LACM’s Let's Talk Music Presents: Joe Walsh

how's everybody doing welcome to let's talk music I'm NATIVE Wayne and were honored and blessed today to have one of the great artists of our time five-time Grammy winner from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame his on his solo on Hotel California was voted as the eighth greatest soul of all time by guitar magazine it's a Joe thanks so much for coming I mean I know how busy you are with your solo career on the band that did a band that you're in and all the charity work and all that so thanks a lot man so let's go back to the to the early days I mean he started music in was it 65 so does 50 years 50 years of music - a long time so no in the early days you were like four you know growing up in Tulsa and Columbus and New York and all that what kind of stuff are you listening to and who influenced you right well I graduated high school in 1965 I was born in 1947 and my mother thank God was very musical she was a classical pianist gotta be careful with that word ha ha and she was like a musicologist she studied music that's what she did and practiced all the time so I was around her at a very young age of course and I was around music she was always playing or practicing or writing she wrote wrote music she's one of those one of those one of those musicians who can do that I can't really read music I did for a while but you don't really need to do it to do what I do and if you don't do it you get rusty anyway in the early 50s there was only AM radio and there were I remember when there was no television and and then there was but it only had three channels and it was black and white and it went off the air about 10:30 at night so I listened to the radio because it was always on because my mother listened to it and I listened I I would say about 1952 it really is my earliest memories of that I would have been five and I listened to whatever was on the radio and what are the things that was on the radio with Les Paul and Mary Ford I'll hide the moon and I love that listen to it over and over and over but whatever was on the radio was really what I listened to in and I was musical I knew that but I didn't really know what that was because I was five and I grew up through the wonderful surfacing of rock and roll the end of the big bands there was a lot of that on the radio and the Golden Age of rock and roll from from Elvis and Bill Haley and the Comets all of that from then on and so I would say that is my biggest influence was all of the doo-wop all of the rock-and-roll all of the great oldies that you listen to on Channel five on Sirius and my mother who was playing classical music all the time either records of it or on piano and so I had I always had that out I always had a little splash of classical music being familiar with melodies and orchestras and stuff which came in really handy later so I hope I answered your question definitely then in the early days I knew you did school II started oboe and did you get guitar lessons music lessons no I didn't really I took a little bit of piano lessons and you know I was looking that was I was looking I played clarinet for a while and I didn't know about that and then I tried trombone but that was too hard to get on the bus with and for some reason I ended up playing oboe and that was in junior high school I was looking for an instrument that I could play but I also needed to figure out this stuff that was on the radio I needed to be able to play that and and and so I started messing around with the ukulele by my by myself and eventually I got a guitar a real cheapo but so I played oboe to keep my parents happy and that's pretty funny because oboe is a double reed instrument and you need ambusher to play it you really do it's a hard it's a hard thing to play but the double reed is the purest waveform and because of that the oboe is what the entire Orchestra Tunes to a 440 so the oboz oboe players job is to play a concert a for the whole orchestra as each section Tunes up and because I was really young and and didn't have my lip developed I would play a concert a but I would go progressively flatter as my lip gave out so the last part of the orchestra that tuned to me was different than the violins you know and it sounded pretty horrible but I always I did that I did that here that I did that anyway I ended up with a guitar because piano was good but guitar I was able to work out all these songs that I was hearing on the radio and all the songs that I loved and had memorized and I could sing too I can not only play the songs but I could sing or hum or just make noises you can't accompany yourself and sing with an oboe so I started learning guitar by myself on my own and eventually I realized Joey you're not going to get any girls playing oboe so I've decided guitar and I never got any girls playing guitar either but I had a lot more fun very cool great I love your song lucky that way but I know that you didn't you know it wasn't luck that got you where you were I know it's a lot of hard work and practice and you know all that sort of stuff do you um what was it hard to get you start in the beginning in the business yeah yeah it was really hard uh I yeah I knew I wanted to be a musician I knew that as an early age but I didn't know how to do that and that song lucky that way I wrote you know that as you live your life it it appears to be an event that's out of control smashing into another thing that's going on creating chaos and havoc and panic and then that mutates into something else and then you know and it's like what is going on and it's really hard to navigate just life because no matter what you think that's not it you know and now in retrospect looking