In the late 1960s an entire school of hard rock bands developed out of the industrial cities of the north-central U.S. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland had a hard core of dedicated fans who followed their local groups wherever they played and usually paid special attention to the band’s guitarist, who often was heavily influenced by any number of popular British rock guitarists. Cream, the British power trio led by guitarist Eric Clapton, was the most profound influence on bands like Grand Funk Railroad, Cactus and other groups out of the Detroit area

The biggest group around Cleveland in the late ‘6Os was the James Gang. Formed by drummer Jim Fox, the band had a near-legendary guitarist by the name of Glenn Schwartz who quit the band to join Pacific Gas and Electric before the James Gang even had a recording deal. He was replaced by Joe Walsh, a lanky, blond-haired guitarist from Montclair, New Jersey. Walsh had gone to Ohio to attend Kent State University and earned a local reputation as one of the fastest, flashiest guitarists in the area. When he joined the Gang in ‘68 he immediately became a local hero. Though Fox had formed the group, it was apparent by the time the group recorded their debut LP, Yer Album, that Walsh was dominating the band’s sound, singing, writing and playing some of the most creative guitar in America.

Yer Album, produced by ABC Records’ house producer Bill Szymczyk, was a Walsh tour de force, yet, like many albums at the time, it had a loose, communal feel to the production and Szymczyk himself even contributed some keyboard and percussion playing. The album was pretty much state-of-the-art for its time and still sounds great today. Part of its appeal is due to the fact that the band had a lot more to offer than just heavy metal thunder-in fact, the record starts with a cacophonous string and acoustic guitar arrangement, "Introduction," before breaking into Walsh’s beautiful "Take A Look Around." The song pretty much establishes Walsh’s style right at the beginning-the first section is a bright, Beatles influenced pop melody with washes of organ over- dubbed by Walsh pushing the rhythm as guitar, bass and drums follow languidly, then the song breaks to a bridge kicked off by more phased organ and a spacey, echo-plex guitar solo where each note reverberates in a rich, trebly, tone as it bleeds into the next note. The combination of the echo distortion guitar and rumbling organ gives a wonderfully melodic quality to the song that brilliantly sets off Walsh’s lazy, adenoidal vocal

The hard rock side of the band follows immediately with "Funk #48, a snappy, well syncopated r&b pattern that features Walsh’s flashy chording in a crisp punch and weave with Fox’s spring precision drumming. Walsh proceeds to pay tribute to his immediate influences for the rest of side one with mindblowing back-to-back versions of classics by the Buffalo Springfield and the Yardbirds, "Bluebird" and "Lost Woman." Covering other people’s material like this was a dangerous and potentially unpopular move for a band to make on its first album, since most groups were trying to demonstrate their originality and did not cotton much to influences. The key to Walsh’s brilliance, however, was his ability to assimilate rock styles without being swamped by them, and he met the challenge of covering "Bluebird" and "Lost Woman" without making them sound stale

The two songs provide a neat encapsulization of Walsh’s multifaceted musical interest, "Bluebird" displaying his capacity for softer, melodic textures and fills that subtly shape with the song, "Lost Woman" calling for him to pull out all the stops on flashy, boogie rave-up soloing of heroic proportions. "Bluebird" gets a melodic treatment that owes as much to the Beatles as to Buffalo Springfield, but Walsh takes on the challenge of matching the Yardbirds’ guitarists, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, strength for strength on "Lost Woman."\

The second side includes several more of Walsh’s melodic, instrumentally dense ballads, "Collage" - (with another string section arrangement) and "Fred," another set of strange, otherworldly sounds. Walsh shows his ability to handle Cream-style hard rock with "1 Don’t Have the Time," yet even here Walsh is stretching the convention by adding an eerie, phased piano sound to the arrangement. His guitar solo in "I Don’t Have the Time" is a masterfully condensed run through of the genre. In between songs are little goofing off passages and stone raps, a fairly popular approach at the time, but handled in a much more believable manner than usual. The album closes on a twelve minute long version of "Stop," ("and the story of how we couldn’t...." says the liner notes) another funk showpiece which gives Walsh the chance to stretch out and build up more of the tight r&b inspired patterns that are his trademark sound

