Joe Walsh was born on November 20, 1947, in Wichita, Kansas. Before joining Eagles, the guitarist, singer and songwriter had already made records with James Gang and Barnstorm. Those experiences taught him to balance rhythm, lead guitar and vocals, then adapt his playing to a band with several guitarists.
Music was part of home life through his mother’s piano playing. By 1965, Walsh was attending Kent State University and playing around Ohio; in 1968, he joined James Gang. The group’s move to a trio put several jobs in his hands at once. He had to sing while covering rhythm and lead guitar, keeping the music moving when there wasn’t another guitarist to fill the gaps. On the band’s 1970 album James Gang Rides Again, “Funk #49” put his guitar alongside the bass in tightly synchronized riffs.
Success with that setup also made Walsh question how much longer he wanted to stay inside it. “I thought I was painting myself in a corner,” he told Guitar World in 2012. He left James Gang and moved to Colorado, forming Barnstorm with drummer Joe Vitale and bassist Kenny Passarelli. Their self-titled 1972 album was recorded at Caribou Ranch while the studio was being established. Walsh secured inexpensive recording time by helping work through the room’s problems, giving the new band space to experiment. The follow-up, The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get, arrived in 1973 with “Rocky Mountain Way.” The song brought together his slide playing and the talk box’s voice-like effect, giving the guitar two distinct characters within the same recording.
Joining Eagles in 1975 brought a different kind of collaboration. His first album with the band, Hotel California, followed in 1976. Walsh supplied the central riff for “Life in the Fast Lane,” which began as a guitar exercise he used to warm up. An idea developed for his fingers became material the band could build into a song.
On “Hotel California,” his partnership with Don Felder required both independence and coordination. Walsh recalled that they developed separate guitar parts before combining them, and spent a couple of hours working out the harmonies. They recorded those harmonized lines together in the studio, with individual solos added over them. Their competitive streak helped: each player’s ideas pushed the other to answer. The arrangement let listeners hear two different guitarists before bringing them together.
Eagles membership also left room for Walsh’s solo writing. In 1978, “Life’s Been Good” turned the absurdities of rock stardom into a song whose construction was considerably more elaborate than its jokes might suggest. Producer Bill Szymczyk explained to Mix that the recording was assembled from three separate sections. The parts carrying the vocals were recorded first, with space reserved for a middle passage that had yet to be made. Electric guitars accumulated in layers before an acoustic part changed the texture.
Walsh, Vitale and Szymczyk returned to the studio two months later to build that middle section. Walsh and Vitale programmed a repeating synthesizer figure on an ARP Odyssey, and Vitale added synthesizer bass and piano played through a Leslie speaker. Those parts supported Walsh’s extended guitar solo before the recording returned to its opening riffs and vocals.