back on my life it's like somebody wrote a finely crafted novel that really is I'm 68 and I don't really understand how I got here part of its luck but part of it being in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time and I always thought you know I'm a fake I don't know what I'm doing and everybody's going to find out that I don't know what I'm do I always thought that and I did my music it affected my confidence because I but I found out this and here's something you need to know in the music business if you're going to be a musician if you pretend you know what you're doing everybody thinks you know what you're doing so that's what I did I just pretended like I knew exactly what I was doing and it works pretty good but now looking back like guys like I say in retrospect I probably knew what I was doing pretty much kinda more than I thought anyway there you go there's some advice thank you man well I think you certainly know what you were doing in the James Gunn any members of James and I know you'll be open for cream what was that like yeah at some point in college about 1967 or 68 I left McClure New Jersey where I went to high school and went to Ohio and I went to Kent State where they had the shootings and yes I was there but Kent was a great place and I became pretty good at cover songs we were a cover band that's what people wanted to hear what was on the radio and this is uh this is right around Beatles time so you know you didn't have to be good if you knew some Beatles songs you could play in front of people so I was in this I joined this band in Cleveland whose guitar player quit to go to Los Angeles and make it and so I joined this band and there was this dynamic going on in the band where they had been together for a year year and a half and then really get along all of them all the time and so I was in this five piece band and we drove to Detroit to play a show and between when we left Cleveland and when we got to Detroit two people quit well we had to play because we needed gas money to get back to Cleveland and it was the bass the bass player and the drummer and me and I thought well here's what we can do I do know this one song a Steppenwolf song a traffic song a couple of songs like that well I know I know kind of the first verse and and sure we'll play that song and I'll sing the first verse kind of or maybe half of the second verse and then we'll jam will jam with the middle part just it doesn't matter what you play play anything and then when we get done with that I'll sing the first verse again and all we have to do is do that five times and we'll get paid Wingo huh so a couple things happen uh the only chance we had was to really go for it and those middle parts that were truly amazing cuz there was you know no rules no nothing just whatever and we got a standing ovation and we were opening for cream so you know I felt like worthless but it worked really good three piece there's nothing better than a three-piece band on a good night and there's nothing worse than a three-piece band on a bad night so we got back to Cleveland and we decided we would keep going and so we did cover songs the beginning and our middle and back to the song for the end and we did that for a year and we got all these middle parts that we wrote and what we did was at that point I wrote something different than the cover song at the beginning of our middle part and at the end and plugged it all in and note that's how we started writing a couple of things I was a lead singer and I played the only melodic instrument now I couldn't sing I wasn't a lead singer I wasn't the singer in the five piece band but the three-piece band ended up singing because I sang better than the other two guys they were horrible but I had to sing and play at the same time now I never would have done that too hard except I had to and I played what I would say is called lead rhythm Peter Townsend is great at it Paige is great at it when you play rhythm guitar while your singing is great but when you go to lead guitar there's no rhythm guitar and vice versa so you you kind of develop a way to cover your ass while you're singing and play lead melodically and rhythmically also and is lead rhythm so later I met the guys in the WHO and I met Townsend and he related to the way I was doing stuff and he took me under his wing but that's how I developed my style and I never would have unless I had to and I'm so grateful that I had to because made me a much better musician so the most important thing to do is to play in front of people and I say that you are you can't be a legend your parents garage and you can't put stuff on the internet and wait to be discovered you got to get out and you got to play in front of people and when I did that in the beginning I thought I was awful you know but I did it and when I got used to it I got more and more comfortable with it and then I didn't suck anymore all right shot glass but you got to get out in front of people and play because that's what we do yah mahn great stuff I'm talking about Tom those great guitarists you've always been looked at as like a guitarist guitarist I just want to give some ports Pete tones and we were just talking about says Joe Walsh is a fluid and intelligent player there's not many like that around Eric Clapton said he's one of the best guitarists the surface in some time I don't listen too many records but I listen to his and Jimmy Page Led Zeppelin maybe 380 greatest guitar is out there apart from Joe Jimmy Page says he has a tremendous feel for the instrument I love this style since early James Young and he actually Jimmy Page actually got his number-one guitar from UA so so cool and then back to him the so all that