Minnesota lost a treasure when Jim Walsh died March 4, 2023. Not only are we deprived of a superlative musician, but also the chance to hear Gypsy, one of the state’s best rock and roll bands – the real thing, not a tribute.
I went to school with Jim Walsh, and we ended up in the same 11th grade homeroom at Edison High School in Northeast Minneapolis. Our homeroom was a home ec room, so we shared a table. Jim was in the Coronados, a well-known Northeast band, and was already something of a celebrity. He was complaining one morning that it was easy for his band to learn the music to the Beatles’ songs, but they were having trouble with the lyrics. As a huge Beatles fan and owner of the latest albums, I volunteered to transcribe the lyrics and bring them to homeroom. It made me feel like a part of the band in a small way.
Fast forward 56 years to 2021, when a friend convinced me to go to a Gypsy concert at Crooners. There had been a few brief contacts with Jim over the years, but when we talked to him after the concert, I think he barely recognized me. Undeterred, I sent him a message a few days later wondering if he would like to do a book on his career and Gypsy. He said yes, and for the past two years we reestablished a friendship that really never was.
Oddly, it was like picking up a conversation from 1965 and just finishing the sentences. We both spoke Northeast. We both had grown up in an era of great change, where one really could run away and join a rock-’n’-roll band. We had similar senses of humor.
I had missed the part in his life where he left the Coronados and Hot Half Dozen and joined the Underbeats in the ’60s. The Underbeats were considered the top rock and roll band that emerged from the garages and basements, rivaled by such groups as the Accents, Gregory Dee and the Avanties, the Chancellors, the Castaways and the Trashmen.
Lead guitarist Jim Johnson, from North Minneapolis, was the leader of the Underbeats, and he had a dream. Part of the dream involved endless hours of practicing, and the other part was about gathering the best singers in the Twin Cities into one band. He recruited Tom Nystrom from the Accents, Enrico Rosenbaum from the Escapades and Walsh from the Hot Half Dozen. Together they set out for California in an old school bus in 1968 to make their fortune.
Jim recalled a lot of bologna and rice meals and rounds of rehearsing so long that it sometimes led to fisticuffs between bandmates. But they slowly dented the tough LA scene at one club and then another, and finally earned a two-year stint as the house band at the Whisky A Go Go, considered the premier venue for music at that time. A record album, actually a double album, followed, and then four years of touring, often as the lead band for the Guess Who. They played nearly every venue in North America including the Fillmore, the Atlanta Pop Festival in front of 400,000, Winterland and a hundred more.
And then it was over. The albums were critically lauded, but the band never created a “hit” song to win over a large audience. Jim came home, had some trouble with the law and played in various bands. In 1977 he wrote, “Cuz it’s You Girl,” which became a minor hit, and launched the James Walsh Gypsy Band. Jim did an album at Muscle Shoals, spending three months with the Swampers, probably the top record producers in America at that time. The experience paid off when Jim ran Metro Studios in Minneapolis for ten years, producing 110 albums.
Jim and I would meet on Wednesdays, his day to work at a piano store in Roseville. We’d spend a couple of hours taping for the book, but many times just entertaining each other with stories. Occasionally someone would wander in to look at the instruments. Jim would invariably greet them with “How many pianos do you want to buy today?”
Sure, he had his great stories. Like hanging out with Jimi Hendrix for a couple of days. Or being invited home by Mama Cass. Or sitting on the floor of a hotel room with the Guess Who indulging in some outrageous hashish and then discovering that the guy next to him was the pilot of the airplane that they were traveling on the next morning. Or living next door to the LaBiancas when they were murdered and having cops break down their door with an axe in the middle of the night.
One of the gifts Jim gave me was a chance to hang around the Winterland Studio while he produced some songs for a North Carolina group. I watched the meticulous work of putting the tracks together, often one musician at a time. I watched Jim record the backup harmonies all by himself. He sang them in part harmony, so they sounded pretty crappy to my untrained ear. But when they were played back, melded together, suddenly they were that lush, magical harmony that set Gypsy apart from most other bands.
Gypsy had a sound, and it was Jim’s mission in life to maintain that sound even though he was the only original member. He did this by bringing in some of the Twin Cities’ best musicians for the half dozen concerts Gypsy would do each year. He did it by having a standard of quality that raised up every group he ever played in. He was a musician’s musician, a stunning vocalist and a pretty good songwriter. With his extraordinary heart, he reached out to people again and again. He once said, “My job is to make people’s dreams come true.”
Here’s the ultimate irony. I finished the book on Friday, March 3. Jim died on Saturday. He never saw it. Oh, he had seen the chapters as they were done. He seemed to like it. But I was hoping he would rise from his sickbed, as he had many times before, and get to touch the book.
But mostly what I’ll miss is our time together. We joked about being brothers separated at birth. It was a splendid friendship, a blessing in our twilight years. I even got to read a poem I wrote at his and Tere’s wedding last year.
And I’ll miss Gypsy. It was certainly the best band to come out of that era, and to still be able to go see them was a stolen treasure. They sounded as good in 2022 as they did in 1970 – because Jim wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Underbeats in 1968. Left to right: Tom Nystrom, Enrico Rosenbaum, Doni Larson, Jim Johnson, James Walsh. (Provided photo by Volante Minneapolis). Walsh played at Edison’s 100th anniversary last October. (Photo by Al Zdon)
