Eagles' Walsh Found His Rocky Mountain Way
But Tragedy in Family Led to Rocker's Departure
Author: G. Brown
Publication: Denver Post
Date: June 22, 2003
Abstract: This article focuses on Joe's time in Colorado in the early seventies, and how the death of his young daughter Emma in 1974 caused him to pick up and leave. At the end, Joe is complimented by Foo Fighters drummer for his talent and passion.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - On the Eagles' whimsically billed 'Farewell I' tour, which hits the Pepsi Center on Tuesday, the band is performing favorites from throughout a 30-year career - including those on the top-selling record album of all time, 'Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975.'
But there's a bit of irony. Last month at Fort Lauderdale's Office Depot Center, at one of the opening dates of the Eagles' summer concert outing, the audience reserved some of its biggest applause for Joe Walsh, part guitar ace and part rock 'n' roll funnyman. During that 1971-1975 period, Walsh hadn't yet joined the Eagles; the citizens of Colorado claimed the rock star for their own.
The second encore wasn't even an Eagles song, but the classic-rock nugget 'Rocky Mountain Way,' Walsh's signature tune, a perfect vehicle for his soaring slide-guitar work and odd strangled tenor.
'It's about living in Colorado, having left Cleveland and the James Gang and having no regrets at all,' Walsh said.
It's Colorado where Walsh experienced some of his greatest musical triumphs - and a great personal tragedy.
The Gang came first
By 1971, Walsh had made a national reputation as lead guitarist and vocalist for the James Gang, based in Cleveland. The band's first three albums brought wide popularity for such tunes as 'The Bomber,' 'Funk 49,' 'Tend My Garden' and 'Walk Away' - and endless touring.
As the James Gang became bigger and the big bucks beckoned, Walsh turned the other way. Encouraged by the Who's Pete Townshend (who admired Walsh's fretboard talent and asked the James Gang to open the Who's 1971 European tour), the Kent State alumnus made the tough decision to begin again and go it alone, moving to the open air of the Boulder County foothills hamlet of Nederland. For months he lived in the mountains and practiced ham-radio operations.
'I didn't get much help from my management or record company at the start of pursuing a solo career,' Walsh said. 'Moving to Colorado had a lot to do with my friendship with Bill Szymczyk, who at that point was an advisor helping me feel confident because I was scared to death.'
Szymczyk was a producer whose first major break had come when he persuaded blues legend B.B. King to cut contemporary-sounding albums, and the result was King's first major pop crossover, 'The Thrill Is Gone,' a No.15 single in 1970. Szymczyk went on to have great success in the early '70s, both as an A&R man and behind the board, signing and producing the James Gang.
'I decided to leave Los Angeles after a big earthquake,' Szymczyk recalled. 'A few of us record company people had bandied about the idea of starting our own label. Back in the early '70s, you'd get two hit records and you could do that.'
Tumbleweed Records was a small independent label run by Szymczyk, based out of a funky old house just east of downtown Denver on Gilpin Street.
'The reason we went to Denver was that my partner Larry Ray's wife was from there,' he said. 'I had visited two times for a total of six days, but each time, I had an incredibly good time! Colorado was happening in a lot of ways back then.'
Indeed, thousands of suntanned, blue-jeaned artists, poets and just ordinary people had instinctively come to the state from New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston for basically the same reason Szymczyk left L.A. and Walsh would leave industrial Cleveland - the big city just didn't make it.
'The James Gang was on tour and played Denver,' Szymczyk recalled, 'and Joe hung out with me and saw the offices on Gilpin Street and what we were doing and said, 'This is kinda nice here.' He was making noises about quitting the band and starting his own solo career. I said, 'Well, if you do, move here.' He said, 'OK!''
Walsh found an easygoing lifestyle in perfect accord with the music he was bent on making. At a time when he needed encouragement, Colorado challenged him and seeded a new perspective. Full-time exposure to the rural landscape and rustic lifestyle in the small towns of the Rockies was almost therapeutic.
'I took an amount of time off and began forming an arrangement of players conceived in a way to express what I was hearing and what I thought a band should be,' Walsh said. 'They were strange times, and it was hard, but it took me back to basic survival, which is always very positive in terms of creative energy - when you have to get yourself together, you play differently from when you're rich.'
In 1972, Walsh emerged from a long winter and spring in the studio with an album called 'Barnstorm,' accompanied by drummer Joe Vitale, an old colleague, and bassist Kenny Passarelli, a newfound friend. The album - which included 'Mother Says,' 'Turn to Stone' and 'Here We Go' - showcased Walsh as not only an innovative, distinctive guitarist, but as a competent keyboardist and a songwriter with impressive scope.
'When Joe and I were getting ready to do his first solo record, I had heard rumors of Jimmy Guercio's Caribou Ranch,' Szymczyk said. 'So of course I wanted to suss him out and see what was going on.'
Guercio, producer of the band Chicago, bought Caribou, near Nederland, for a reported $ 1 million in 1971 and installed a studio by 1973. He transformed the place into an opulent retreat for pop music's aristocracy. The life-in-the-fast-lane ambience that usually accompanies a recording session disappeared at the 3,000-plus-acre site, in its idyllic setting nearly 9,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains. During the ranch's glory days, an entourage got full use of the facilities for a basic rate of $ 1,500 a day.
