Something clicked. Walsh helped restructure the Eagles, bringing a gritty rock edge to a group best known for laid-back, country-rock music. His first album with the Eagles, 1976’s Hotel California, became one of the best-selling in history. There was something fortuitous about it all.

“When Bernie [Leadon] decided that he just wasn’t interested very much in continuing, Don [Henley] and Glenn [Frey] thought I would plug in really well with where the Eagles were eventually going to go,” Walsh later told Guitar World. “And at the time, I was going, ‘Aw fuck, it’s time to do another solo album. Oh, shit. Anybody got any ideas?’ You know? So, it all just kind of came together. I joined the Eagles – and the result, of course, was Hotel California.”

Vinyl Records

Eagles – Hotel California

In fact, as incompatible as the pairing may have seemed at first, Walsh didn’t arrive out of the blue. He had actually shared a few concert bills with the Eagles, and they had the same manager in Irving Azoff. He’d previously gained some measure of fame as a founding member of the James Gang, a funky hard-rock trio that released three albums in a little more than a year and a half, highlighted by the radio favorite “Funk #49.” Walsh then launched a solo career and released four albums before he joined the Eagles.

Unfortunately, even the quick success of a multi-platinum project like Hotel California couldn’t steady the Eagles – and Walsh’s appetite for destruction would prove difficult to quench, as well.

They’d take more than two years to complete a follow-up album before going on a long break in 1980, picking up the pieces in 1994 for reunion albums and tours. Along the way, Walsh kept a solo career going, releasing albums like Barnstorm, The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get and But Seriously, Folks. He also kept up a party aesthetic that eventually became a larger issue, especially after the Eagles were grounded in the ’80s.

“When we stopped, I was sad and didn’t know what to do,” Walsh told the Daily Mail. “So, I kept going. I became an alcoholic and dependent on drugs. I hit rock-bottom.”

The Eagles’ early ’90s reunion – a blockbuster event winkingly titled the Hell Freezes Over tour – couldn’t have arrived soon enough for the clean-and-sober Walsh. “He looked so bad,” bandmate Timothy B. Schmit remembered. “I think the offer to rejoin the band saved him.”

Walsh then played a key role on the Eagles’ long-awaited 2007 studio album, Long Road Out of Eden, their first since 1979’s The Long Run. In 2012, he released Analog Man, his first solo album in two decades.