The song was “Rocky Mountain Way.” Joe Walsh got the words for it in a single rush while mowing his backyard in Boulder, Colorado, and he ran inside so fast to write them down that he left the mower running. By his own estimate, those words cost him about $1,500 in rose bushes. He has always called it well worth it.
A Groove With No Words
In the early 1970s, Joe Walsh took a big gamble. He quit the James Gang, the Cleveland band that had made his name, and moved west to Colorado. Producer Bill Szymczyk, who had worked with the James Gang, was already there, and so were a number of friends.
Walsh put together a new band called Barnstorm with drummer Joe Vitale, bassist Kenny Passarelli and keyboard player Rocke Grace. Their first album made only a modest splash. While they were finishing the follow-up, The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get, the four of them came up with a groove they all loved. All four would share the songwriting credit.
There was one problem. The track had no lyrics, and the band was waiting on Joe to write them. He had nothing.
The Afternoon in the Backyard
Walsh told the story in detail to Rolling Stone in 2016. He was out mowing the lawn behind his house in Boulder, and his mind was not on the grass. He was worried about whether walking away from the James Gang had been a good idea. As a solo act, he said, he hadn’t really surfaced yet.
Then he looked up. It was summer, but there was still snow on the back range of the Rocky Mountains. He remembered being struck by how beautiful it all was, “5,000 feet up.”
That was the moment the words came. The opening lines turned his doubt around: a year spent out in the mountains, and a decision that this new way of living beat the old one. The second verse borrowed a baseball picture, with the bases loaded and time to change the batter. Walsh said that verse was aimed at his old management.
“I got all of that at once. And I ran inside to write it down before I forgot it.” — Joe Walsh, Rolling Stone, 2016
“You Don’t Understand. I Got the Words.”
What Joe Walsh forgot was the lawn mower. Nobody shut it off, so it kept rolling across the yard and into the neighbor’s garden. In his words, it “ate her rose bushes” and cleared a little path straight through them.
His neighbor was not amused. Walsh tried to explain what had just happened to him out there.
“I said to her, ‘You don’t understand. I got the words.’ But she just looked at me.” — Joe Walsh
He guessed the damage at maybe $1,500, real money at the time, and said it was well worth it. He has told the story for years, on Conan and to Howard Stern, calling it an expensive song to write.
One honest note for longtime fans: Walsh has not always told it the same way. In an interview with Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, he said he wrote the lyrics while the band was recording at Caribou Ranch, up in the mountains. The lawn mower version is the one he has repeated most often.
The Talking Guitar From a Nashville Garage
With the lyric done, Walsh went back into the studio with Bill Szymczyk to finish the song. He stacked six or seven guitars for that thick rhythm sound. Then came the part that made people turn up the radio: a guitar solo that seemed to talk.
That sound had country roots. Back when the James Gang played Nashville, Joe Walsh became friends with Dottie West, the Grand Ole Opry star, and he would visit her home. Her husband, Bill West, was a steel guitar player with a knack for electronics. Bill had built a talk box, a little speaker that pushes the guitar’s sound through a plastic tube into the player’s mouth, so the player can shape the notes like words. Pete Drake had used it on his steel guitar hit “Forever,” and then it went back into Bill’s garage.
One day at Dottie’s house, with Chet Atkins there and a guitar being passed around, Bill went out to the garage and came back with an old cardboard box wrapped in tape. He pulled out a piece of tubing and told Joe to put it in his mouth. Walsh recalled that it smelled terrible. He tried it anyway, and he went on to use the talk box on “Rocky Mountain Way.”
The Nashville rig was quiet, though. Sound engineer Bob Heil later recalled that Walsh had cut the record with a small speaker and a funnel, the kind of setup steel players used in Nashville, and that it was nowhere near loud enough for a rock stage. Heil built Walsh a high-powered version so he could play that solo live, and the talk box became one of the signature sounds of 1970s rock.
Worth Every Rose
“Rocky Mountain Way” came out in 1973 and climbed to No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. That number undersells it. The song became a fixture on FM radio and a Joe Walsh spotlight in Eagles concerts for years.
Asked by Howard Stern to name the greatest song he ever wrote, Walsh picked this one. He has also said the magic was simple: a bunch of guys playing together in one room.