But Caribou served Walsh and Szymczyk before it gained fame as a destination studio.
'Guercio was going to direct a movie, 'Electra Glide in Blue,' starring Robert Blake,' Szymczyk explained. 'He said, 'I'm not going to finish the studio because I'm not going to be here for six months.' We begged and pleaded with him - we definitely wanted to record there because it was only 3 miles from Joe's house. He thought it would be good if we could break the place in for him while he was off making a movie, so he finished the room for us.
'But the downstairs was still dirt floors, there was no bathroom, and upstairs was two-by-fours. We used the studio, but it was a lot of DIY stuff.'
Tumbleweed rolls by
Meanwhile, Tumbleweed released some very good albums housed in luxurious die-cut jackets. Danny Holien almost hit with a single called 'Colorado,' a quiet protest against the rape of the land - it reached No.66 on the Billboard charts in September 1972. Walsh, Vitale, Rick Derringer and Todd Rundgren played on another Tumbleweed recording for Michael Stanley, which included 'Rosewood Bitters,' a song that became a concert mainstay throughout Stanley's career, and 'Denver Rain,' an introspective ballad.
But Tumbleweed was short-lived - the label folded in 1973.
Walsh built a larger version of the 'Barnstorm' band (also called Barnstorm) for the road (with Rocke Grace on keyboards). He officially went solo with 1973's 'The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get' - its title growing evidence of his comic persona - which became the first Top 10 album of his career and went on to sell more than a million copies. Two songs, the radio hit 'Rocky Mountain Way' and the memorable 'Meadows,' opened up an enormous audience for him.
'I always felt 'Rocky Mountain Way' was special, even before it was complete,' Walsh said. 'We had recorded that before I knew what the words were going to be, but I was very proud of it. That was pretty much one shot at it, all playing at the same time.
'I got kind of fed up with feeling sorry for myself, and I wanted to justify and feel good about leaving the James Gang, relocating and going for it. I wanted to say, 'Hey, whatever this is, I'm positive and I'm proud,' and the words just came out of feeling that way, rather than writing a song out of remorse. It turned out to be a special song for a lot of people.
'It's the attitude and the statement. It's a positive song, and it's basic rock 'n' roll, which is what I really do.'
When the Eagles, which debuted in 1972, wanted a more rock 'n' roll sound, they hired Szymczyk, and the unprecedented chart success of the 1974 'On the Border' and '75 'One of These Nights' albums made both parties millions. Meanwhile, by his late-1974 release 'So What,' Walsh was in Los Angeles getting significant studio help from various members of the Eagles, with whom he shared management.
Barnstorm parted amicably in 1975, allowing Walsh to produce Dan Fogelberg's first hit album, 'Souvenirs.' The Eagles invited him aboard as guitarist-writer-vocalist-keyboardist, to replace original member Bernie Leadon.
Walsh gave the country-rock band a much-needed harder edge, as heard on the 'Hotel California' album, particularly on 'Life in the Fast Lane' and the title track.
It gave him enhanced visibility, and he continued his solo career along the way. 'Life's Been Good,' which came after three years at the top with the Eagles, deliciously parodied the lifestyle change he'd undergone: 'My Maserati does 185/I lost my license, now I don't drive.'
Death of a daughter
A simple plaque adorns the water fountain in North Boulder Park: 'This fountain is given in loving memory of Emma Walsh. April 29, 1971, to April 1, 1974.'
Walsh and former wife Stephanie donated the water fountain to the park in 1976 because it was a favorite playspot of their daughter, who died in a car accident. Walsh's 'So What?' album also included another tribute, 'Song for Emma.'
'Joe was on the road constantly, and when he'd get off he'd spend more time in L.A. than he would in Colorado,' Szymczyk said.
'When Emma died, that put the period on the whole deal. Stephanie went to pieces, and so did he, and so did I - I was her godfather, in the hospital when they had to take her off life support. That was a very dark time.
'Very shortly after that, Joe was permanently gone (from Colorado).'
The Eagles broke up after their final studio release, 1979's 'The Long Run.' In 1994, Walsh joined the reunited band for their 'Hell Freezes Over' tour.
On the current 'Farewell I' trek, he's still the one member who didn't check his sense of humor at the door (and possibly the only guy in the history of rock who ever went on tour with a chainsaw in his suitcase), filling out the songs with bluesy slide and fuzztone chops and skewed humor.
At the Florida show, Don Henley, the Eagles' drummer/singer, was recovering from tonsillitis - 'Yes, I still have them' - so he was happy to let Walsh burn up some guitar.
'It's been strangely absent,' Henley said. 'Musicianship just isn't part and parcel of what's going on right now, at least from where I sit. If you turn on MTV or VH1, you're not going to see a rock 'n' roll band that features a great guitar player (like Walsh). You're going to see a lot of slashing and pounding, dancing and posturing and nudity. And on the Country Network, it's cows by the swimming pool!'
Taylor Hawkins, drummer for Foo Fighters, plays modern pop-punk, but he's your ordinary average Walsh fan.
'I saw the show,' he said. 'Walsh would lay back during the rest of the set, but when he took the front of the stage to do his solos and songs, he's such a (expletive) rocker. He's like Neil Young - he still loves the sound of loud guitars, and he gets off on the audience.
"The other dudes in the Eagles are good musicians. But I felt a lot of passion from Joe Walsh. He can't imagine life without it."