time you were doing James Gang and then in 1973 you went solo and you've done 12 solo albums is it easier doing it solo or is it easier in a band yeah well that that they both have benefit uh I was in a three-piece band okay so on stage I was the only melodic instrument and it was frustrating because I was starting to write now at this point we achieved an amount of success so that we got some momentum going and we got a record out in that that went well stayed on the charts for 53 weeks I think J the King rides again but I'm starting to write more textures and stuff more more harmony harmony or piano part you know or rhythm guitar and lead guitar at the same time and I couldn't do any of that in the three-piece band and I really felt like I needed to go in that direction and I felt like I was painting myself in the corner as a heavy metal guitar player and I thought it was a lot more to being a musician than that so I left the James Gang and went out into the great unknown and again had no idea what to do or what I was doing I moved to Colorado and started writing and carefully kind of put a band together and uh funded it and ran out of money in right at the very end one of the songs I wrote broke through and that was called Rocky Mountain Way and so I barely made it in terms of not being able to do music for living I almost had to go get a job and not follow my dream now I would say I have the best of both worlds being in the Eagles the way we work is that everybody has a specific assignment a specific thing to play and a specific vocal part to sing and your job is to be there with it and if we all show up it turns into something bigger than any of us individually there's not a lot of room for improv or spontaneous you know improvisation there's not a lot of room for that in that band it's specific parts working into a complete total song that's one way of doing stuff and we do it as good as anybody and I love that and I love being in that band because a lot of stuff gets decided another existing band with all kinds of dynamics going on and that's great but as a solo artist and having my own band I get to go out and just open up and and improvise they lead to a different every night and I get to call all the shots and and that's great too and so it's the best of both worlds and I think either one of those by itself what I would feel incomplete so as a solo artist it lonely sometimes you don't have anybody to bounce stuff off of you got to kind of come up with direction for everybody and and there's a lot of non-musical stuff that comes along with success you people there is you don't see it at the time but when you when you break through and get some momentum going there's a lot of stuff to decide hiring and firing and what are you going to do and it can be a distraction if it's really successful you get royalty cheque and that can be very distracting or you start partying more and more then you really get into that there's a lot of distractions that can steer you away from what you doing in the first place that got you there some guys crash and burn some guys catch it in time I took it as far as as I dared to and made it back I had not planned on living this long but here I am so there's all of that and in being a solo artist is really hard to draw this non-musical stuff of the business of music that somebody needs to decide it you know it's a lot safer being in the band where you can bounce it off of each other but I love having a solo career and I had a solo career and played with some great musicians and great bands but it's not like the chemistry that the Eagles have being part of something much bigger than me so that's the big picture yeah great stuff and um apart from like some of the best songs in history what really impresses me about Eagers is there's amazing harmonies do y'all spend y'all spent a lot of time rehearsing to get those how many so magical yeah we did we did it first when I first joined I had to get up to speed I replaced a guitar player and they were well on their way they had songs on the radio and I had to learn all his parts and I my harmony part nowadays we don't have to really communicate that much we know each other really well and we know the ranges that everybody has from low to high and the harmonies just kind of fall into place we'll rotate the catalog sometimes put some stuff away that gets flat from playing it too many times and dig out some other songs from albums and stuff we don't rehearse harmonies like we used to which was all the time we'll sit down in chairs like this and go through every song one time at the beginning of the tour and when you when you join the army Eagles I said you were too wild for the Eagles is that what life in the fast lane is about huh where it wasn't just me you know we just uh they went Hotel California came out it achieved it affected the entire planet it it affected people beyond our wildest imagination and we really didn't know what to do we were so sick of it by the time it came out because we'd worked on it for a long time and those though it was different then that's all I can say you you can you could do things that you can't do now fun things you can get away you can't get away with the stuff we used to do the media won't allow it and the internet won't allow it the internet ate all that the internet ate the record industries I know it in eight the record companies it ate intellectual property that's the one that hurts I don't know what to tell you people about copyright and royalties and stuff the record companies were were very unfair took advantage of the artists you had to sign a lot of your part of it away and a lot of stuff was deducted from you royalties so we were getting ripped