Joe Walsh Rides Again

Walsh has a smoking-hot daughter, Lucy, 22, blond, from the second of his three marriages. She's a musician too, and played keyboards in Ashlee Simpson's band before getting a solo deal with Island Def Jam. She's also in the midst of filming an MTV reality-show pilot focusing on her career and her sometimes rocky relationship with her dad. Walsh explains: "She's got a famous dad who was drunk until she was twelve, and since then we've had to get to know each other, kinda, so MTV thought there might be an angle. It's a big pain in the ass, but I can't say no. She's my daughter."

These days, Lucy and the crew are showing up daily at Walsh's California ranch-style stucco pad, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Typically, she wears tight-fitting T-shirts that accentuate her figure, while he wears much baggier T-shirts, shorts, blindingly white K-Swiss sneakers and calf-high white socks. Actually, Walsh has two homes, the one here and another in San Diego, where his current wife and two boys, ages ten and seven, primarily live. This is a place no wife would put up with, mainly because it's filled with a vast assortment of dusty old tube-style ham-radio gear, Walsh's obsession. Most of it he's bought off eBay. A few years ago, while touring with the Eagles, Walsh was faced with the choice of going onstage with the rest of the band to play before 20,000 fans or staying in front of his PC to place a last-minute bid on eBay; he chose to make the band and the crowd wait. This says less about Walsh's priorities, however, than about how his past tends to reverberate into the present.

"I was living in Columbus, Ohio, in 1958 and quite happy there with vacant lots and BB guns," he says one afternoon. "But around fifth grade, my parents and I moved to New York City in the summer, with nothing for me to do, and I'm freaking out. On the roof of my building, though, I found a wire leading down to the first floor. I knocked on the apartment and told the guy I wanted to know what it was, since it was the most exciting thing I'd seen since leaving Columbus. It was an antenna. He invited me in, and I saw him talk to people around the world on his radio. Soon I became an operator. His name was Jim Walden, and he saved my life."

Walsh's current collection consists of an old Collins KW-1 transmitter; a Hallicrafters model HT-32; a Multi-Elmac AF-67 exciter; a copy of Basic Electronics Theory With Projects and Experiments, fourth ed.; an old Racal RA6790/GM; an old National high-frequency receiver; and an old coil set, "type C." And that's not a fraction of it.

"I mean, there was a whole long period of being an alcoholic, when I didn't pursue any hobby other than vodka. I like to say I only got drunk once -- for thirty years. It was a good run. But that's a whole other story. This is my hobby. I'm a ham-radio operator. And I finally got all those radios I dreamed of since I was twelve, every last one of them."....

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