(Credits: Far Out / Jim Summaria)
Thu 16 October 2025 20:42, UK
There were a couple of different points in his life where it might have been accurate to call Joe Walsh a “train wreck”.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Walsh’s intake of drugs and alcohol was legendary, so much so that he took the opportunity to play off his own notorious reputation in the song ‘Life’s Been Good’. After the Eagles‘ breakup in 1980, Walsh pushed the boundaries of intoxication to dangerous levels.
But while Walsh might have labelled himself a “train wreck” at his lowest points, there was one instance where Walsh was credited for creating a “train wreck”.
The wreck itself wasn’t literal: nobody would be dumb enough to let Walsh behind the controls of an actual train. Instead, the credit referred to an audio effect that Walsh created with his guitars at the end of one of his most famous pre-solo, pre-Eagles songs.
“You’ve kinda gotta put on headphones to hear it, but I took a guitar and did a full-on Pete Townshend with it in the background, where I put everything on ten and turned the fuzz tone all the way up,” said Walsh. “I took the guitar off, threw it up in the air, put it on the ground, and jumped up and down on it. I didn’t light it on fire, because you can’t see that on an album. That would have been stupid.”
While recording the James Gang’s third album in 1970, appropriately titled Thirds, Walsh composed the hard rock track ‘Walk Away’. Detailing the aftermath of a breakup, Walsh channels the anger and bitterness of the event through his guitar, ripping through solos, riffs, and chord changes with palpable anger. The song was all but finished when Walsh began concocting an ending for the track.
Wanting to channel even more chaos and destruction into the song, Walsh began overdubbing layers and layers of discordant guitar lines. Some parts were achieved using slides; others were simply feedback-laden monoliths of sound. The main wah-wah riff begins to bleed into multiple different careening guitar lines as the song comes to a clattering finale. Walsh is clearly having a ball creating as much sonic destruction as possible.
As a joke on his arsenal of guitars that close ‘Walk Away’, Walsh is officially credited with creating a “train wreck” in the liner notes of Thirds. When Walsh left the James Gang the same year to pursue a solo career, ‘Walk Away’ remained on his setlist and would later be picked up by The Eagles as one of Walsh’s spotlights during the band’s concerts.
The album would be Walsh’s last with the band. “It became a quest to find a suitable replacement for Joe Walsh,” said Jimmy Fox of The James Gang. “We’d try some guys and do an album or two, but it wasn’t quite what we wanted and so we’d move on to something else in the hope of recapturing the old spirit. Some of the albums were good but we were always looking to find that particular thing we had with Joe and I don’t think we ever found it again.”
If you catch Walsh playing a solo show, there’s a decent chance you’ll hear him bust out ‘Walk Away’. He may even replicate that “train wreck” as well.
Check out the studio version of ‘Walk Away’ down below.
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