The 2 guitar solos Joe Walsh considered his best

One of the greatest American guitarists of all time, Joe Walsh first made his mark in Rock history as a member of the James Gang, going on to earn widespread acclaim as a solo artist and rise to fame as a member of the Eagles, which became one of the best-selling bands in the world. During his prolific career, the musician wrote many memorable guitar solos and over the years he mentioned two that he considers to be among his best.

The 2 guitar solos Joe Walsh considered his best

“Rocky Mountain Way”

“I would think the overall guitar work in ‘Rocky Mountain Way’, especially the talk box. Peter Frampton asked me how to use it and he went and got rich with it and never even thanked me,” Joe Walsh said in an interview with Guitar Player magazine in 1988. He reaffirmed in 2012, while talking to Howard Stern, that the guitar solo was his best as a solo artist and told the story of how he wrote the lyrics.

“Solo-wise, probably ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ (is my best). One of the things that makes it magic (is that) it’s a bunch of guys playing in a room. That groove, you can’t do with Pro-Tools. I was in Colorado. I had left the James Gang, I was worried that I might have made a mistake, we were doing fine. (It was) A three-piece band, I just got saturated with playing really loud and being like a kick-ass guitar guy, playing through Marshalls and stuff. I was hearing all these songs like with a piano and (the other two guys were kind of against it).”

“So I was in Colorado and I have an album done which was the ‘Barnstorm’ (1972). The first solo album I did and I am mowing the lawn. I didn’t have any words for ‘Rocky Mountain Way’ but we had the track done. And I’m just dead in the water about this song ‘what is it about?’. If there were words I hear where they go (but I didn’t) know where they are. Well, I’m mowing the lawn I look up and there’s the front range of the Rocky Mountains with snow on them, in the summer and it knocked me back.”

Joe Walsh continued:

“It was just beautiful and I thought ‘Well, I have committed, I’m in Colorado. It’s too late to regret the James Gang, the Rocky Mountain way is better than the way I had because the music was better. And I got the word ‘Bammm’ and ‘ he’s tellin’ us this and he’s tellin’ us that, changes it every day,’ that’s about the James Gang’s manager.”

“‘And we don’t need the ladies crying ’cause the story’s sad.’ That’s giving up the regret of leaving the James Gang. I got all these words at once and I ran into the house to write the words down and the lawnmower kept going over into the neighbours yard and ate the garden (laughs). It was an expensive song to write but…,” Joe Walsh said. That track is one of his biggest solo hits, alongside songs like “Life’s Been Good” and “A Life of Illusion”.

“Hotel California”

“I’m very proud of the guitar work in ‘Hotel California’. I pretty much had to deal with the planning and organization of that. Don Felder brought in the descending chord structure. So I can’t say that I had anything to do with writing ‘Hotel California’. I was commissioned as a specialist to arrange the order of the solos. Who played what where, who went up high. It was tough figuring out how much momentum we needed compared to what we were going to end up with at the end of the song. When the solos start, it’s just here we go, and it goes all the way to the end of the song. Felder is tremendously underrated,” Joe Walsh told Guitar Player magazine in 1988.

More recently, Walsh recalled the meaning behind the song’s lyrics and how difficult it was to put together the guitar solos. “Everybody wants to know if there are demonic references and if there is a ‘Hotel California’. You know, we were all from different parts of America. Everybody was going to Los Angeles, that’s where everybody was to try and make it. All of us musicians, who were influencing each other and there were all these places to play and all these people would come. Jackson Browne, David Souther, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and these people. Nobody was from California, everybody was from Ohio or Michigan or Texas…”

Joe Walsh continued:

“So, California at that time was this big hotel, this big melting pot of people with talent trying to fit in. That’s what we meant about California at the time. In retrospect everybody thought we knew what we were doing but for the most part we didn’t have a clue. We just knew we had the chemistry. We were so lucky that somebody thought to push record, it was wild and crazy times. It was a different age then and we were in a position that we could do anything we wanted. So we did it (laughs)!”

“We never dreamed that we would influence as many people on the planet as we did. We knew it was good, we knew that the guitar solos were some stuff that people hadn’t tried before. It was a painful birth to get those the way they came out. I think we all wanted to be remembered as valid, creative artists for the generation that we represent. We wanted to be remembered as doing a body of work that represents the time that we lived in,” he said in an interview with Top 2000 a Gogo in 2010 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).