LONELY IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Joe Walsh is curiously indifferent about success. He gives you the impression that he has long outgrown awkwardness, but has never gotten used to felicity. Joe Walsh still sees himself as a swan in duck’s clothing.

Bluntly, the man underestimates himself, but luckily there are many who would disagree. Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Peter Townshend are among his .most notable fans, with the latter publicly declaring his admiration, admitting that he wished he was able to acheive the same perfection as Walsh’s onstage sound. Humble Pie tried to lure him from the James Gang when Peter Frampton quit, but Joe refused, only to leave the Gang a short time later for personal reasons. That was a move that the band never recovered from, relentlessly trying to recapture the winning chemistry they possessed when Walsh was with them.

No one is apt to pull out the plug on Joe’s popularity. He’s distinguished himself thrice over, a feat rarely repeated in rock chronology. First in the James Gang, then Barnstorm, and now solo. Yet still after 5 gold records for Rides Again, Thirds, James Gang Live, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, and most recently So What, he is reluctant to admit to stardom.

“It’s such a trip when you make it, quote, unquote. I’ve probably made it, but on what level? I don’t know how to measure it. You know a lot of people measure success on bucks. I guess I measure success on being able to do what you want, and live with it.”

44 I really wanted to prove to everybody that *Old Walsh'la together. AA

Walsh is a humble man among haughty company. He’s flattered by the compliments paid him from rock’s loftier personages, but it does little to boost his confidence. Their approval just makes him feel like he’s doing something right.

“When I feel on a lower level, which is most of the time, I feel in awe. The people you’ve named are the people I’ve listened to and learned from. Those people are really up there - superstars, and yeah, I’m up and coming and all that, but to know those people that I studied from approve of where I’ve gone with it makes me feel really good.”

His fans also totally approve, filling huge concert arenas to capacity to see and hear the object of their heavy metal hearts. They push and sway with the music, mercilessly driven as they crush their collective bodies against the stage, like an army of androids awakened by Walsh’s note bending. They clutch and grab at Joe’s patched leather shoes, undaunted by the fact that he is seemingly oblivious to their mass existence. His eloquence comes from his guitar, not his speech or actions.

“I get really engrossed, and when I get feedback from the audience and the audience gets me off, I get more into my guitar. Rather than going crazy more and more, I will come down more and more, and concentrate 6n my playing,” he explains simply. Walsh, admittedly the careless popstar, sports stringy hair and a railman’s cap pulled down to there - covering everything but a protruding schnozz. “Hey Joe, take off your hat!” urge his eager fans; but he doesn’t notice, ignoring their request. Could it be stage fright that prompts the low profile?

“Yeah, I still get stagefright. I do a lot.

I had it in Detroit, because it was a really important gig - from playing Detroit a lot in the old days. I really wanted to prove to everybody that ‘Old Walsh’ is together, and if I can do that I can kinda prove it to myself.” v

Joe has to convince himself, because there was once a time when he felt he’d had the final belt in the gut and couldn’t see the floor for the ceiling. Luckily he resurfaced and climbed back on the rock heap, eventually scaling it. Still the scars of self doubt and the fear of failure remain: although buried, occasionally they re-emerge to haunt him.

Kent State, the sight of his idyllic college days was crumbling rapidly. Kent, like many other college campuses was experiencing a bad case of student unrest, but what separated Kent from all other colleges except Jackson is one day. May 4,1970. This is the day when the gunfire of the National Guard was used to quell a student skirmish, killing four persons. “Kent used to be really beautiful. There was a group of people who were really tight but after the trouble happened everything changed. Kent got really sterile and the police started cracking down. I lost all my respect for politics as well as my innocence, seeing how badly mishandled that whole thing was. I was confronted with how completely powerful the government is and how it can be that powerful and that wrong.”

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Not only was Joe disillusioned with his politics but also with his band. “I left the James Gang out of musical frustration. What was going on in my head couldn’t be played by three people live. It became harder to record, and I had to compensate by not recording too ‘busy.’ I was very unhappy with the entire musical direction of the band. We were doing really well at something I didn’t particularly care to do. After awhile, I said ‘I don’t care how great this is going, it’s not what I want to do.’ ”

What the man needed was a pyschic recharging, so he moved on to beautiful Boulder, playing at being a heavy metal John Denver and plotting his next vinyl assault. He credits that period of his life as his “new phase” where he evolved and matured vocally as well as thematically. Part of the reason for this musical and mental metamorphosis was the company he was keeping. Joe was hanging with the out - to - lunch - bunch - Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, the Eagles, Danny Fogelberg. After a move out of commercial necessity to "Sunny, southern you-know -where, he teamed up with Irving Azoff who got Joe’s guitar in gear - very soon Walsh was gigging regulary. His Rocky Mountain hiatus was over and now it was time to get back on the road. Did the country-rock clique rub off on Joe, diluting the grit of his unique sound, or vice-versa?

