One more thing...
If there had never been a “Funk 49” and Joe Walsh wrote and recorded it now...
...in today’s music market, would it be as big a hit or even a hit as it was over forty years ago?
I doubt any of the major labels would publish it now. It doesn’t follow the structure they know makes hits, and that’s pretty much all they do anymore.
...in today’s music market, would it be as big a hit or even a hit as it was over forty years ago?"
That song still kicks ass. I've been slinging rock guitar since the latter '60's, and that's a longtime favorite of mine. He recorded it with a Tele played through a tiny, single-speaker amp (don't recall what brand right now) cranked all the way up to get that distortion. Mic'ing is a lost art now, it seems, especially in the studio.
I saw Walsh and Glenn Frey play with some studio cats at, of all places, an IBM convention in Vegas some years ago. First time I ever got to watch Joe play live, and he was nothing short of amazing. Frey was spacey as hell and just looked.....old. Joe was engaging, funny, and was the undisputed leader on stage. Amazingly fluid playing; one hell of a guitarist/performer.
To your question....I'd love to think that a "Funk 49" produced today would get the requisite airplay to make it a hit, but I sincerely doubt it. The crap most stations put out sounds the same and has all the emotion and fire of chewing on a worn piece of plastic.
My all time favorite musician, hands down, was the late, great Gary Moore. That Irishman could flat wail. He passed not long ago at 58; by the end he had put on a rather enormous amount of weight, and his live performances (can be seen on Youtube) suffered for it. Compare his later versions of "Empty Rooms" to his masterpiece performance of the song, live, in Sweden in 1987. Unbelievable performance. Gary should have stuck to studio work in his latter years, frankly. To this day, though, no one can wring more emotion from a guitar than Gary (Santana included).