Wichita native Joe Walsh performs at Intrust Bank Arena on Saturday, Nov. 15.
The lineup also includes Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks (who has family connections to the city) and Nathaniel Rateliff, plus Walsh’s Eagles bandmate Vince Gill as well as Ryan Bingham and The Texas Gentlemen. The concert, which will also be streamed on Veeps for those unable to attend in person, serves as the ninth annual VetsAid concert, an organization which Walsh and his wife, Marjorie, co-founded to help “raise and disperse sorely needed funds to veterans groups across the country.”
To date, the organization has raised $4 million with organizations going through a rigorous annual application process for approval. This year’s local grant recipients include the Wichita Police and Fire Foundation, Midwest Battle Buddies and the Wichita Kansas Intertribal Warrior Society. National grant recipients include Veterans of Foreign Wars Foundation, Semper Fi & America’s Fund, and Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation.
On Dec. 16 and 17, Julien’s -- a leading pop culture auction house -- will offer more than 800 items from Walsh’s personal collection to fans. The items will range from cars to guitars and stage clothes, radios and other ephemera.
Called the “Life’s Been Good” collection, photos and descriptions of the materials have been organized in a two-volume box set with portions of the proceeds from a Limited Edition Box Set headed to VetsAid.
Walsh has had a lifelong awareness of the perils that those enlisted in the military face. His father, Lt. Robert Newton Fidler, died in a mid-air collision in 1949, when Walsh was roughly 20 months old.
Later, as a student at Kent State University in Ohio at the height of the Vietnam War, Walsh saw the impact that war had on people in his peer group. He was present in May 1970 when members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four Kent State students.
It was something that reverberated through the larger community and had a grave impact on the town’s once thriving cultural scene, Walsh told podcaster Marc Maron in 2018.
Walsh’s mother, Helen, was a classically trained musician who exposed him to music early on, particularly pre-rock ‘n’ roll sounds. That may account for some of the more refined passages in his own songs and his harmonic sensibilities that often bound beyond typical rock ‘n’ roll fare.
“One thing my mom did give me was the genes I needed to be a musician, and I’m so grateful for that,” he said during a recent interview with KMUW.
His son, Christian Quilici, a co-founder and producer of VetsAid, adds, “She took Joe to the opera; she filled their house with music when he was growing up.
“We’re taking the opportunity this year in Wichita to honor the memory of the 20-year-old war widow who had a 20-month-old baby back in 1949. She had to make it work. We’re going to tell the story of what happened when she came home to Wichita and the struggles she faced, like many Gold Star mothers do with young children when their spouses don’t come home.
“We’re proud to tell the stories and how they’re impacted, like Joe’s mom was, and what a hero she turned out to be in taking care of Joe on her own and with the support of the community there in Wichita.”
When Walsh speaks of losing his father, the pain he feels for a man he didn’t know is palpable.
“There was no Gold Star designation [when my dad died],” he said. “That was just too bad as far as the government was concerned: ‘Oh, that’s a real shame. Here’s a flag to put on his coffin.’
“It was really hard. Everybody had a dad, and I didn’t. I was so proud of my dad, but I never knew him. My whole life was trying to do something that he would approve of. I just wanted him to be nodding, ‘Yes,’ later on.”
Walsh has certainly proven himself worthy of admiration. Forget the number of records sold as both a solo artist and a member of the Eagles, or the admiration he’s earned from generations of rock guitarists, there’s also the five Grammy Awards and membership in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But his art has long reflected some kind of underlying pain, striking a delicate balance between the nagging awareness of mortality and a celebration of its lighter moments. Whether that’s the carefree guitar playing and choruses of “Funk #49,” a 1970 hit for Walsh’s band The James Gang; “Rocky Mountain Way,” a 1973 tune that celebrated living away from the phoniness of the music industry and enjoying high altitudes, and perhaps his most beloved song, “Life’s Been Good,” a 1978 track that could read either as a report on the life Walsh was leading as his stardom grew or a broad statement about the bad behavior of rock musicians who, at the end of the day, cared about little more than creating music.