Yer Album was one of the finest debut records by an American group at the time, but was nothing compared to what the band sounded like live. The group energy is somewhat diffused by the experimental nature of the record, which most closely resembles some of the records being released by British groups at the time. In person, however, the James Gang were a no holds barred power trio and Walsh was quickly becoming known as the fastest gun in the western hemisphere. "Stop," "Funk #48," "Bluebird" and "Lost Woman" became showcases for Walsh’s talents and audiences across the country went wild as the James Gang blew group after group off the stage. At one show opening for The Who, the James Gang and Walsh impressed Who guitarist Peter Townshend so much that Townshend went around raving about Walsh for weeks. "I don’t want to sound ridiculous," Townshend said at the time, "but he (Walsh) is one of the guys I go nuts-rapturous-about. We were in Pittsburgh. All of a sudden we heard the music drifting through to the dressing room. Well, it sounds fair, I said. And if it sounds fair in the dressing room, it has got to sound incredible from the stage. From the side of the stage they were blowing my mind, and I jumped down into the front of the audience. I listened to their last four numbers, and I thought they were really a musical group-not visually exciting. I went up and complimented them all, and they were flattered: it was all rather stiff. So they knew a couple of friends of ours, and they laid their album on us-they said ‘It’s our first album, it’s crap.’ So I put itinto my suitcase along with some other albums I’ve collected along the way.

"For four days we went on a holiday in Florida," Townshend continued, "we lived on an island in the Everglades. I started to play this album, and every note just had basic freshness. What was so nice was that I felt in a lot of ways that they said a lot of things about their first album that we said about ours. It took me two years to get into the Who’s first album, you know what I mean? I think they’re going to be a big group. On our tour, I’ve played the album even if I had to lose four hours of sleep to do it-drive five hours to a record player to play it."

Townshend’s analysis of the band was astute. Bassist Tom Kriss was replaced by Dale Peters soon after Yer Album was released and from there the band did not look back. Within a year the James Gang became one of the most popular bands in America. Even more interesting was Townshend’s remark that the group was interested in music rather than visuals. This would be one of the major themes of the Eagles in a few years, and gave an indication that Joe Walsh had a lot in common with the Eagles long before he met them. The disparity between the softer, more melodic songs that he recorded and the gut wrenching hard rock the James Gang played live disturbed Walsh from the outset

"It seems as though kids would very much more like to hear loud rock ‘n’ roll," Walsh said at the time. "I mean an average crowd. Once in a while you get a crowd that really appreciates softer things. It's really puzzling to us what songs to play where, because we do have to worry about going over. Like Cleveland, where we’re from, is a Who town-that’s the kind of thing they want to hear. But we played Cincinnati and did a lot of soft stuff and it went over real well. There’s a lot of really terrible groups out that aren’t really playing at all. It seems that for a while the louder you were the better it was, doesn’t matter what you are musically.

Walsh and the James Gang had come into New York in the steaming hot summer of 1970 to play a series of gigs. One summer night they had played in the Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village a terrible club with bomb shelter acoustics. Before the set records blared at post-distortion levels and strobe lights flashed on and off, the band began playing the din was incredible-you could hear nothing but sustained roaring, undifferentiated, ear-splitting sound. The following day Walsh, Fox, Peters and! found a grassy meadow in Central Park and sat down to talk. Despite the bummer gig the previous night, the group was in good spirits-they had just finished recording a new album and were extremely excited about its prospects. "On the first album," Walsh explained in his easy-going drawl, "we didn’t really have any concepts or anything. We had songs that we did live. We were playing for a long time, had a lot of ideas, but we weren’t trying to do anything at all, just make it as good as possible. The first album’s always rough cause you don’t know what the heck you’re doin

"With the second album we have a little more direction now," he continued, "we know each other musically. What do you think of the first album? I don’t like it. You have to remember that’s over a year and a half ago for us. The thing that shocks me is the difference between the first and the second. The first was nice but we’re just not there anymore. It’s a nice example of where we were at the time, but we’re not there anymore. It seems more than a year ago to me, in ideas.

