Chapter Seven—Walsh Goes Solo

During the year following the release of James Gang Rides Again the band became one of America’s most popular rock groups as they toured heavily and received tremendous response from around the country. Despite their success, however, Walsh became increasingly disillusioned. The James Gang was being pigeonholed as a power trio, and he had to do so much of the heavy hitting up front. "One of the biggest hassles right now is the audience," he complained at the time. "It seems like they don’t really care about the music, just so they get entertained, but we’d like to hope that they come to heat our music.

"I can come off the stage having the worst night I ever had," he continued, "and if you jump around a lot and play loud you can fool the audience. They’re not aware of the fact that you had a bad night. We’ve come MV the stage having the worst night and have a standing ovation and a great reception. Then you might have a good night and nobody gets into it. It really makes you wonder....really shakes you up. The main worry we have is that we’ll have a great set, play really well, and then some group will come out after us and jump around all over the stage and blow us off the stage. That seems to be our main trouble. Musical taste has gone downhill, If a kid pays four bucks to listen to ‘Lost Woman’ and I’m gonna play it anyway there’s no point telling him to shut up when he keeps calling for it during the show, Kids are really insensitive. They don’t come to listen to the music."

Faced with this unattractive prospect, Walsh had no choice but to turn up the amplifiers and blast away. "I’m happy either way," he admitted when pressed about whether he’d rather be playing loud or soft music. "I really get off playing loud and hard and I really get off playing soft. I’m just really wary of playing soft because I’m afraid it won’t go over. Jimmy always likes to do "Ashes the Rain and 1" and I’m afraid to do it because sometimes it doesn’t work. I think I’ll probably end up acoustic. I’ll play loud probably a year or two more and then get more into songwriting. But for the time being it’s really fun to play loud. There’s an amazing sense of power when you have huge amps and stuff,"

Walsh seemed most worried that the band would lose its identity as it got more popular and turn into rock stars. "That’s really a bummer," he said, shaking his head. "I hope we don’t get into superstar stuff."

But as the James Gang went along Walsh became more and more openly disgruntled with the group’s direction. The next album, Thirds, reflected this growing division in the band. Thirds is the most uneven of the band’s albums, lacking the enthusiasm and good-natured looseness of Yer, Album or the precision of Rides Again. The group was keen on developing more along the lines of the experimental approach suggested by the previous record, but felt they had to pull back stylistically to prevent themselves from going over the audience’s heads. The interest in experimentation was in clear evidence on "Yadig?" Soft brush strokes on the drums, vibraphone and electric piano were used on this instrumental to evoke a quiet, jazzy feel and Walsh’s understated electric guitar solo at the end offered James Gang fans an unusual glimpse of the guitarist's range. "White Man Black Man" a slow blues written and sung by Peters, went for a similar effect with much less success, but Walsh once again added interest with a long guitar solo at the end.

Though none of Walsh’s songs on Thirds matched his best moments on Rides Again, several tunes worked well here. "Again" is reminiscent of Rides Again’s second side, an introspective ballad with Walsh singing and playing acoustic guitar- once again a string arrangement is used for dramatic effect. "Midnight Man" is similar in feel although Walsh plays electric guitar this time, using a beautiful, chime-like tone on two tracks of guitars and playing a straight line for the fills. The playing is absolutely brilliant, a logical extension of his Rides Again style. Walsh’s best song on the record, "Walk Away," became a minor hit and eventually was one, of the group’s best known songs. It was a twist of the "Funk #48" and "Funk #49" structure, slowed down slightly and fashioned into a more conventional song structure. Walsh’s guitar technique advanced from the earlier material. His solo is melodic and well-structured, with cleverly multi-tracked harmony lines and fills, and his overall sound is richer and meatier than on the earlier albums. The final solo pits crashing wah wah guitars against searing one note solos and brutally distorting block chords.

