MINNEAPOLIS — Even though he was in the throes of COVID-19, veteran Minneapolis rock singer James “Owl” Walsh refused to go to a hospital.
“With what I heard about being intubated from my doctor, I said no,” explained Walsh, who was concerned about his singing voice, not to mention the atrial fibrillation he’d been contending with.
So he suffered at home, and after two weeks, he experienced something unexpected: Songs started coming to him.
“In the middle of the night, I got up and I had a song in my head. I went to the piano and I played it until I remembered it because I don’t write anything down,” he recalled.
“The next night, another song came. And this went on for a couple of weeks. I had eight songs in my head, and I knew I had to record them.”
That was in December 2020. This summer, Walsh’s band Gypsy — still celebrating the 50th anniversary of its 1970 debut album — released the new material on “Red Stone Line.”
“It’s Gypsy grown up,” said Walsh. “We are taking it from a less starry-eyed view and more of a musical position.”
The Twin Cities’ original prog-rockers, he and his bandmates were fearless. They headed to California in the glorious late 1960s and hung with Jimi Hendrix and other stars as the house band at Hollywood’s most celebrated rock club.
They became the first Minnesota group to land an album deal and then determinedly recorded daring music, including the epic 11-minute hit “Dead and Gone.”
Gypsy now favors a still-adventurous but less long-winded sound. Influenced by Steely Dan and early Chicago, the songs are still trippy, eclectic and philosophical. This time around, singer-songwriter Walsh even gets a bit political.
“The first song (‘Screams of a Dying World’) is very political,” he said. “I’ve lived through several presidents in my life and I’m not sure what’s going on now. Hopefully they’ll straighten it out soon.”
On the album’s closing song, “The Garden Is Dying,” he sounds downright pessimistic, decrying people who tell lies.
“It’s not just political lies, but it has to do with the drought situation and the famine situation and everything that’s going on in the world that could be easily avoided if enough people cared,” he said.
The album features one cover tune, Walsh’s take on Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky.” It was a favorite song of Gypsy co-founder Jim Johnson, the guitarist/singer who died of cancer in 2019.
“Red Stone Line” opens and closes with nods to Gypsy’s heyday. The opening track begins with a harmonized “Warning, warning” — the first words from Gypsy’s self-titled debut — while the finale references the band’s second album, “In the Garden.”
Gypsy emerged in 1968 as an outgrowth of the Underbeats, one of the Twin Cities’ most popular rock bands then. At age 16, Walsh joined the group on keyboards, and wound up dropping out of Edison High School because he was gigging almost every night — and “making more money than my dad.”
The Underbeats headed to Los Angeles, the land of golden music opportunity, and renamed themselves Gypsy, a hipper moniker in hippie times. Featuring singer-songwriter-guitarist Enrico Rosenbaum, the group became the house band at the Sunset Strip’s famed Whiskey A Go Go from 1969 to mid-’71.
“The joke on the bus on our way to California in ’68 was: We were going to go out there and get a record deal and we’d retire in ’73 and cut our hair,” Walsh said. “So here I am. I still haven’t cut my hair, whatever I have left.”
