Joe Walsh: Solo or Not, Joe Walsh Has Stayed in Style
Author: Karen Knutson
Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Date: April 29, 1988
Abstract: Joe gives a phone interview before playing a benefit. He talks about topics like then-current acts he likes and what he's been up to in then-recent years.
Joe Walsh is the headliner at "Rockin' on the River," an all-day outdoor concert beginning at 3 p.m. Saturday at Riverfront Park at North Little Rock. Other acts are Roxx, Southern Vision, the Boomers, and Jimmy Davis and Junction. Tickets are $ 10 in advance and are available at Peaches and Discount Records, Jacksonville Guitar, and Olsen's Music at Conway. Admission is $ 12 at the door. The concert is a benefit for Summerset, the end-of-summer festival held at Burns Park, North Little Rock. Veteran rockers are the current rage, but some of them have never gone out of style.
That's the case with Joe Walsh, the 41-year-old guitarist and singer whose talent and noted sense of humor have kept him in the public eye via the music business for nearly two decades.
He's currently living at Memphis, where he recorded his latest album, "Got Any Gum?" Every now and then he ventures out on the road.
"I regularly play concerts, but I don't really go out on tour, it's not a constant thing," he said in a phone interview. "I go out for five dates over an eight-day period."
That's not the case with the younger generation of musicians, "those that are 10 years younger than me," he said. "They're on the road all the time, and they need to be."
There are several musicians in that category "that are really rocking," Walsh said.
"Jimmy Davis is one of them. He looks like Bob Seger's nephew. So is Richard Marx. He can really sing. And those girls, the Bangles. I really like them."
Walsh got started in the music business a while back with the James Gang, best known for its classic hits "Funk No. 49" and "Walk Away."
The native of Wichita, Kan., also spent an intermittent six years studying at Kent (O.) State University, but never got around to completing degree requirements. He was there when four students were killed by the National Guard during the anti-Vietnam social unrest of 1970. He wasn't quite sure why that happened.
"We weren't really that active," Walsh said. "It was more like a country club. We were just mad because there were a bunch of rifles guarding a building that had been burned the night before. That just seemed kinda stupid to us."
His baptism into the political structure led him to become a whimsical candidate for president a few elections back. He's not running this year, though. "I'm running for mayor instead," he said, "mayor of the United States. I'd be good at it. I know what to do."
Walsh's postcollege career veered away from running the country to concentrating on the music business. Following the James Gang came the band Barnstorm, creators of another classic single, "Rocky Mountain Way." A try at a solo career followed that, resulting in the albums "So What" and "You Can't Argue With a Sick Mind."
Walsh's great success in his solo endeavor made it hard for his fans to comprehend the reason for his next move: Becoming a member of the Eagles.
No one complained, though, when the collaboration produced two of that group's most outstanding albums, "Hotel California" in 1977 and "Long Run" in 1979. While with the Eagles Walsh also managed to squeeze in another solo work, "But Seriously Folks."
He's resumed a solo career following the breakup of the Eagles in 1981 ("We didn't really break up," he said; "we just stopped."), releasing "The Confessor" and "Got Any Gum?"
He's also produced albums for Dan Fogelberg and Ringo Starr, played on "nearly everyone else's albums," and mucks around with his hobbies of amateur radio, blacksmithing, "arguing all night about politics, or, for that matter, anything, and hooking stuff up to see if it works," he said.