It’s that kind of everyman evident in those songs and albums titles such as “The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get” and “You Bought It, You Name It” that has endeared him to his audience. His 1975 entry into the Eagles, as a replacement for original guitarist Bernie Leadon, highlighted his affability and his ability to at once be the rock star and -- as a title of one of his later hits would express -- an ordinary average guy. The Eagles were on the cusp of real stardom, about to record and release their still-unstoppable 1976 album “Hotel California” when Walsh joined.
The record digs deep into the mythology of the American West with California as a central figure: This was the place that everyone seeking the promise of a new Eden had to stop. Its promise and disappointment were documented in the novels of John Steinbeck, which the band’s co-founder and literature devotee, Don Henley, would have read and absorbed deep into his psyche. The same way that he’d absorbed the tales of rugged individualism found in the teachings of Thoreau.
Throughout that album, the past and the present wage a kind of quiet war with each other -- the titular track is a statement in part about the inescapable nature of consumer culture and the detritus of Manifest Destiny; Walsh and co-guitarist Don Felder helping the song’s story take flight with what is rock’s quintessential guitar solo. On “Life In The Fast Lane,” built on a guitar lick that Walsh used to warm up for gigs, Glenn Frey used a line he’d heard from a drug dealer to encapsulate the live fast, die young aesthetic of a generation.
This while he and Henley revisited the teen angst of the Everly Brothers on the heartbreaking “New Kid in Town,” which could pass for a tale about the lessons that early love teaches us or the realities of one generation giving way to another. But it’s the closing tune, the epic “The Last Resort,” which sprawls beyond the seven-minute mark and confirms what their contemporaries, perhaps most notably Jackson Browne, were saying at that moment: The pursuit of happiness and the American dream had led to the death of both, and now one could only live on in the shadows of those dreams.
It was deep cynicism perhaps on the part of the firebrands who had built the group from Linda Rondstadt’s backing band to a major commercial force. But they still had records to sell and arenas to fill, and no doubt Walsh’s affability -- his outsized personality and the humor running through his solo work -- suggested that the Eagles weren’t all about foreboding. If Henley and Frey were the visionaries who saw the crumbling of empires and were deeply disillusioned, Walsh was the guy who shrugged his shoulders and said, “These things happen,” and tore into a guitar solo.
The Eagles raised money for Jerry Brown’s political campaigns in the 1970s, but Walsh’s politics were more about realism than idealism: He announced his own (unofficial) candidacy in 1980, promising free gas for everyone and in 1992 renewed his pledge of public service, offering himself up as a vice presidential candidate.
There were still moments of gravity within the songs. “Life of Illusion” acknowledges one of life’s great questions: How can we be sure success and love and friendship are real especially if we don’t have models for happiness? “Meadows” is a song about a man struggling with the idea that there’s something greater than himself, but perhaps unsure he can give into the concept completely, while “The Confessor” is an intense purging of demons that reveal a soul plagued at times by loss and insecurity.
Rather than reaching for fake profundity, Walsh dealt from the deck of truth, something that may have had its origins in the summers he spent with his grandparents in Wichita, roaming around the Fairmount neighborhood.
“Summers lasted forever,” he said. “I had time to grow up; I had time to be the age I was. My whole world was about three blocks square, but I was the king of it. Top of the world for me was up in my favorite tree.
“I wish young people today had the time to be the age that they are. It seems that the world’s going so fast that you don’t have time anymore between computers and cellphones. I’m grateful [that I had] that time.”
As for the work he’s done with VetsAid, it becomes apparent that in addition to expressing himself through art, acts of service have helped in his healing process. Today, he said, there is greater awareness of the unique experiences of Gold Star families.
“I know how it feels,” he said, “so one thing I’m (doing with) VetsAid is trying to jumpstart Gold Star kids and families so that they’re not alone, so that they can get together because that’s part of healing.”