Walsh was especially excited at the direction he saw the group heading. "We’re gonna try to be the most versatile three piece group around," he enthused. "We’re gonna be able to do within one or two songs every song on both albums, and that’s hard for three people. We’re gonna add an organ so we can do the organ songs like ‘Tend My Garden’ and ‘Take a Look Around.’ We’re trying to figure out a way to do ‘Fred.’

It sounded like Walsh was committing himself to two musical directions at once, heavy metal and folk rock-two that are hard to resolve. "More than most groups, the three of us have a really broad knowledge of rock," he explained. "All three of us like all kinds of rock, we’re not into any one thing. Dale’s into Lonnie Mack, among other things. He has a real knowledge of the whole Lonnie Mack gig, where he’s from, Cincinnati, Ohio, and all the people down there. And we’re into Buffalo Springfield and I’m really into the Beach Boys and the Beatles. All these things come out into our music more than just being a loud three piece electric group. We’re all aware and we’re all into these kinds of music and it really shows up.

Still, it’s hard to avoid being pigeonholed and I pointed out that the band would probably continue to be compared with Cream. "That’s really strange," fretted Walsh. "A lot of people down the line have said that we remind them of Cream. We don’t remind me of Cream at all. We have the same instrumentation. Three guys—well, Traffic’s three guys, if we’re going anywhere it’s in that direction.

When the second James Gang album James Gang Rides Again, came out, Walsh’s remarks were easy to understand. It was a daring, almost schizophrenic record that essentially presented two groups, one on each side. Side one was the power trio. A state of the art recording, brilliantly produced by Szymczyk, "Made loud to be played loud" as the notes say. The playing was strong but subtle, energy controlled shrewdly for maximum impact. The songs on side one represented the group’s fundamental live sound at the time the record was released and the songs were credited equally to the three members. Side two, on the other hand, was all Joe Walsh songs except for "Ashes the Rain and I" which he co-wrote with Peters. Here the band sounds like a crack country rock outfit, adept at producing tasteful, melodic tunes. The contrast between the two sides was magnificent, a stunning coup unlike anything yet attempted in rock music. James Gang Rides Again became one of the most important and influential records of the 1970s.

Side one is a hard rock masterpiece that careens along without giving the listener a chance to catch a breath until it ends. Walsh’s first chicken scratching notes come burning out of the right speaker as "Funk #49" starts things off with a bang, then the full band cuts to the left speaker for the first chords of the song before matching up both barrels. The song picks up where "Funk #48"leaves off, twisting the syncopated percussion even further as Walsh and Fox engage in excruciatingly hot r&b patterns while Peters adds an extra twist with a much better bass line than the one on "Funk #48."

"Funk #49" ends on a slow fade out, then, after about one four bar measure of time has elapsed, the rhythm track fades back in for "Asshton Park," an instrumental pegged around Peters’ walking bass line that features an interestingly melodic guitar solo from Walsh which employs a device called an echo-plex that repeats each note as it’s played. Walsh uses the echo-plex to get a round or fugue like effect, placing successive notes inside the echoing memory of the previous notes. "Asshton Park" breaks immediately into "Woman," a straightforward hard rocker as Walsh alternately plays chords and overdubs fills. At the song’s climax Walsh overdubs additional lead guitar lines until there are a full ten guitar parts going at once, an amazing overlay of sound that leads right into the album's production masterpiece, "The Bomber."