"Walk Away" became an immediate crowd pleaser and was chosen to kick off the Live In Concert record, the band’s last album. The set demonstrates the band’s enormous popularity in person at that point while at the same time offering a pretty good idea of the internal difficulties they suffered toward the end. Walsh is showcased on the record, singing all the songs and carrying each one with long solos. It’s interesting to hear how his playing on "Stop" evolved from the recorded version to the lightning fast runs sprayed all across this version. Walsh adds a blues ballad coda and segues right into Albert King’s slow blues "You’re Gonna Need Me," soloing with the echo-plex and gradually building up the tension and the speed of the solo until he pulls off another of his masterful stylistic coups, brilliantly reworking Jeff Beck’s solo from "Blues Deluxe" on his Truth album, then goes from there to the finale. Walsh was one of the few guitar players at this point who was remaining creative during a phase when guitar solos were being beaten to death, but his mastery of the most difficult style the slow blues form, proved his worth

One of the biggest gripes Walsh had with the band was that he wanted to expand the instrumentation to include at least a keyboardist so he could play the more complex songs. The rest of the band insisted on remaining a power trio, however, and Walsh was forced to pack away his guitar for pan of each set and play organ in order to do several of the best songs from Rides Again. His keyboard playing on "Take A Look Around" and "Tend My Garden," which are back to back on Live In Concert, is crude but emotionally effective. It’s too bad another musician couldn’t have been included to play these relatively simple parts. During the part of the show when Fox switches from drums to acoustic guitar so he and Walsh can play the dual acoustic arrangement of "Ashes the -Rain and I" the group didn’t suffer from the alteration in lineup so they certainly could have included a keyboardist.

"Walk Away" starts off the hard rocking second side of the record with a smashing sequence of power chords. The arrangement here is significantly different from the recorded one, a more direct, loping approach than the tightly wound studio version. The album closes with almost twenty minutes of what was by then still the high point of the band’s sets, "Lost Woman." The band’s collective and improvised skitls are well presented here, and Walsh particularly solos with fire and passion

The tension that had been building up inside the group exploded immediately after the release of the live album. It was time to go back into the studio to make another record and Walsh balked at the prospect, then gave the group notice. "After the split was made official everything went straight up," Dale Peters explained at the time. "There was a tremendous surge in the group's performance.

Jim Fox went on to laud Walsh for his final efforts with the James Gang. "Joe deserves a lot of credit ‘for that. Any guy could have just said he was leaving and chucked the whole thing, but he said ‘1 want to leave this band, I’ll play out the rest of the year, if that’s OK,’ and Joe pushed harder than either of us during that last period. We got a lot of things together there before the end.

Fox recalled the reasons why Walsh left the group. "He was very, very tired with being on the road, and he felt he had his own music to explore. Joe had a lot of varied interest, he was very good at a whole lot of different kinds of music. I imagine that whatever he comes back with will be softer. He’s back home now, playing with a bunch of old friends. That’s really what he needs, he needs to direct the group. The people he’s with now will play the way he wants them to. He’s also much happier in the studio, where he is now, than on the road. But he was tired with the pace with us, he was tired of bouncing ideas off the same two heads for years and years

"The only bad thing I feel about the breakup," Fox concluded, "is--for Joe’s sake, not feeling the same way as we did, he couldn’t see that it was where we had worked to get it for three years. Joe felt that it was time to move on whereas we felt that we finally got it the way we wanted it. But Joe, he’s gotta do what he wants to do. He was always unhappy, he was never a happy guy, he was never the kind of guy to come off the stage and say ‘That was a good gig!

Joe Walsh’s dissatisfaction with the James Gang was clearly evident during his last year with the group. One concert in particular illustrated some of the reasons for his sadness. The James Gang was scheduled to headline the Capitol Theatre in Portchester, New York, shortly after the release of Thirds. The concert sold out quickly and attracted an exceptionally rowdy audience that grew increasingly restless during the opening set by a group named Steel River. Backstage, promoter Howard Stein was even more nervous. Two shows were scheduled that night and the James Gang had split between shows to return to their hotel, but after Steel River opened the second show the James Gang was still missing

Finally the group arrived-without Walsh! Apparently the guitarist, who’d become exhausted after years of nonstop touring, had passed out back at the hotel and the band couldn’t wake him. Finally, after over an hour delay, Walsh was dragged into the hall. He looked barely awake, as if someone had thrown him into a shower and dragged him off, taking time only to cover his soaking hair with a woolen skull cap.

