)
Joe Walsh slides out of the control room and
beckons me down the narrow stairs to the
instrument room below. He has on his baseball
cap and an unusually bright striped T-shirt. The
room is lined with guitar cases and numerous
dark blue Eagles' metal boxes. Joe raises
himself up to sit on one.
"I'm exactly where I wanted to be," he begins. I raise the question of his own career plus his Eagles job. "I don't think it's too much," he says. "I think it's just enough for each, to balance it out. And I look forward to both of 'em, y'know. It's real nice. A solo effort is too straining, too sterile."
These days, Joe lives up the coast in Santa Barbara where he can moor his boat. "I moved up there about two years ago—it helps a lot. I would find it hard to come off the road or come out of the studio and be in Los Angeles, and expect to calm down. That's just the way I am; if there's something to do, I got to do it. The Eagles'll take up the rest of the year. I'm sure. We're about half way through this album and then we're gonna go on the road. I can play my stuff on the road with them, so it works out fine. And I don't expect to do any work on a solo album for a long time."
I wonder if there will be any of his songs on the new album. "Well, yeah," he replies, "I suppose we'll do one or two of my songs. Usually, I bring songs in and Don and Glenn will end up singing them and modifying the songs, y'know. I brought in some ideas that have turned into songs. I don't know if they're necessarily my songs. But what I like to do is just be available and try and intelligently translate their ideas into a guitar part that becomes part of the track. And I guess I'm just a little more, by roots, rock 'n' roll based. I think a band can be very valid if they can rock 'n' roll. But they don't have to, you know. I mean, it expands the diversity of the group—it gives a certain amount of confidence for everybody."
"Life in the fast lane
Surely make you lose your mind
Life in the fast lane . . .
Everything all the time."
(From: "Life In The Fast Lane)
On the road, in concerts, Joe's place in the
Eagles is especially dominant. "I've been doin'
concerts for a long time, and I've developed a
style, I guess—a way of approach. And I really
do feel it's free, whatever we do. Any of my
stuff—I think everybody can play it good, and
everybody tries to interpret what they should be
doin' for the strongest track—1 like to get
feedback from them."