10 Years After: Remembering Rory Gallagher

When Rory Gallagher died unexpectadly after a short illness in 1995, the music world was robbed of a true guitar legend and one of the most genuinely nice guys in the business. The Donegal-born, Cork-raised axe-man remains in many minds one of the best guitar players ever to have graced a stage, especially here in Ireland.

Ten years after his untimely death, his popularity remains as high as ever, with a whole new generation of fans discovering his music for the first time.
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of his passing on June 14, the first ever fully comprehensive retrospective collection of his career will be released. Big Guns – The Very Best of Rory Gallagher, will feature 24 classics, drawing on his career as a solo artist and a member of Taste, including favourites like, ‘What’s Going On’, ‘Tatto’d Lady’, ‘Shadow Play’, ‘Calling Card’ and ‘Daughter of the Everglades’. It also includes previously unreleased live versions of two of his best-loved concert numbers, ‘Messin’ With The Kid’ and ‘Bullfrog Blues’ – both recorded at the Brighton Dome in 1974.
All tracks have been re-mastered and re-mixed in 5.1 surround-sound and will be released on SACD hybrid (playable on both SACD and CD players). The package will feature a 48-page booklet with two essays on Rory’s life and many unseen photos spanning his career.

This long overdue compilation was overseen by Rory’s brother and long-time manager Donal, who has devoted much of his time since Rory’s death to ensuring the availability of his recorded legacy in high quality editions.
“The whole programme of restoring the back catalogue was started back in 1998 when I did a deal with BMG,” he explains. “By the end of last year, when the contract had expired, I had restored the entire catalogue and had brought everything out. But the one thing I didn’t want to do prior to that was to bring out a ‘best of’ or a compilation. I felt it might distract from what the catalogue was all about.
“There were so many interesting things on the individual albums, plus the bonus tracks and all the restoration and re-mixing – and for others who skirted over Rory’s music and never really got into him, this is a good album with which to re-evaluate his career.”
Gallagher selected 50 tracks to start out with, eventually paring it down to the twenty-four that were finally chosen. It was clearly no easy task deciding what to include and what to leave out, as he explains.
“It was almost like a football knock-out competition. A lot of decisions had to be made but some of the tracks just had to be included on it, there was no possibility of leaving them out. In fact Maurice Byrne in the Sony/BMG offices in Dublin handed me a list of songs and said, ‘If 50% of these tracks aren’t on the album, it ain’t the best of Rory Gallagher’.”
The other consideration with a project such as this was the format in which it would eventually be released. With the growing availabilityof hi-resolution, surround-sound editions of classic albums, the decision was made to release the album on the new Super Audio CD format, mixed for 5.1 surround-sound.
“When BMG merged with Sony, one of the things they wanted was Rory’s back catalogue,” Gallagher explains. “But they wanted anything to be future-proofed for release on one of the new formats. Given that it’s in 5.1 surround-sound we had to go back to the original multi-track tapes, rather than using the stereo mixes, which is the normal way of doing it. It’s a whole new approach in that you have to be more conscious of the surround experience.
“One track, ‘The Loop’, for example was vying for my attention with a track called ‘Alexis’ for inclusion – they’re both instrumentals and both tributes, one to the Chicago transit system and the other to the blues player Alexis Korner. I opted for ‘The Loop’, which has a recording of the actual Loop in Chicago, which we were able to throw around the room. ‘Tatto’ed Lady’ was another one that had to be included. It had fairground sounds at the beginning of the track, which we enlarged for the surround mix.”
Not all of the original tapes were easily found and there were problems with the deteriorating quality of some of the multi-tracks, according to Gallagher.
“We were quite surprised at the fact that some of the tapes still existed at all,” he says. “The first Taste album was recorded on an 8-track and we got hold of that and even for the Isle of Wight album, there was a multi-track available. But Polydor had lost the multi-tracks for the Taste track ‘On The Boards’ – luckily though, there was a copy of it, which had been sent to Germany where the song was released as a single, so we were able to use that.
“It frightens you the fact that some of the multi-tracks have gone missing. You think they’re safe with a big record company but it’s not necessarily the case. You start worrying what would happen if we had a fire at our own storage facility. There are another 400 multi-tracks to get through, so as soon as this project is finished we’ll be tackling those for future versions of the original albums.”
The sequencing of the album was yet another challenge that had to be faced. One of the early – and crucial – decisions Donal made was not to programme the tracks chronologically.
“I was trying to get the tracks to work together in a way that made some kind of sense,” he says. “Disc one is very much the rock side of Rory. It’s all in-your-face, no-holds-barred stuff with tracks like ‘Big Guns’ from the Jinx album ,‘Bad Penny’ from Top Priority and then there’s the live section, which is almost like a live EP’s worth of material. The two obvious live tracks to include were ‘Messin’ With the Kid’ and ‘Bullfrog Blues’. We just happened to have two great versions on multi-track available to us, which were recorded at Brighton. To my ears they were the better ones to use than the ones that had previously been released.”
Disc two features a more acoustic, mellower collection of songs and includes tracks like ‘Out On The Western Plain’, ‘Just A Smile’ and ‘I’m Not Awake Yet’.
“It’s a more melodic, laid-back sequence of songs – showcasing another side of Rory’s playing,” says Gallagher. “It’s a side to him that not everyone is aware of – the fact that you could chill out to his music as well as rock to it.”

