Joe Walsh
You Bought It—You Name It

LA RECENSIONE

Here we go again with Walsh’s aviator-themed covers, in memory of his father who crashed with a plane during a mission when he was still an infant. But this 1983 effort will be the last occasion the guitarist uses such figurative imagery as an outlet for his personal lack of affection. From this point on, his album covers would still feature bizarre and sardonic images, but no longer... aeronautical ones.

This time, the photomontage portrays him relaxed and pensive, sitting on an improbable, overcrowded bench placed on the flight deck of the American aircraft carrier Yorktown, which is cheerfully burning after being hit by a Japanese bomb in the Battle of Midway, year 1942.

The music, like the cover, keeps to the style one expects from him: clean yet assertive rock, varied and melodic, enhanced by excellent guitar parts and performed with his uniquely dragged yet piercing voice, brimming with irony or tenderness depending on the mood and subject of the lyrics.

In any case, the considerable success that had accompanied Walsh’s solo career up to this point starts to wane from here on. This album lacks the standout track, the evergreen, which, more or less, was present on previous albums, all of which were commercially substantial. It’s generally not a good moment for Joe, orphaned by the Eagles who went on hiatus after their last falling outs at the dawn of the eighties, with cocaine and alcohol raging over his physical and mental health. Meanwhile his third marriage is already leaking and about to take the fatal blow from the heavy and toxic relationship that is about to develop between him and that other wild child Stevie Nicks, from Fleetwood Mac. Together, they’d sink into addiction, hurting each other and risking their very lives.

But let’s focus on the music: the album is known above all for containing the innocently chauvinistic “I.L.B.T.’s”. The acronym, an escamotage to hide the subject matter from the record label, allows Walsh to make explicit a situation that is anything but personal, in fact common to billions of people around the world. The lyrics basically go something like this:

_I like big tits

_I meet them on the street, left and right

_I try to look away, but I can’t resist

_Every time I try to quit, some tits show up

_That one’s a nice D-cup... Great tits, right?

_They always come in pairs, it’s hard to pick a favorite tit

_They give me chills when they bounce near me

_I’m a tit-man, they really get my blood rushing...

The tone of voice and arrangement are obviously ironic and good-natured, a sort of bluesy march seasoned with uhuhs and ohohs. For these prankish outbursts, the most grotesque of pillories has recently come into fashion: it’s forbidden to joke even lightly about subjects like these. The horrifying violence against women, a fact that is certainly real but also an ugliness as old as the world—no doubt—nowadays is evoked even in the presence of simple testosteronic thoughts, or bursts of anger that have nothing to do with the antagonist’s gender. I had a little taste of this myself once, when I called a girl a jerk in the street because she was behaving like a jerk, cutting me off, bumping into me, and making me drop my grocery bag without even turning around to look, let alone apologize: she replied, all serious, that she could even sue me for... well, I don’t remember what English term she spat out.

And so, because of creeps like Epstein and the like, thanks to all those assholes who can’t deal with a breakup, let alone a cheating partner, and react by hitting and killing, nowadays it’s gone out of favor even to simply say “nice piece of ass” to someone who’s a nice piece of ass. And yet, the survival of the human species on this planet, to be pedantically didactic and crudely rational, has always managed to carry on with the need for men to empty their testicles, and women who, rightly and preferably, choose who they allow to do so, hopefully picking someone reliable, strong, and healthy and not someone stupid, depraved, and good-for-nothing.

Together with this cheerful ode by Joe to female voluptuousness, there are nine other tracks in this work with its fantastically lazy title (“You bought it... now you name it!”). To start, there’s the textbook but fun opening rock’n’roll “I Can Play that R’n’R”, followed by the driving hard rock “Told You So” packed with guitars coming from every direction. “Here We Are Now”, on the other hand, is a round reggae, a style our man already tackled in previous works, while “The Worry Song” goes funky and lists all of our man’s worries: perfectly topical, by the way.

The witty and straightforward lyrics also involve the danceable and “modern” “Space Age Wiz Kids”, which should be enjoyed while reading the lyrics and savoring how goofy Joe delivers them. “Love Letters” is even more lighthearted, but doesn’t forget to create melody. The elegiac “Class of ’65” is instead serious—at least by our prankster’s standards—and features a curious, elaborate arrangement, with talk box and screeching 12-strings. “Shadows” shows us a rather Hendrixian Walsh, a true homage to the man from Seattle who taught everyone how to wear, mistreat, and caress the electric guitar.

The album closes with the pianistic theme “Theme from Island Weirdos”... After the Boat Weirdos to whom he had dedicated a (wonderful) instrumental a couple of albums back, here now is the whole “weird” island: the music is less epic this time, though just as delightful.