Joe Walsh
There Goes the Neighborhood

LA RECENSIONE

The usual hilarious cover introduces Joe Walsh’s fifth solo album, portraying him—helmet and camouflage included—on the hatch of an American tank, itself parked in the middle of a junkyard. A glimpse of Los Angeles with its trademark smog serves as a backdrop to the remains of sinks, boilers, toilets, surfboards, gold records(!), and assorted scrap: always witty and irreverent, that excellent Joe.

Let’s move on to the tracks: the creative yet extremely rigid drumming of his mate Joe Vitale kicks off “Things,” a typical upbeat number among those from our Kansas-born, California-bound guitarist. Next comes a piano-driven, melodic but not particularly striking “Made Your Mind Up,” followed by the country-style rock’n’roll “Down on the Farm,” complete with some fantastic violin work by the supreme session man David Lindley.

On “Rivers,” the talk box-treated guitar, reminiscent of “Rocky Mountain Way,” makes a comeback but… it’s Don Felder playing it, his Eagles bandmate! Speaking of which, at the time of this album (1981), the Eagles were drifting apart. Their hiatus would last a whopping thirteen years—they’d only regroup in 1994. The song is very lyrical and commendable, with an effective chorus.

“A Life of Illusion” is the single, which had considerable success at the time, rather Caribbean-flavored, complete with guitarrón and Mexican-style trumpets. In fact, it’s a leftover from his final days with Barnstorm, the short-lived group Joe formed in Colorado in the early seventies after leaving Ohio and the James Gang. Thus, it has a different sound from the rest of the album: different collaborators, diverse nuances and rhythms surrounding Joe’s voice and guitar. All this makes this contribution feel somewhat out of context.

With “Bones” we immediately return to Walsh’s current sound and… some great slide guitar from the then thirty-three-year-old blond, in this track! As a young man, Walsh had thoroughly explored slide guitar directly with a luminary: Duane Allman. In fact, he uses the trick of slipping the legendary Coricidin glass bottle onto his left middle finger, the same choice as the unfortunate and much-missed mustachioed Nashville native.

Duane believed there was no cylinder, glass or metal, better suited for slide than that empty antihistamine bottle, and that wearing it on the middle finger provided maximum stability and power as it glided over the strings, due to its central position on the hand. Even my absolute favorite slide player, Rod Price of Foghat, would slip a Coricidin bottle onto his middle finger for a result that was truly, truly fiery and exhilarating. Another outstanding slider with the same equipment and positioning choice is the amazing Bonnie Raitt.

Many slide guitarists, however, prefer to slip the cylinder onto their pinky finger, so the remaining three fingers are adjacent, making it easier to form chords and alternate between traditional phrasing and slide: this is the method of brilliant players such as Ry Cooder and Johnny Winter. Yet another technique, wearing the cylinder on the ring finger—as chosen by illustrious musicians like Rory Gallagher, Derek Trucks, and Joe Bonamassa—is a sort of middle ground.

To return, and conclude, the tracklist of this still well-received Joe album: “Rockets” is another piano ballad with an unusual and rich chord progression. Finally, the closing “You Never Know” is much livelier and more unpredictable, full of time changes, with beautiful interwoven guitar lines: in other words, a virtuosic outburst, far from “commercial,” by an artist otherwise quite careful and happy to offer very accessible material.