Joe Walsh rocks the Fillmore with a greatest-hits set

When Joe Walsh played the Fillmore on Monday, it was like a greatest hits album live. The Grammy Award-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, 67, performed songs from his storied discography, from James Gang to Barnstorm to the Eagles to his 11 solo albums. The crowd - mostly men over 50 - was in the presence of a genuine lifer.

Walsh kicked it off with a jangly, mellow version of "Walk Away," a James Gang tune from his last album with them, Thirds. With his shoulder-length blond hair twinkling beneath the strobe light, he and his nine-piece band - including fabulous drummer Joe Vitale from Walsh's short-lived, early-'70s outfit Barnstorm - next jumped into "Life of Illusion," the ignorance-is-bliss anthem from Walsh's 1981 album, There Goes the Neighborhood.

The two-hour set included three songs Walsh wrote for the Eagles: "In the City," "Pretty Maids All in a Row," and, for the second encore, "Life in the Fast Lane." The Eagles would have been a far more boring band without him. When Walsh joined them in 1975, the hotel-room-trashing wild man revived and strengthened the deeply sleepy easy-listening folk-rockers. Walsh's epic licks with Don Felder on "Hotel California" are inarguably the highlight of the Eagles' catalog and regularly appear on lists of the greatest rock guitar solos of all time. He was the fire beneath Don Henley and Glenn Frey's wings.

There were a few moments Monday when Walsh, whose voice is just as nasal and singular as ever, displayed that same crazed electric guitar fire. The hottest were his solos on "Rocky Mountain Way" - for which he broke out the talk box - and two James Gang numbers, "The Bomber" and "Funk #49." The latter even included a bizarre drum-machine-and-EDM-inspired breakdown that left fans scratching their heads at first but eventually dancing to the chaotic sounds.

Walsh is the kind of guy who knows the big questions exist, and he thinks about them a little bit, but he doesn't lose sleep over them. This playful and often profound perspective is best articulated on his hit song "Life's Been Good," wherein Walsh's greatest struggles are not being able to leave a party because he can't find the door, and not being able to drive his Maserati because he lost his license. It was clearly the fan favorite of the night.

There was one newer tune, the title track from Walsh's most recent album, 2012's Analog Man. "The whole world's living in a digital dream, / It's not really there, it's all on the screen," moans Walsh. But he doesn't lose sleep over the impending digital doom: "Gonna get me an analog girl who loves me for what I am." As always, no worries, life's been good to Walsh so far.