off but at least there was somebody to pay us somebody that counted how many records were sold now there's nobody nobody to do any of that and I don't know what advice I have to give everybody now the way things are a lot of stuff is gone radio the Internet eight radio with people who can pick what they're going to play next so it's all in transition Congress has got to do something the copyright laws are from 1936 and I talked to people from should I say you gotta help it you gotta help it we can't afford to write music and I I don't know what to tell you I'm trying to figure it out - it's ugly and I like the name of your latest album out a lot of mine is that way yeah that's why you did it because the digital is it's destroying everything right yeah yeah I'm not sure about this digital age yet works really good there's a lot of stuff that comes along with it that we don't really think about where you just destroyed the infrastructure of the record business um you know we sit in chairs while our minds are in the screen inside of cyberspace and our bodies just sit there and wait for our minds to come back and people are spending more and more time in there because it's really fun and there's all this fun stuff to do but in the meantime the planet sucking eggs and this is an analog planet and kids play these horrible games violent games where when everybody's dead the games over and and there and that's manifesting in in all this stupid school shootings and stuff this is all hazards of the digital age I don't know what you're gonna come out of it and Big Brother boy Big Brother knows all about every one of us and they're keeping track of it so here we are definitely yeah analog I love analog I love those 50s I you know you record with Pro Tools now and because you can fix anything musicians have a tendency to fix everything and so many records I hear now are perfect but every time you fix part of a human performance you're messing with the Mojo and that's what I don't hear I don't hear any mojo with Pro Tools and stuff because you can make it perfect and that's not good I like perfect music except in the elevator and what upcoming projects see how that was in the culture well I'm working I'm working I'm doing some music for a movie that is a is a documentary I've always paid attention to veterans Vietnam the guys that came home and and who were affected by it and I'm more and more aware of the guys that went over to try and figure out Kuwait and Iraq and Afghanistan and all that they're so young I whenever we played in Washington I would go to Walter Reed Hospital and see the guys would no arms or legs and talk to him and thank him so there's this documentary it's called citizen-soldier and it's about a National Guard unit in Oklahoma that out of nowhere got called to Afghanistan and they just trained about 30 days a year you know when there's a tornado they they minimize looting and get the infrastructure back up that's about it and Oklahoma but they ended up deep in in enemy territory in Afghanistan and these guys went high school together but they took GoPros they took GoPros and all hell broke loose and not all of them got back but these guys I know got ahold of that footage and they're making a documentary about their whole journey and so it's a war movie but it's not a movie somebody gets blown away that they really were and I'm doing music for it because I really believe in it I really I really like doing that I think that's a way that's really going to affect people because over here it's a Forgotten War we don't pay any attention to it anymore but still going and notice guys are coming back and they're a mess so maybe trying to change the world by being part of something like that and I think I'll I'll find stuff like that nothing really huge but stuff like that that I care about and I can do something about as much as I can there there aren't albums anymore so I can't say I'm recording a new album what the hell is that but I can I'm going to continue and write and I guess I just put it on the internet you know I don't want to have validity measured by how many copies it sells don't ever confuse success with validity that that's bad that's bad so I guess I just put it out on the internet and say come and get it and play it live cuz that's there's no money in recording anymore to pay the bills I got to go on the road and that's good too yeah my soul wanted to wanted to open it up to any questions any questions out there actually before we jump to audience Q&A we have one question from the online chat room for Joe the question is what artists have you never performed with it you would really like to one day collaborate with well you know the one that I will always regret is Ray Charles I wish I could uh play guitar for him other people that are around I don't know I'm pretty lucky guy I played it a whole bunch of people there's not a lot of real burning desires but Ray Charles is the one that's one they got away from me well then if you guys want to raise your hands I'll bring the mic around first question hi Joe you have you you co-produced this guitar pedal with analog alien called the double classic and one half sand overdrive and other half the compressor and the overdrive is kind of going after years sounds so what is the sound they're going for is like a small Fender amp or Marshall or well I I came up with that idea for that pedal for any amp but I would say probably a small amp um it's like a channel strip it's like a basic preamp that you can EQ as you can make it dirty or clean and a limiter to give it body and one can come before the other sometimes the amp and then the limiter is good when you're recording sometimes the limiters better and