When You're Down That's Where You'll Stay

Joe Walsh — "In The City" (1979)

I had the honor last week of being invited onto the In Film We Trust podcast to discuss one of my all-time favorite action flicks, 1979’s The Warriors. It was a total blast rapping with hosts Liam and Wayne about the multi-layered brilliance of the Walter Hill-directed film, its enduring place in the pop culture firmament, and the impression that it left upon me and my junior high school pals when it was first released. I’ve embedded the entire podcast at the end of this newsletter for your listening pleasure.

One thing that we briefly touched upon but didn’t get too deeply into was “In The City,” the song that the film’s mysterious DJ dedicates to the Warriors after they’ve (spoiler alert!) successfully fought their way back to their home turf of Coney Island, and have finally been cleared of any involvement in the assassination of Cyrus, the charismatic Riffs leader who tried to unite all of New York City’s street gangs.

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The entire Warriors soundtrack is a pretty interesting, if somewhat uneven, listening experience. Barry De Vorzon’s synth-driven score beautifully meshes with the film’s kinetic energy and its grimy-yet-shiny visuals, and I wish there were more of his instrumentals on the actual soundtrack LP. Most of the songs by other artists are there for commentary on the screen action (Arnold McCuller’s cover of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “Nowhere to Run,” Genya Ravan’s “Love is a Fire”) or to give the soundtrack an appropriately multi-cultural mix (Mandrill’s “Echoes in My Mind,” Kenny Vance/Israel Miranda’s “In Havana,” Desmond Child & Rouge’s “Last of an Ancient Breed”), but none of them have ever made a lasting impression on me away from the film.

The lone exception is “In The City,” a song that continues to stop me in my tracks to every time I hear it. Even back in his James Gang days, Joe Walsh always had a real knack for the simple yet attention-grabbing riff, and “In The City”’s mighty four-chord intro — with its first and third chords coming in on the off-beat — is another arresting example. Throw in Walsh’s sweetly stinging Coricidin bottle slide licks, and you’ve got the basis for a really solid guitar-driven rock track right there.

But what really puts “In The City” over the top for me are its lyrics, which lay out the day-to-day desperation of urban life in matter-of-fact terms (“Nothing grows, and life ain’t very pretty/No one’s there to catch you when you fall”) while doggedly refusing to let go of the romantic notion that “there must be something better” in the realms beyond the concrete and steel. It isn’t poetry, but it’s still a surprisingly powerful — not to mention sober (and sobering) — message from the goofball who’d been last heard on the pop charts celebrating his extravagant rockstar lifestyle with 1978’s tongue-in-cheek “Life’s Been Good”.

Walsh’s solo version of “In The City” wasn’t released as a single, and I don’t remember hearing the song on the radio until The Eagles re-did it (with Joe once again singing and providing the slide filigrees) for their 1979 album The Long Run. The Eagles’ version wasn’t a single, either, but WLUP was playing the album track pretty regularly when I moved to Chicago at the end of that year.

I’d dug the song in the context of The Warriors, but it wasn’t until moving to the Windy City — my first truly urban living experience — that I really understood where it was coming from. My four-block walk to Ogden Elementary took me from some of the glitziest parts of town to some of its grittiest, and I learned pretty quickly (via adults and schoolmates alike) that Cabrini-Green, one of the city’s most violent housing projects, lay just a few blocks further to the west of my school.

I was so excited to be living in this fascinating and bustling city, to have access to so much incredible history and architecture and possibilities just outside of my front door; The Jam’s “In The City,” a song I would discover a few years later, totally summed up the adrenalized feelings I experienced upon landing in Chicago.

But I also knew I had gotten lucky; my mom had recently married a guy who just so happened to live on Chicago’s Gold Coast and who installed us in a sleek glass and steel Mies Van Der Rohe building with uniformed doormen. And The Eagles’ “In The City” was the “In The City” that was coming out of my clock radio as I gazed out of my bedroom’s iced-over floor-to-ceiling windows onto the grey and unyielding pavement of Walton Street below, ruminating on how many fellow Chicagoans were doomed by the fates to live a much rougher existence than I was currently enjoying.

“In The City” may or may not have been playing on that one evening in February 1980 when I watched in helpless horror from nine stories up as an elderly woman from one of the neighboring buildings was knocked to the ground and literally kicked to the curb by a purse-snatching mugger. In any case, the song has forever soundtracked that particularly ugly memory.

It’s survival in the city

When you live from day to day

City streets don’t have much pity

When you’re down that’s where you’ll stay

Much as I’ve always admired the song, it’s only recently that I started wondering a) what such a serious urban bummer was doing on an album by a band who generally preferred their bummers to be of the Hollywood Hills variety, and b) how Walsh wound up writing the song with De Vorzon, a guy who would already be in my personal hall of fame just for writing “Theme from S.W.A.T.,” but who wasn’t someone I figured would be rubbing shoulders with rock stars. But as this 2022 interview with De Vorzon in The Tennessean reveals, I figured wrong:

I brought in this contemporary rock crew, (and we built a) surreal score using synthesizers and rock and roll to score the entire movie, which at that time was not done. You could have a main title that was rock and roll, but not the score… I'm living here in Santa Barbara, Montecito specifically, and my neighbor happens to be Joe Walsh and we're friends. And so I called him up and said, “Hey, Joe, I'm doing this movie called ‘The Warriors.’ Do you want to write an end title with me?”

The Eagles, who were struggling at the time to piece together their long-awaited follow-up to 1976’s Hotel California, then decided to re-cut “In The City” for The Long Run — probably because (as the finished album suggests) they were desperate for decent material, and because Don Henley and Glenn Frey knew a great song when they heard it. (See also the Timothy B. Schmit-sung “I Can’t Tell You Why,” my other favorite track from that album.) More from De Vorzon:

The movie came out.  I was little disappointed. Joe did not put it out as a single and it just became part of the soundtrack. Then the Eagles, who had just had “Hotel California” and were working on the follow-up album for “Hotel California,” Joe calls me up and says, “Hey, Barry, um, I think The Eagles are gonna do ‘In the City.’” I said, “Really?” I said, “Joe, I want you to do me a favor. Never bring this up again until you can walk into my house with an album by The Eagles, and my song is on it out because if it doesn't make the cut, I will kill myself, alright?”

De Vorzon needn’t have worried. The Warriors soundtrack wasn’t a big seller, stalling at #125 on the Billboard 200. But in the end, “In The City” got him a co-write on an album that would go on to move eight million units in the US alone.

As solid as The Eagles’ version is, however — and as similar as their arrangement is to the Walsh/De Vorzon recording — I still prefer the original Warriors one. For one thing, the original features legendary backing vocalists Billie Barnum, Clyde King and Venetta Fields, whose soulful contributions bring a (surely intentional) touch of Elvis Presley’s 1969 hit “In The Ghetto” to the proceedings. The drums are also a little heavier, the echo on Walshe’s slide solo is a little spacier, and the ringing guitar arpeggios on the outro add an extra layer of wistfulness.

Either way, though, it’s one of my favorite songs Joe Walsh has recorded — which, given how much I love the first three James Gang albums and his first handful of solo LPs, is definitely saying something. And speaking of saying something, here’s our whole Warriors episode of the IFWT podcast…

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