“All those people sing a bit on the So What? album and we’ve played jams, but I’m into a rock and roll thing which they appreciate, but I don’t know that they’d want to go that way. It’s an area that they all dig, but they’re not in that school of thought.”

Now, Joe Walsh is a respected name in rock circles; I wondered if he got frustrated feeling that he continually had to top that last big one?

. “Yeah, but that’s a legitimate frustration. If you don’t feel you’ve creatively topped the last one you don’t feel any progression. I have to put out probably an album every eight months. I have words, ideas, stories, music and a whole lot more to get together. It gets real hard to top yourself after a while.”

As for topping album titles, Joe wouldn’t even touch The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, without the full staff of Mel Brooks’ gag writers.

“I thought after a name like Smoker, etc. I just didn’t want to compete with trying to make something funnier, because it might not be, and I just figured ‘so what.’ The whole ‘so what’ thing is based on what I’ve seen, not what I feel. You start to feel after a while, once you see where it’s all at; then you get into that attitude. You can’t play your best every nigl)t, no matter how hard you try. After a while you just say ‘ so what. ’ You like music? Just play music and to hell with all the games.”

Beside possessing a title that’s an ode to pop punkism, etched in the grooves of So What? is “That’s no bananny, that’s my noze.” Could it be a) a veiled drug reference, or SHUDDER, b) a confirmation that Paul is indeed dead. For our answer we went not to the horse’s mouth, but again to the singer’s schnozz. Well, Walsh-o, spill them bananas, what is it?

“Well, it’s a little of everything. It’s like my lyrics, that are abstract. I do that on purpose so the listener can do anything with it he wants from surreal extreme to concrete extreme. Actually, I said it simply because I have a big nose and I really dig Jimmy Durante. Well, er, it seemed really funny at the time,” he explained.

Walsh has recently crossed over to the other side of the stage, becoming producer as well as performer. He produced Souvenirs for Danny Fogelberg, as well as co-producing his own album, So What? He claims no conflict of interest between his two talents, explaining that performing and producing are not mutually exclusive. If it hadn’t been for Bill Szymczyk, that electronic brain pan specialist, or if you must, the ultimate engineer turned producer (with such accomplishments as the Jackson Five, Eagles, J. Geils, B.B. King under his belt), Joe might never have realized his potential for producing. Joe ventures so far as to say that Szymczyk “made him what he is today.”

“He found me in Nowhere, Ohio. He was a producer, but he wasn’t anything else quite yet - not really anything special. Through some kind of chemistry we made the first James Gang album and it did very well, mainly in the Midwest. In the record company’s eyes it deserved a second record, which was The James Gang Rides Again. I thought that was the major statement of the James Gang. It was really when the chemistry and the magic was peaking. Bill and I got very tight, probably because besides the music, I’ve always been very technically oriented. Bill taught me a lot and he is the reason I could produce Fogelberg. 1 became an apprentice and eventually his first black belt. He helped me, and the James Gang success helped him build his reputation.”

Unlike most musicians, Walsh is uncomfortable with his status as a star. “In college I had a lot of fun because I was just playing without a lot of responsibility and without a lot of status. I was treated as just me. When you become successful you tend to be treated like a star instead of a person.”

Stardom means different things to different people, but to Joe it’s a desolate perch. Ideally, he would like to become part of a band, an integral part of a performing unit, instead of the focal point - a position he has occupied for most of his past. “I’m always looking for a band. The Eagles are an ideal example of my idea of a band. There’s five guys in the Eagles and everybody adds a fifth. When you see the Eagles you know Glen is there, Randy is there, Don is there, Bernie is there and Don Henley is there. Everybody is there, but it’s the Eagles. Barnstorm was almost a band, but not quite an Eagles; it never got from Joe Walsh and Barnstorm to just Barnstorm. I wish it had, because, you know it’s really lonely in the spotlight.”