The audience had grown ugly by the time the James Gang started to play but Walsh summoned up his reserves and after a shaky start began to play really well. During his "Asshton Park" solo, however, beer cans began to rain from the balcony and Walsh looked up at his assailants with a mixture of pain and bewilderment as he clumsily ducked the missiles while still trying to play. As the concert went on things got more and more out of hand, with the fans in the front rows contributing to the mayhem, and when the concert ended with Walsh’s final, gut wrenching solo, the guitarist swung the neck of his guitar like a bat at the microphone stand, sending the stand spinning into the crowd with brutal force and knocking out a fan in the crush at the front.

Walsh was not especially proud of moments like this and they must have contributed to his decision to leave the group. "I found myself feeling very old very fast and I decided I really didn’t want to be like that," he said.

Nevertheless, when he left it was with a clear conscience. "It was okay," he said of the split. "They were all confused as to why, ‘cause in one respect things were never better; we were really selling records and selling out shows and stuff. They didn’t know what my motives were, but it was just the frustration of a three-piece group. I liked some of our stuff, like the second side of Rides Again, but that was all done in the studio. For a three piece group to try to do that justice live, it was just......

"I was just not comfortable," he continued. "I knew it for a long time but finally I just. . . rather than try to add people and fight the others in the group all the way by trying to take control of it, it was just best to start from scratch. There was the whole aura of me being the flash lead guitarist and all that. I felt really overworked and I just didn’t want that kind of image. I didn’t want to be the American Alvin Lee. I joined that group, it wasn’t my group. I was the lead singer and the lead guitar player, so on stage I was the focal point. But Jimmy Fox was definitely the leader, and we just fought all the way down the line.

"I was not in a position to take over and tell them what to do, even though I felt I was in the best musical position to do so. It was a kind of uptightness that kept them from letting me run the show even though they couldn’t think of anything better to do. It just got to the point where we were ready to go in and do another record after the live album and rather than go in there and have another nightmare and do another album I figured if you’re ever gonna do it you better do it now."

So Walsh holed up in the Colorado Rockies working on a solo album that would allow him to indulge his musical fantasies. A year later he emerged with Barnstorm, a largely neglected solo album that proved his point nonetheless. From the understated opening acoustic guitar chords of "Here We Go" the record was a masterpiece, a direct extension of the mood on the second side of Rides Again. Guitars were used more for texture and fills than open-ended soloing as Walsh built up layer after layer of phased sound in cascading rhythms, an amazingly soothing sound series that allowed his songwriting theory to flourish. Guitar and keyboard overlays meshed with the sparse rhythm accompaniment of bassist Kenny Passarelli and drummer Joe Vitale. "Here We Go" built to a single solo that lasted only a few measures before breaking to Walsh’s piano intro to "Midnight Visitor," an eerie song about a chance encounter in the wilderness. The clap along chorus featured Al Perkins adding steel guitar.

Each song on Barnstorm anticipated the next tune, making the album conceptual in a sound sense rather than thematically. "One and One" follows with a beautifully simple opening and Walsh’s most energetic solo, but only briefly, as the soft passage returned with Vitale adding a flute fill, The exquisitely beautiful "Mother Says" follows the instrumental "Giant Behemoth" with one of Walsh’s characteristic rhythm patterns that builds layers of syncopation until he finally solos out the side with some tasteful guitar playing.

"Birdcall Morning" opens the second side with one of Walsh’s most beautiful melodies, a theme of peace and tranquility that seemed to prove the point that a solo album would have been a theraputic move for him to make at the time. After two pleasant country-type songs, "Home" and "I’ll Tell The World," Walsh’s hardest rocker on the set, "Turn To Stone," climaxes the album with some powerful block chording and heady soloing. Walsh closes out with "Coming Down," a quiet ballad sung with his own acoustic guitar accompaniment and plaintive harmonica.

