Ross Halfin, Shawn Brackbill Flying high with the Eagles, his rock’n’rolling madness masked tragedy and insecurity. So how did 2023’s Ringo Starr and VetsAid stalwart get so reliable, so responsible? “I’m part of something now,” says Joe Walsh.

Interview by BOB MEHR

Portrait by ROSS HALFIN

JOE WALSH LEANS IN CLOSE, HIS BLUE EYES all aglow.

“The one thing I’ve found in the music business is that if you pretend you know what you’re doing,” he announces, “ever yone thinks you know what you’re doing.

“And I’m here to tell you, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he chuckles, adding a perfect Walshian twist. “Though in retrospect, maybe I did. I just didn’t know I knew.”

It’s an early summer’s day in Hollywood, and Joe Walsh is holding court in a suite at the Sunset Marquis hotel – the kind of room he might have systematically destroyed in a past life as a legendar y rock’n’roll wild man. Today however, at 75, he is the ver y picture of decor um. Perched on a white leather couch, sipping from a Diet Coke, his well-coiffed blond hair and sun-kissed mien reflect decades of sobriety and success – though a kind of mad energy still flickers just beneath the surface.

Walsh and his bandmates in the Eagles are due to begin the first leg of what is expected to be their farewell tour. Before then, sadly, we’ll learn of the death of another of their ex-bandmates, Randy Meisner (“a great guy and an unforgettable voice,” Walsh will post). Between Eagles dates, on November 12 in San Diego, Walsh leads the seventh of his annual VetsAid concerts – this year’s co-stars: Jeff Lynne’s ELO, Stephen Stills, The War On Drugs, The Flaming Lips and Lucius – benefiting the militar y support organisation he founded in 2017. It’s a deeply personal cause for Walsh, whose father, an Army Air Corps instructor, died on active duty when he was a baby.

Born in Kansas, and raised by his mother and stepfather across Illinois, Ohio, New York and New Jersey, Walsh was perpetually the new boy in school. “It was good training for a performer,” he says – training he put to use as one of rock’s great gonzo guitarists, breaking out in the late ’60s in Midwest power trio James Gang and scoring solo hits before joining the Eagles, helping hew their 1976 monolith, Hotel California.

Along the way, Walsh’s goofy prankster-partier persona masked tragedy, including the loss of his infant daughter, Emma, killed in a car accident in 1974. And when the Eagles fell apart in 1980, he entered a bleak wilderness of substance abuse and career stasis, turned around in the early ’90s when Don Henley and Glenn Frey made getting clean the condition of his joining a re-formed Eagles.

Nearly 30 years on, the guitarist is living testament to second chances. His 2008 marriage to Marjorie Bach (sister-in-law of Ringo Starr) brought a stability and peace that had long eluded him.

“I’ve had some tragic things happen in my life,” he admits, “but at the same time, a fella couldn’t have asked for more than what’s been handed me.”

Your father, Robert Newton Fidler, died when you were very young. Do you have any conscious memory of him?

I was a year and a half old when he passed. (Closes eyes) Sometimes I get a weird feeling… there’s a picture of me and him sitting on the steps of our Quonset hut on Okinawa where he was killed. I look at that, and I can almost remember. That was 1949. In those days, it was just, “Aw, that’s too bad.” There was not even, “Thank you for your service.” So I grew up without a father. And I really needed one. Everybody else had a father, but I didn’t. It was my mom and me against the world.

Your mother eventually remarried George Walsh, whose name you took.