"The Bomber" starts with open hard rock chords with Walsh screaming his vocal out over the top of Fox’s drumming pushes the song along through the opening verses, then, as Walsh sustains the last chord in a line, Fox shifts the beat and plays along with Peters for a few bars until Walsh joins in with an echo-plex solo. Walsh slowly picks out notes as he goes up the neck of his guitar, then holds single notes in long, echoing phrases, building to a dramatic peak at which point Fox begins the march drumming accompaniment to Ravel’s Bolero, which Walsh picks out in majestic stateliness, once again stretching the notes to breaking point before the solo shifts to its final section, a version of Vince Guaraldi’s "Cast Your Fate To the Wind." It’s a bizarre collection of melodic ideas put together ingeniously. After returning back to the crunching main theme and the final verse, Walsh finishes with a resounding heavy metal climax. The song’s impact is tremendous.

On an eight track or continuous play tape the second side begins where the first side left off, coming in on a long fade that first can be beard faintly, then gradually comes into focus. It’s like a reverse image of side one, as the long, sonorous organ notes that begin "Tend My Garden" swell into the listener’s ear. Here Walsh’s interest in Beatles production style. use of melodies and harmonics (particularly of The Beatles, the so-called White Album), is in full view. The song switches from the soft, easygoing verses with the organ sound washing through the arrangement to crisp, sing-along choruses punctuated with snappy handclap percussion effects and great guitar/keyboard interplay.

After breaking to a quiet, understated acoustic piano bridge, Walsh squeezes in a beautifully compacted Jeff Heck style guitar solo. The full band then returns to the verse, with Walsh chucking guitar tills into the rhythm and sliding down his strings for a distant airplane sound as the song fades, only to switch neatly into the next tune, "Garden Gate." The first acoustic guitar notes of the song begin as the last sounds of "Tend My Garden" disappear, then "Garden Gate" ends and without a hesitation on the beat "There I Go Again" comes right in, with Walsh’s acoustic guitar moving effortlessly into the first note of a melody that was anticipated perfectly by the final melodic note in "Garden Gate." "There I Go Again" is a carefree country & western influenced song with Poco’s Rusty Young contributing an appropriate steel guitar solo.

"Thanks" completes the mood with Walsh playing a sprightly melody on acoustic guitar and overdubbing sonorous, Abbey Road inspired electric guitar harmonic lines. The world-wise sadness of the song’s lyrics anticipates the album’s final song, "Ashes the Rain And I," one of the most powerful songs Walsh has ever written. The song is structured around a mournful rondo theme played with classical style guitar and accompanied by dense, brooding strings arranged by Jack Nitsche, whose brilliant collaborations with Neil Young remain the most interesting points of the Buffalo Springfield’s recordings. Here Walsh surpasses the emotional impact of Young’s orchestrated works by resisting the temptation to build an epic around this idea, instead scaling it down to a tight, compact musical statement with a brief, dirge-like vocal refrain.

The week that James Gang Rides Again was released the group was playing a series of New York area gigs, climaxing with a show at a beautiful ex-Vaudeville palace in South Brooklyn, the 46th Street Theatre. This was the first rock show held at that venue and the excitement built around the gig was electric. A frenzied crowd filled the theatre well before show time and the anticipation grew and grew as the audience waited for the James Gang to play. Meanwhile the band’s arrival at the theatre was delayed and the promoter paced anxiously by the stage door.

When the cars finally pulled up to the backstage entrance the James Gang certainly didn’t appear to be very enthusiastic. FOA and Peters got out with morose looks, and the usually laconic Walsh was livid. Inside the dressing room Walsh explained that the delay had been caused by a terrific legal battle that was raging over Rides Again. Representatives of Maurice Ravel’s estate had insisted that the composer left specific instructions in his will that Bolero could be performed only with a full orchestra and demanded that the Bolero section of "The Bomber" on Rides Again be deleted. The issue was a red herring-many versions of Bolero have been recorded without orchestras before and since, but ABC’s lawyers were sufficiently alarmed by the threat and told the band that future pressings of the record would omit the Bolero section, thereby destroying the logical progression of the piece and pretty much ruining a great album in the process.

Walsh was so angry he appeared near tears as he said, "I can’t understand why they would do this. Jeff Beck took the idea, called it ‘Beck’s Bolero’ and they never said a thing. I guess this is what I get for being honest enough to credit the guy on the record."