then into the amp but that's just an all-purpose thing that I go into and get it find the sweet spot for the ant bomb using and then that goes into the amp and I thought that might really help people because if you have 30 feet of cable you can bring the highs back up that you lost with high impedance and you can drive the amp just enough I don't need a bunch of other pedals you know a lot of people ask me how I get my sound and well I for the big records that I had I plugged a guitar into the amp and turned it up and Mike dan but you know you can't do that now because they have a modeling thing that you can do that sounds awful so for funk 49 you plugged which guitar into which amp sir you know you won't believe it it was a Fender Telecaster plugged into a tweed no.1 tweed it was a Fender champ a Fender champ a blackface and that's why it sounds like that because there was an eight-inch speaker and that's why it sounds like that but right in right into the amp that's it Mike yep and that was funk 49 what a great sound Telecaster yeah Hey Joe I have question it kind of occurs to me that you can hear so much great stuff on YouTube for example you can get all these historic performances you can get music on your iPhone all kinds of places do you think in any way this is kind of not devalued but kind of lessen the experience of going to a live performance because you can sort of get it on demand anywhere well yeah yeah it just overkill isn't it uh somebody record you with her phone and puts it on YouTube and it looks terrible and it sounds terrible and there's not a thing you can do about it and every song got the Eagles do live that's what happens and that's not fair really um I think it's really overkill there's so much out there I can I can watch YouTube and yeah well why go see me you can see me on on YouTube I don't know what to do about it but when it was simple you know if you like somebody's record you went and heard them and you saw them before the digital age that always worked better for me that's the analog the digital way is too much information and you sit in your chair like a car in park with a motor running and spend hours looking at next Joe thank you for taking my question right here in the back and you can answer no comment to this I don't want to get anybody in trouble but referencing what you said earlier about how horrible the record companies are today and it was well noted in sorry it was well noted in that recent documentary of the Eagles and there was a case where Don Felder and Don Henley were feuding over the rights for Hotel California because Don Felder wrote the music and Henley and Frey wrote the lyrics was ultimately settled for about I think six million a do you think that was fair and B do you think that was ironic that if Don Henley supported artists rights that he would have been more fair to Don Felder okay here's how I'll deal with that okay I joined an existing band and those guys were all in it and there were dynamics between the guys in the band going on for a year and a half before I joined and the reason I joined was because one of the guitar players decided he didn't want to do it anymore and so I replaced him so everything you talked about is all stuff that was going on when I joined and I always stayed away from that I didn't vote in any of that I was like Switzerland I was a neutral country you guys figured it out it has nothing to do with me and whatever happened didn't really involve me and I can't really comment on it and be fair to everybody sometimes nobody's wrong I don't know I did the best I could with good evening mr. Walsh great to have you here tonight my name is Terrence question that I had your well noted for playing the first guitar solo in Don Henley's hit dirty laundry a song which arguably is the most precent tune in rock history and it's denunciation of the media what can you tell us about the recording session for that tune well Steve Lukather did the second solo and that's good too god damn good to Steve great um Don usually is mad at some and feel strongly that the media is has mutated and into something that does not serve the people anyway I think that was a really good social commentary dirty laundry they they took a situation of his out of context and made it look like what it wasn't and that's what that song was about and it was big news for a week but they're really that really stung God and I remember going in at night too because they worked at night I remember going in and setting up and okay what do you want me to do it and he said try something like you're mad so that's what I did just you know and and pretty good pretty good I think I came up with a part that fits the emotion of the song and the frustration of the song and in that context I thought I did a really good job of coming up with a guitar part so we want to say special thanks to Jill for coming by it's been an amazing night yeah thank you very much Joe and one thing that I'd like to also add that Joe's been very gracious to allow us to offer a scholarship in his name so thank you very much Joe good luck everybody good luck I wish you peace and happiness and success pretending you know what you're doing ha it'll work all right you guys pay attention to our website and see who we've got next and thank you very much for coming

Channel: LACM (Los Angeles College of Music)

Views: 506,520

Rating: 4.8789845 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Walsh (Musical Artist), Eagles (Musical Group), music college, Musician (Profession), Guitar (Musical Instrument), Guitarist (Profession), Talking, James Gang (Musical Group)

Id: mvFZjB7xUpY

Length: 54min 30sec (3270 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2015