I can’t resist posting one more bit from my June 1981 interview with Joe Walsh:
Could we talk about your reputation? It’s been surprising in a pleasing way to find out how calm things are here [a hotel in Michigan], considering what I’ve heard. I don’t even know if it’s true.
Oh, yeah, it’s true. I used to do that. I still do, sometimes. I’m at peace myself – not that I wasn’t back then – but you’ve got to remember, you go and you play for (I’m not trying to impress you) five or ten or 15 thousand people, however many, and the next thing you know you’re in some motel and there’s nothing on television because all the stations have gone off, and there’s no room service. You’re buzzed, mentally high, and nothing to do with drugs or anything –you’re just buzzed because the energy of getting that many people on their feet yellin’ and screamin’, you get feedback from it and it wakes you up. So I’ll be sitting in a hotel room wide awake just buzzin’ from the energy of the concert, thinking, “Hey, where’d everybody go?” So I would break things and smash things, have a great time. Kinda blowing off steam so you can go to sleep, relax. And I get mad, or sometimes I just enjoy it. If I’m in a Holiday Inn or a Howard Johnson’s, why not break everything? They’re all cheap, anyway. And it’s fun – you oughta try it some time.
Keith Moon really taught me how to do that – he was a master at it. The James Gang did a tour with the Who, and Keith gave me lessons about breaking things. I haven’t done it in a while, but I’m –
Working up to it?
Yeah.
Think you’ll do that before the end of the tour?
Oh, I’m sure I will. Just kind of spontaneous.
[Tour manager Smokey Wendell comes into the room, glares at Joe, says “Working up to it, sure.”]
By the time I get home and get the story all written, say what a calm and quiet gent Joe Walsh is, the story will break –
And right next to your article will be a bulletin that I did some place in.
The best one was in Chicago. It was the end of the tour and I was mad at the record company. A vice president had come out, so I trashed his whole suite…. It had wallpaper like this, right? [gestures to the foil-faced, ugly wall of his suite] And I couldn’t stand it, so I took all the pictures down, tore all the wallpaper off in his whole room, and then hung the paintings back up.
I’ve always pictured the tour accountant as a kind of sympathetic, harried and apologetic little guy with a checkbook, going “I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it!”
It was this guy’s room; it wasn’t my room. I said, “hey, it isn’t my room, I didn’t do nothing.” He had to check out with a lawyer. He was crying and shit. It was wonderful.
Are you still on that label?
Mmm-hmm. He’s not.