Joe Walsh: 34 Songs and a Familiar Kind of Crazy

OOD Playlists is where the songs get gathered by year, artist, mood, place, memory, or whatever else makes them belong together. The list matters, but the reason for the list is the post.

This one follows Joe Walsh from the James Gang through Barnstorm, the solo records, and a few additions that belong even if they sit outside the main sequence. The playlist runs chronologically enough to show how much more was happening beneath the jokes, the voice, and the guitar playing everybody already noticed.

The YouTube and YouTube Music links are waiting at the bottom. The story starts with Chicago radio, wanders through Caribou Ranch, and eventually arrives at two dusty “bowling trophies” that were not bowling trophies.

Joe Walsh got into my head long before I knew much about the James Gang, Barnstorm, or most of the records represented on this playlist.

Sometime in the early 1980s, Steve Dahl went on vacation and Walsh filled in for him on Chicago radio. I think he did it more than once, and I remember at least one stretch lasting a week or two, but forty-some years have made the details unreliable. I went looking for the exact dates and couldn’t find them. I found enough to know I didn’t invent the whole thing, which is about the best I can usually hope for with memories from high school.

What I remember clearly is Joe Walsh saying, “How ya doin’?”

He said it in this slow, stretched-out voice that sounded a lot like Spicoli before most of us knew who Spicoli was. Every time he said it, he sounded slightly more amused and slightly less connected to the ordinary rules of human behavior.

To us as high school boys, he seemed completely crazy in exactly the right way. Not dangerous crazy. More like somebody had handed control of a Chicago radio station to the funniest guy at the party and nobody from management had noticed yet.

We loved him.

That was the version of Joe Walsh I carried around for a long time: great guitar player, strange voice, funny songs, Eagles, “Life’s Been Good,” and a general sense that the whole operation could come off the tracks at any moment.

Making this playlist pushed me past that version.

I usually hear these playlists quite a few times before I release them. I build one, move songs around, play it in the car, hear something I missed, and go back into the albums again. By the time I’m done, I’ve usually changed at least part of my mind about the artist.

The more I listened to this one, the more impressed I became with Joe Walsh’s entire body of work.

The guitar playing is obvious. It announces itself. What took longer for me to notice was everything happening underneath it: the layered parts, the little sounds moving through the background, the changes in rhythm, and the way songs keep opening up after you think you already understand them.

Listening through the early records also brought me back to Caribou Ranch.

Walsh recorded some of his most important early work there in the 1970s. Barnstorm was the first album recorded at the ranch, and parts of The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get were made there too.

About twenty years later, I lived there. My girlfriend at the time had grown up on the ranch while the studio was still operating, and she was the reason I got to live there in the first place. One weekend the two of us babysat for Jimmy Guercio’s kids, and somewhere in that house I found what I thought were somebody’s old bowling trophies — dusty, labels falling off. They were Grammys.

That’s the only time I’ve been near a Grammy.

I also think Walsh’s writing ability is underrated. His personality gets there first. The jokes, the voice, and the whole slightly damaged space-cadet act can make it easy to miss how good some of these songs are. He can build a song around a riff that sounds like it was dug out of the ground, then turn around and write something as bruised and human as “Help Me Thru the Night” or “Tomorrow.”

He can be funny without making the music disposable. Even the long pieces have enough going on inside them to reward another listen.

I kept both versions of “Turn to Stone.” They aren’t duplicates once you actually listen to them.

The playlist starts with the James Gang, moves through Barnstorm and Walsh’s solo albums in chronological order, and finishes with a couple of additions outside the main sequence. I put the soundtrack version of “In the City” near the back, then ended with the seventeen-minute live version of “Lost Woman” from Carnegie Hall.

By the time that final track ends, you’ve either had enough Joe Walsh or you finally understand the point of the entire playlist.

If I missed the Joe Walsh song that makes the whole argument fall apart—or if you have another artist playlist I ought to build—send it through the contact page. I’m sure somebody will explain what I got wrong.

Anyway, here are 34 songs and almost three hours of Joe Walsh. The hits are here, but they aren’t really the reason I keep playing it.

How ya doin’?