#Seems to me james gang free#

It just hit me how beautiful it all was, 5,000 feet up. It was summer but you could still see snow on the back range. And then I looked up … and there were the Rocky Mountains. One day I was in my backyard in Boulder mowing the lawn and I was thinking, 'Boy, I sure hope leaving the James Gang was a good idea!' Because I hadn't really surfaced as a solo act yet. I couldn't think of any words and everybody was patiently waiting for me to come up with something. We had the Smoker album pretty much done except we had this one track that was an instrumental. I had left the James Gang, left Cleveland and gone to Colorado because Bill Szymczyk was there and so were a whole bunch of other people I knew. So running for president was an attempt on my part to get people to care enough to go vote. There's a total separation between the federal government and the people. And the reason I did it is because there was, and there continues to be, a very apathetic attitude toward voting. I thought it'd be a great idea and I had fun with it. They had an agenda that was about something other than doing what was necessarily good for the country.Ī few years later, I decided to run for president myself. In those days it felt like the government's priority was not the population. 'Turn to Stone' was written about the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War and the protesting that was going on and all of that. And then Sly went on about an hour and 20 minutes late. And I had a beautiful Les Paul, a 1960, and he checked that out. His guitar was sitting there, and I was looking at it and he said, 'Go ahead, pick it up.' So I did. Which he rarely came out of – especially when it was time to go on! But Jimi was great. The James Gang once played a gig in Youngstown with Hendrix. I didn't light it on fire, though, because you can't see that on an album. I took the guitar off, threw it up in the air, put it on the ground and jumped up and down on it. 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 10 and turned the fuzz tone all the way up. I was credited with playing 'train wreck' guitar on this, but that's really just because of the end of the song. There's still some more stuff I want to say.' But, he added, 'I don't think I'm done yet. 'It's a pretty good list of songs,' he remarked about the ones discussed here. He checked in with RS from a (presumably intact) hotel room in Arkansas to look back on his roughly half century in music. He released a well-received album, Analog Man, in 2012, and is currently out playing sheds on a co-headlining run with Bad Company, on the aptly named 'One Hell of a Night' tour. Now 68 and sober for more than two decades, Walsh has righted his course. 'I never imagined how far down one could go,' Walsh told Rolling Stone recently about his years of abuse.

#Seems to me james gang free#

Joe Walsh has called himself an 'ordinary average guy,' which is something of a stretch for a man who's written some of rock's greatest riffs, from the James Gang's 'Funk #49' to the Eagles' 'Life in the Fast Lane' and his own 'Rocky Mountain Way.' Walsh's offstage exploits are similarly the stuff of legend: He's hung with Hendrix, freaked out Elton John, leveled hotel rooms with the likes of Keith Moon and John Belushi, and even ran for president (his platform: Free Gas for Everyone) – all while consuming enough vodka and cocaine to fell an elephant.