On the Road Again: Joe Walsh
On the Road Again, Paste BN's spotlight on artists on tour, this week looks at rock guitar great Joe Walsh.
The Eagle has landed. When Joe Walsh sets out on a month-long solo tour Wednesday, he won't travel at the level of luxury he did on his recently completed two-year tour with the Eagles. "You get used to that," admits the guitarist, 67. "You go, 'Uh oh, I gotta ride on buses now, not on jets! Am I sure I want to do this?' But, yeah, I do.
Deep catalog. With a recording career that has spanned 50 years, Walsh can pull from solo hits, as well as those with the James Gang and the Eagles. His current band features drummer Joe Vitale, who played with Walsh in an early '70s band called Barnstorm and also wrote Life's Been Good and Rocky Mountain Way with him. "We decided we would find some stuff in my catalog that I've never really attempted live and dust those off and try and perform them," Walsh says. "I just don't want to go out and play Joe Walsh's Greatest Hits."
Way to go, Ohio. Walsh, who attended Ohio's Kent State University will kick off the tour on familiar turf in nearby Warren. "When I was only famous in Ohio, I played Warren a lot," he says. The tour's first show "sold out in a couple hours, so we added a second night. That's the kind of energy I'm really looking forward to."
The show must go on. Walsh made two mistakes once during a James Gang tour of England: "I got the flu, and I drank the local water. You didn't do that in England back then. Right in the middle of the show — about the third song – if you can imagine, all of the things that happened with a flu attack happened onstage. I got a bucket and a towel and kept playing. I finished the show, and the audience thought I did that every night!"
Coming down hard. In his Barnstorm days, Walsh and his band survived a crash landing shortly after taking off from Pittsburgh in a three-engine jet. "The engine on top just disintegrated," he says. "The fan blade blew up. It tore big holes in fuselage, way in the back, so it didn't kill anybody. What it did, though, was cut the hydraulic lines. They couldn't get the landing gear down, they couldn't steer the wheels, and they didn't have any brakes. The captain couldn't gain any altitude, but he was able to circle around and come in. He couldn't come in slow, because he had to control the plane. We went off the runway and into the mud. That helped us stop. We all got out pretty good."
Group effort. Walsh doesn't think the world has seen the last of the Eagles. "I don't think we're done," he says. "We just have to regroup. I think we'll reinvent, but it'll be a year or so." He also won't rule out the possibility of a James Gang reunion. "Now that the Eagles are on downtime, anything's liable to happen," he says. "That might even seem like a good idea. If this tour works I might even have enough of a kick in the pants to try that out. We could certainly do it."
A schedule of Walsh's tour dates follows:
September
16 – Packard Music Hall, Warren, Ohio
18 – Packard Music Hall, Waren, Ohio
19 – The Colosseum at Caesars Windsor, Windsor, Ont.
21 – Taft Theater, Cincinnati
23 – Warner Theatre, Washington, D.C.
25 – Mid Hudson Civic Center, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
26 – The Sands Bethlehem Event Center, Bethlehem, Penn.
October
1 – Beacon Theatre, New York
7-8 – Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, N.Y.
10 – Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, Hampton Beach, N.H.
12 – The Fillmore, Philadelphia
14 – Theatre at Westbury, Westbury, N.Y.
16 – Mohegan Sun, Uncasville, Conn.
17 – Orpheum Theater, Boston