Just six years before Joe Walsh replaced Bernie Leadon in the Eagles and set off to Hotel California with the band, he replaced guitarist Glen Schwartz in the James Gang in 1969, joining them on their first three albums. The triad releases not only introducted Walsh’s mastery of the guitar but his gift of songwriting.
After parting ways with James Gang, Walsh embarked on his solo career, releasing his debut Barnstorm in 1972, followed by The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get (1973) and So What in 1974—a year before joining the Eagles—pushing deeper into his own lyrics.
Here’s a look at five songs Walsh wrote, before his Eagles days, that are among his favorites.
[RELATED: 5 Joe Walsh Songs That Demonstrate His Musicianship and Songwriting]
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1. “Funk #49” The James Gang (1970)
Written by Joe Walsh, Jim Fox, Dale Peters
At first, James Gang was a covers band that would jam out for five minutes, according to Walsh, which changed with the band’s 1969 debut, Yer’ Album, which was written or co-written predominantly by Walsh. By the time the band, released James Gang Rides Again in 1970, Walsh helped get the band on the charts with “Funk 49,” which followed “Funk 48” from Yer’ Album and went to No. 59 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“At some point, we had six or seven of those sections, and we didn’t need to cover other people’s songs anymore,” said Walsh. “We took those jams and wrote words to them, and that was really the first and second James Gang albums.”
Walsh continued, “The ‘Funk #49’ jam was one we always happened to crush, so we recorded it for ‘[James Gang] Rides Again.’ How’d we get the name? We said, ‘Hey, this is that funk jam we have. And it seemed like we were counting how many times we ever played it. We thought it was right around 50. But we were in the studio with Bill Szymczyk, who was our engineer at the time, and he said, ‘It couldn’t have been 50.’ So we said, “OK, well, 49 then.”
I sleep all day, out all night
I know where you’re goin’
I don’t think that’s actin’ right
You don’t think it’s showin’
A jumpin’ up, fallin’ down
Don’t misunderstand me
You don’t think that I know your plan
What you tryin’ to hand me?
2. “Walk Away,” The James Gang (1971)
Written by Joe Walsh
In the liner notes of the James Gang’s third album Thirds, Walsh is credited with “guitar, vocals, and train wreck” on the opening “Walk Away.” Walsh’s “train wreck” referred to his spiral out of control with the guitar toward the end of the track. “You’ve kinda gotta put on headphones to hear it, but I took a guitar and did a full-on Pete Townshend with it in the background, where I put everything on 10 and turned the fuzz tone all the way up,” said Walsh of his “train wreck” in the song. “I took the guitar off, threw it up in the air, put it on the ground, and jumped up and down on it. I didn’t light it on fire, because you can’t see that on an album. That would have been stupid.”
Taking my time
Choosin’ my line
Trying to decide what to do
Looks like my stop
Don’t wanna get off
Got myself hung up on you
Seems to me
You don’t want to talk about it
Seems to me
You just turn your pretty head and walk away
Places I’ve known
Things that I’m growin’
Don’t taste the same without you
I got myself in
The worst mess I’ve been
And I find myself startin’ to doubt you
“Walk Away” peaked even higher than “Funk 49” at No. 51 and has often been performed by the Eagles live.
3. “Turn to Stone” (1972)
Written by Joe Walsh and Terry Trebandt
On his 1972 debut solo album, Barnstorm, Walsh couldn’t help but reflect on the protests around the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, and being present at the 1970 shooting at his alma mater Kent State two years earlier. “It’s a song about frustration,” said Walsh. “I attended Kent State. I was at the shootings. That fueled it, too. In those days it felt like the government’s priority was not the population. They had an agenda that was about something other than doing what was necessarily good for the country.”
Hey now, the well run dry
Pages of your book on fire
Read the writing
On the wall
Hoe down, it’s a showdown
Everywhere you look, we’re fighting
Hear the call
And you know it’s gettin’ stronger
I can’t last very much longer
Turn to stone
Well there’s a change in the wind
You know the signs don’t lie
Such a strange feelin’
And I don’t know why it’s takin’
Such a long time
In 1980, Walsh also decided to run for president promising “Free Gas For Everyone” with his slogan “Life’s Been Good.”
“I thought it’d be a great idea and I had fun with it,” added Walsh. “And the reason I did it is because there was, and there continues to be, a very apathetic attitude toward voting. There’s a total separation between the federal government and the people. So running for president was an attempt on my part to get people to care enough to go vote. But people just don’t bother. And that’s why it’s not working.”
