Guitarist Joe Walsh Brings His Mojo to Berklee

Legendary guitarist Joe Walsh H'12 stopped by Berklee to talk about rock 'n' roll, his time with the Eagles, and musical mojo. 

October 29, 2015

Legendary guitarist Joe Walsh H‘12 says his whole style developed from a night when two of his bandmates quit on the way to a gig in Detroit, opening for Cream.

On the ride from Cleveland, where his band the James Gang was based, the keyboardist and lead guitarist/singer got in a fight and bailed, leaving Walsh (the rhythm guitarist) , the bass player, and the drummer without enough money to get home unless they did the gig. Walsh came up with a plan: he knew a couple of verses, if that, of a couple of songs, and he’d sing those while everyone made up music for as long as they could.

“And if we can do that four times, we’ll get paid,” he told his bandmates. Because he was forced to play both lead and rhythm guitar, he ended up playing in the style that he later became known for when he joined the Eagles, one of the highest-selling American bands in the history of popular music.

That night, with Eric Clapton in the crowd, the James Gang got a standing ovation and played an encore. (Clapton later told Rolling Stone magazine, in 1975, that Walsh was “one of the best guitarists to surface in some time. I don’t listen to many records, but I listen to his.”)

“What I’m saying is get out there and experience stuff and deal with it, because that will make you a better musician,” Walsh says. It’s a point he mentioned a few times during his 90-minute master class in the David Friend Recital Hall on October 20.

“You can’t be a legend in your parents’ garage. You’ve got to get out and play in front of people. You will suck. That’s okay, you gotta learn how to play when you suck and know about that, and have a bad night and know about that.”

Walsh, a Grammy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and multiple Grammy Award winner, talked of how he grew up in 1950s Ohio with his early musical influences being the music he would hear on AM Radio or the pieces his mother, a classical pianist, would play. He remembers Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon” as the first song he heard. He recalls when Elvis Presley was just starting to get airplay.

His world changed, however, when the Beatles came on the scene. He studied the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs, and he learned how to play their music on the guitar.

“If you study all those songs with an acoustic guitar then you find all these chords that go together in all these strange ways. To me, the best thing that one can do is to learn all those songs and study the harmonies. The White Album is, I think, the Bible.”

After the James Gang disbanded in 1971, Walsh formed a band called Barnstorm and then joined the Eagles in 1975. The group’s 1976 album Hotel California was the first to feature Walsh. The band broke up in 1980 and since then Walsh has released several solo albums and collaborated with everyone from Ringo Starr to the Foo Fighters. Berklee awarded honorary doctorate of music degrees to the Eagles in 2012. 

Having witnessed the rise of rock ‘n’ roll from AM to mp3, Walsh at times sounded slightly nostalgic for the old days. Music today, he says, often has its “mojo” ProTooled away and can sound quantified and computerized.

“Every time you fix something you [mess] with the human performance and that’s what I call mojo. The records out of the ‘50s were so great because they were awful, out of tune … but they’re great human performances and that’s what I love about them.”

At the end of the talk, Walsh took out a guitar he had bought that day at the Guitar Center on Massachusetts Avenue, tuned it in for the first time on stage, and treated the crowd to a bit of great "human performance," playing riffs from "Hotel California" and other songs.