Walsh did not tour immediately behind the release of Barnstorm, but he did comment on the album. "I didn’t do anything at first," he said about his days following the James Gang. "I just went out for a while, went after people for a band, but it wasn’t really a hectic thing. I knew Joey Vitale from Ohio for a long time and he just came out. We would hang out and play for a bit and just see what happened, and it was really positive. So we had me and the drummer and we started looking around. We found Kenny Passarelli the bass player then, and it was the three of us who did that first Barnstorm album.

"It was a group, but it was three pieces and I’d just got done with that. I didn’t wanna go out on the road with a three piece group having just burnt out on one. So the album was out and we were really kind of desperate just to have more because there was quite a bit on the album, and we found Rocke Grace, the piano player, went out on the road and just called it a group, We weren’t really together, just went out and played-we did that for a year and did fairly well, but there were still some frustrations, some pans that we thought were lacking, so we added a fifth guy, Tom Stephenson, on organ."

Stephenson joined after the four piece band had recorded a second album at Caribou with Bill Szymczyck, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get. This record had much less of a personal feel than Barnstorm as Walsh had obviously returned to the rock wars. "Rocky Mountain Way" started things off with a bang as Walsh’s distinctive power riffing, slide guitar and voice box soloing were all used. The song was about Walsh’s post-James Gang moves. In the song Walsh says he spent a year in the "Rocky Mountain Way" until he felt it was "time to open fire." This became the anthem of Walsh’s live solo spots. He goes on to say that he’s better off this way and that the story had a happy ending.

The rest of Smoker isn’t quite up to the hard rock standard of "Rocky Mountain Way," which matches anything Walsh did with the James Gang. ‘Bookends" retreats to the quieter, more melodic style. "Wolf’ is an almost total reproduction of the Barnstorm sound, using the acoustic guitar base and long, echoing vocals. "Midnight Moodies" is an upbeat guitar and flute dominated instrumental with a Caribbean rhythm for variety, and "Happy Ways" is an even brighter salsa-influenced tune with Walsh singing in mock-Islander voice. The effect here, with Vitale’s flute shimmering in and out, is closer in spirit to Traffic than anything Walsh did with the James Gang and closes the side on a pleasant note.

Side two opens almost as strongly as the A side with the great orchestrated rocker, "Meadows," an improvement over the Barnstorm sound in that the same layered sound is used but with much more exciting results. Vitale’s drumming, which is wonderful throughout the record, is especially good here. "Dreams" follows with another atmospheric, laid back sonority, like a lounge jazz ballad, with one of Walsh’s best vocals on the record. Then comes the longest track, "Days Gone By," another unusual sounding song for Walsh. The three part vocal harmonies have an Abbey Road-era Beatles feel while the keyboards/drums/flute basis of the arrangement- is reminiscent of Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die album. Walsh’s ability to revitalize such classic influences suggested that the musical limits of his solo career were unbounded. The end of "Days Gone By" features a phased vocal chorus similar to the Traffic classic "Coloured Rain."

The album’s finale, "Daydream (Prayer)", includes another intricate vocal harmony arrangement that indicates Walsh had a strong affinity for the same kind of music that the Eagles did, except that he was coming at it after mastering the hard rock format.

When Walsh brought the five piece Barnstorm band on the road after Smoker, he fielded a group that was better than the James Gang. At this point Walsh was confident he’d done the right thing. "I followed my convictions," he insisted, "and I really think you’ll see where it’s going when you see us. I’ve had a chance to really branch out, and, luckily, I’ve had a chance to get some really good players, and I got a lot of help along the way. We’re just starting to come into a really productive period; we’re playing together really well on stage, so I think the most productive period for Barnstorm will be the next two or three albums."