4. “Rocky Mountain Way” (1973)
Written by Joe Walsh, Joe Vitale, Kenny Passarelli, Rocke Grace
After Walsh left the James Gang, he remained connected to the band’s co-producer (and future Eagles producer) Bill Szymczyk to work on his solo releases, including Barnstorm and his second album The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get. On the Smoker album, Walsh had one instrumental that needed lyrics, “Rocky Mountain Way.”
“I couldn’t think of any words and everybody was patiently waiting for me to come up with something,” shared Walsh. “One day I was in my backyard in Boulder [Colorado] mowing the lawn and I was thinking, ‘Boy, I sure hope leaving the James Gang was a good idea,’ because I hadn’t really surfaced as a solo act yet. I was almost there, but not quite. And then I looked up, and there were the Rocky Mountains.”
Walsh added, “It was summer but you could still see snow on the back range. It just hit me how beautiful it all was, 5,000 feet up. And that was it. The words came: ‘Spent the last year Rocky Mountain way / Couldn’t get much higher.’ And the second verse is about my old management—telling us this, telling us that, time to change the batter. I got all of that at once. And I ran inside to write it down before I forgot it.”
Spent the last year
Rocky Mountain Way
Couldn’t get much higher
Out to pasture
Think it’s safe to say
Time to open fire
And we don’t need the ladies
Crying ’cause the story’s sad
‘Cause the Rocky Mountain Way
Is better than the way we had
Unfortunately, Walsh forgot to shut down his lawnmower, which moved into his neighbor’s yard and destroyed her rose bushes. “Those lyrics wound up costing me, I don’t know, maybe 1,500 bucks, but it was well worth it,” said Walsh. “The neighbor, though, she was pissed. I said to her, ‘You don’t understand. I got the words. But she just looked at me.”
5. “Song For Emma” (1974)
Written by Joe Walsh
Walsh’s third album So What featured a rerecording of his Barnstorm track “Turn to Stone,” a song co-written with Don Henley, “Falling Down,” and an instrumental cover of “Pavanne of the Sleeping Beauty” from Maurice Ravel’s 1908 composition The Mother Goose Suite. So What also featured a song Walsh wrote for his young daughter Emma Kristen, who was killed in a car accident on the way to her nursery school.
“My wife [Stefany Rhodes] was taking our 4-year-old daughter to school and some lady ran a stop sign and creamed our car,” remembered Walsh. “And I lost my daughter. And it was gory and all that. To help with closure, I wrote this song for her. And over the process of the next year, my wife and I, we just weren’t strong enough to get through the grief and so we separated and eventually got divorced.”
There’s a feeling I get when I look to the sky
As if someone is watching
Someone hears every word
We are filled with regrets, it was such a short time
But we told Him we loved you, hoping somehow He heard
We hoped He heard
You were with us for a while and He took you,
And he made your mama cry
I can see it in her eyes, there’s a question as to why
And after all this time still I find that I’m without an answer
Good Bye. Bye love
He later met a woman in Los Angeles, who inspired his song “Help Me Through the Night,” and helped him through the grief. “Because I was a wreck,” he said. “But she was there so that I could grieve Emma.” Both songs are on So What.
“I called it that [‘So What’] because I had this ‘So what’ attitude,” Walsh said of the album title. “I was angry. I was really mad at God. And I felt that was a great reason to drink: ‘Poor me. God took my daughter away.’ And so I got an attitude, like, ‘This is the worst thing that’s ever happened. I don’t care about anything—just to justify that it was okay to get screwed up.”
Driving with Stevie Nicks
A decade after the release of “Song For Emma,” Walsh was on tour with Stevie Nicks and took her for a drive through the Colorado mountains. In her liner notes for Timespace, Nicks admitted that during their two-hour drive, she was complaining to Walsh about mostly “inconsequential things” when he told her the story about his daughter and her death. They eventually reached their destination, his daughter’s favorite playground, North Boulder Park, where she was too small to reach the fountain. Near that same fountain read a plaque: “This fountain is given in loving memory of Emma Walsh, April 29, 1971-April 1, 1974.”
The drive with Walsh moved Nicks, who later wrote “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You” for him. She released it on her 1985 album Rock a Little and called it the “most committed song I ever wrote” in the liner notes of her 1991 compilation Timespace.
Nicks added, “Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore since we took that drive.”
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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