(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 9 October 2025 22:15, UK
By the end of the 1970s, Joe Walsh didn’t really need to take shit from anyone anymore.
He had become a legend in his own right without ever compromising himself, and when listening to all of his work that he did before Eagles, it is a treasure trove of the tastiest guitar work that anyone ever laid down that decade. He simply knew the kind of music the fans wanted to hear, but he also knew that there were bound to be a few bumps in the road if he wanted to get a little bit weird.
But asking Joe Walsh to stop being a bit eccentric is like asking the Tasmanian Devil to give you some peace and quiet. Walsh was going to do whatever made him feel good, and that normally meant playing rock and roll at full volume to anyone within earshot. That worked perfectly well in the confines of James Gang, but outside of tunes like ‘Funk 49’, there wasn’t really that much room for him to grow outside of being one of the good ol’ boys of rock and roll with a guitar in his hands.
That’s not to say that he couldn’t get introspective in his solo career, either. So What does have a lot of great rock and roll tracks across its runtime, but tunes like ‘Help Me Through the Night’ are bold looks at the kind of mindstate he was in after losing his daughter and struggling to live from day to day again.
That kind of transition doesn’t suddenly happen overnight. It’s a hard enough sell to get people to grasp onto a song about being more introspective when everything you’ve done before involved a ripping guitar solo, and Barnstorm at least set up the possibility for Walsh to be a more inventive artist than what he ultimately turned into. He wanted to make a more downbeat record, but it’s not like the fans were ready for it.
While the record is far from terrible, anyone that was listening to James Gang before this were in for a surprise, Walsh is pretty much in full songwriter-mode throughout much of the record, and while it does make for an interesting listen, even Walsh had to admit that he was a little bit in over his head trying to get the whole thing finished in one go. He needed practice, and he wasn’t exactly at the level of his contemporaries.
Walsh knew that singer-songwriter tunes belonged to people like James Taylor, and he knew that there was no way for him to match up to that, saying, “I was thinking I was going to be James Taylor. I went out, played all nice love ballads, and people said, ‘What? What’s he doing?’ After eight months, I was rocking again. You either gotta rock or be great at the quiet stuff. I wasn’t good enough as the introspective singer/songwriter. I wasn’t being true to myself, either.”
That didn’t mean that he gave up on it altogether, though. His solo work was a great place to ease into that kind of sound, and while his time in Eagles will forever be remembered for that riff in the middle of ‘Life in the Fast Lane’, it’s telling that the first song that featured him singing with the band was the song ‘Pretty Maids All in a Row’, which is so tender that it might as well have been a long-distance cousin of ‘Desperado’.
James Taylor may have continued to be the go-to person for storytelling songs, but Walsh did have that musical gene in him somewhere. All it took was a few years for it to be let out, and when it finally did, no one expected one of the biggest wildmen in the music industry to have as big of a heart as he did.
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