Only the first 10,000 copies of Rides Again, which were pressed before the lawyers interfered, contain the original section with the Bolero passage. But Walsh’s fury at his handlers was a blessing in disguise for the James Gang fans that had assembled that evening because the band went on and played their hearts out in what may have been the finest show they ever performed. Walsh, who usually has the demeanor of a bored ice cube, was unusually animated and cranked to the sky as he played. Midway through the set he announced that the band was going to play "The Bomber": "This is a song from our new album that you won’t be able to hear on the record the way it’s supposed to Sound," he spat out the words. "But for now this is it.’’

Walsh never put more venom into the opening chords of that tune. It seemed he would either chop his Angers off or break the strings, he was hitting them so hard. For a moment Fox and Peters were shocked by the vehemence of Walsh’s guitar, but they locked in behind these crashing power chords. The song built and built, wrenching out layer after layer of intensity, driving the audience more crazy with each change. Walsh was carrying the whole load himself and everyone in the place had their eyes and ears glued to him. He played in a frenzy that Fox and Peters held down relentlessly with a pounding, driving rhythm pattern that locked tightly into Walsh’s playing. At the Bolero section Walsh was totally possessed, ringing out every note as if it were the last time he would ever hear it again.

When the song reached the point at the end where the group stops for a false ending, the audience was standing on the seats and when the band stopped the people seemed momentarily suspended in mid air during the second or two of silence before the last crashing chord, which released the tension and drew a collective gasp from the stunned audience, then silence until a hoarse throat somewhere in the first few rows shouted "That’s great!!!"

The spark that ignites into full flame between audience and performer at such moments blazed. The James Gang had done something very rare-they had surprised and dazzled a theatre full of people with their special brand of musical pyrotechnics, and the crowd fully appreciated what had happened. Walsh was not through, though. The next song, "Bluebird," featured a lengthy solo by Walsh, starting easily then building, undergoing a multiplicity of musical shifts toward the end. The band went immediately into ‘‘Lost Woman," where Walsh continued his showcase, He invited numerous comparisons with other guitarists as he alternately drifted and crashed through the solo, picking various styles and playing off them: Steve Stills, Jeff Beck, Steve Miller. At times he even seemed to be doing goofy impersonations of them. The capper came during the "Lost Woman" solo when Walsh started playing Pete Townshend-inspired riffs. "We’ve learned a lot from the Who," Walsh said after the show. "They’re the greatest bunch of people in the world. They have so much energy on stage. I think we picked up on it, a lot cause we’ve been playing harder and harder." At this point Walsh was probably the foremost student in rock, not that he didn’t have his own distinctive style, just that he knew when he heard a good lick and remembered where it came from. He conquered, styles rather than copped them, and right at that moment he’s molded these influences into a powerful force. The group continued to stretch out on the tune, Peters took a solo while the audience clapped along to the beat, then Fox took his solo and-surprise again-he scatted and swung on his drums, he didn’t attack them and it was his jazz, Art Blakey influence coming out. The audience was on its feet screaming and clapping, shouting, waving arms in the air, giving the 46th Street Theatre an opening night it would never forget. On went the echo-plex device and off went Walsh as he played another hard-edged solo. Townshend flashed again as Walsh grimaced, hit a particularly mean-sounding chord and fed it back, then backed up against his stack of Hiwatt amplifiers and rammed the neck of the guitar against the side of the amp, mashing the strings in an incredible feedback roar that was raw and melodic at once, then suddenly turning, unslinging the guitar from his shoulders, looking for a moment as if he was trying to decide if he should smash it, then instead placing it on a guitar stand in front of the amplifier and striking a final, echoing note that repeated, steadily decreasing with each cycle, as the group walked off the stage. The wild, standing ovation was given to a single guitar with the stage all to itself, still echoing an eerie, droning final note.

Then came the encore.......

Chapter 5      Chapter 7

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