Walsh said this in the summer of 1973 and his enthusiasm for the group was well founded. The sets opened with a long suite of songs from Barnstorm, which were even more beautiful versions of that material. Then Walsh used an echoplex solo as an introduction for a spacy, textured version of "Tend My Garden," which, due to the addition of a piano and organ-synthesizer, had a much fuller sound than the James Gang was able to produce. Following that the group segued directly into "Rocky Mountain Way" then played "The Bomber" from Rides Again before finishing with another droning, hypnotic Barnstorm suite. Barnstorm was well received in concert but Walsh had other reasons for his optimism as well. He had just signed a new management contract with Irving Azoff, a move which was an immediate benefit to his career--but the guitarist had little idea of how big a benefit it might become. "I’m kinda getting back into it’ Walsh said sheepishly after a show in Central Park. "I totally withdrew for the first album. I wanted not to be the guitar player but the songwriter, to get away from that young boogie audience. But I’m really starting to play onstage a lot better and I’m really starting to get back into some guitar work. You can’t cross the river without wanting to get back."

Azoff's influence on Walsh was immediate and thoroughgoing. So What, his 1974 album, was a brash expression of rock stardom that featured striking cover photos of Walsh in aviator glasses and a modified Zorro outfit without mask. Inside, though, it was the same old Joe-t-shirt and guitar, brandishing a beer can. The music bristled with the same self confident panache. "Welcome To the Club," the spirited set-opening rocker, sounds like a double-time version of "Rocky Mountain Way" and places Walsh back into the old guitar hero mold once again as a lightning lead guitar line finishes the tune. "Falling Down" is the first of Walsh’s collaborations with the Eagles. Written with Don Henley, the song combines Walsh’s quirky melodicism with the precision imagery of Henley’s Eagles writing. Walsh plays all instruments except drums and harmonizes beautifully with Henley and two other singers at the song’s end. "Falling Down" would have graced any Eagles album yet recorded and at this point it seems in retrospect that Walsh’s coalition with the Eagles was inevitable.

It must have given Walsh no end of delight to record Maurice Ravel’s "Pavane Dc La Belle Au Bois Dormant" on harp and moog synthesizers after being denied the opportunity to release Bolero. The instrumental passage works well as a bridge to one of Walsh’s best-ever rockers, "Time Out." Once again Henley sings backing vocals reminiscent of the Eagles, with John David Souther also along this time. Walsh jokes his way out of the side with "All Night Laundry Mat Blues." The acoustic blues tune is sung by a boozy chorus of Walsh and Dan Fogelberg, another Azoff artist.

A full Eagles vocal chorus of Randy Meisner, Don Henley and Glenn Frey was used on the first two songs on side two, a revised version of "Turn To Stone" and the beautiful ballad "Help Me Through the Night," further emphasizing the Eagles connection. "County Fair" is more sparse along the lines of Barnstorm but without so much texture to the sound. The mostly instrumental song weaves one of Walsh’s most effective pattern trances on the solo guitar passage. The crisp doubletracked guitars sound wonderful before the last verse, then again on the outro. "Song For Emma" uses a nice orchestral arrangement by Jimmy Haskell and Bill Szymczyk to end the album on a beautiful note.

So What was the record that cemented Walsh’s status as a top solo act, but the guitarist remained aloof from the rockstar machinery and toured casually, without worrying excessively about a follow-up album. Two years later the appropriately titled live album, You Can’t Argue With A Sick Mind, ended his tenure as a free agent just as he had ended his James Gang stint with Live In Concert.

The band Walsh assembled for this set was an all-star cast. New Eagle Don Felder played some guitar, Joe Vitale shared the drum shores with Andy Newmark and percussionist Rocky Dzidzonru, Willie Weeks came in on bass and keyboardists Jay Ferguson and David Mason filled out the lineup. Highlight of the set is a seventeen minute version of "Rocky Mountain Way," which pits Walsh and Felder in a searing guitar duel. The rest of the set consisted of a reworked version of ‘Walk Away" that was not appreciably better than the James Gang version-In fact it sounded more like something based around the sound of Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde album-great takes of "Time Out" and "Meadows," and also "Help Me Through the Night" with Meisner, Frey and Henley joining Walsh on the chorus.

Sick Mind might as well have been an Eagles dry-run. There’s Walsh, leading his own band, yet trading hot guitar licks with Don Felder one minute, then singing harmonies with the rest of the Eagles the next. Walsh and the Eagles were ready for each other.

Chapter 6   Chapter 8

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