh admitted that he could never get around the more laid-back aspect of their music whenever they got onstage.
Sure, the band members were some of the best in their field, but Walsh was always more respectful of the band than being an actual fan, saying, “Some improv bands I like. I love the Allman Brothers and I was listening to a lot of blues and of course that’s all improv. (But) I never really quite got the Grateful Dead. I have a lot of respect for Jerry Garcia, but I could never tell what the hell they were doing. I’m not sure they knew either. But I was open to their input… To be able to improvise yourself, you’ve got to study other people.”
And it’s not like the band didn’t take a few cues from the Dead when they started working on their songs. Henley might have written that one kiss-off line to the band in ‘The Boys of Summer’, but when they eventually re-emerged for Hell Freezes Over, having Walsh and Felder play a more subdued intro to ‘Hotel California’ with an almost Spanish lilt to their playing probably wouldn’t have happened without learning to spread out like Garcia did back in the day.
So while Henley had no time for mindless noodling on his stage, Garcia wasn’t looking to make tunes where they just improvised for the hell of it. He wanted to create an entire tapestry of sound whenever the band played, and even if Walsh didn’t like the finished product, he wasn’t about to talk trash on a band that had clearly found their niche.