Donal Gallagher worked with his late brother since they were both teenagers. He went on to become road manager for Taste and continued to work with him through the solo years.
“Rory joined The Fontana showband at just 15 years of age and I ended up going to the ballrooms and helping putting in the equipment,” he recalls. “The Fontana later became The Impact and they supported bands like The Animals, The Kinks, The Who – any band who was in the top ten in England always got good money to come to do the ballrooms in Ireland. I learned a lot about equipment just by watching these bands and helping out whenever I could. I can even remember looking after the spotlights for an Everly Brothers gig at the Arcadia Ballroom in Cork.”
After having success with the power trio Taste, who released two studio albums and their legendary Live At The Isle of Wight album in 1970, Gallagher went on to a spectacularly successful solo career. He released 11 studio albums and 5 live albums between 1971 and 1990. The consummate live artist and self-confessed road animal, Gallagher toured relentlessly, playing literally thousands of dates around the world, including 25 full US tours. At one point he was headhunted by the Rolling Stones to replace Mick Taylor – though he famously turned them down to concentrate on his own career. Gallagher toured right up until his death. Ironically, his final Irish concert at College Green in August 1994 saw him perform before his biggest ever home audience.
Donal Gallagher remembers the glory years in the ‘70s when Rory’s popularity was at its peak.
“With every album the gigs just got bigger and the tours got longer,” he says. “Rory was very prolific in those days – he’d got a six album deal out of Polydor in 1970 and by the end of ‘74 had delivered all six of them. He was in a very strong position by then, coming out of the recording contract having delivered Irish Tour ’74, his biggest album to date. Suddenly the Stones are on the phone looking for a new guitarist.”
The story of Rory Gallagher and whether he might join The Rolling Stones as a replacement to Mick Taylor is one of the great “what-ifs” in rock lore. But, as Donal Gallagher recalls, it wasn’t as straightforward a proposition as it might have sounded.
“A couple of nights before heading out on a Japanese tour at the end of ‘74 the phone rang, and it was Ian Stewart [the Stones piano player],” he remembers. “I ran up to Rory’s room and said ‘the Stones want you’. He thought it was a wind-up – we used to joke about things all the time. But they wanted him to go over to Holland and record with them for a night to see how it would go. We packed our kit and got back to London but the date was deferred and then deferred again.
“It ended up being four nights before the Japanese tour. Rory thought it was just a jam session. ‘If they ask me to join I’ll give you a call,’ he said to me. When he got there he was greeted by the Stones manager who said something like, ‘Welcome to the Rolling Stones – we knew it would be you Rory, everyone’s ready for you. They set up that night and they were waiting for Keith to arriveJ. agger said, ‘I have this new song – can you give me a riff for it? It was ‘Start Me Up’. Rory had his own song and had this riff, which became the intro to ‘Start Me Up’.
“As things would turn out, there was no dialogue internally within the Stones. Rory spent the whole time talking about Brian Jones, whom he’d adored – that wouldn’t have gone down too well with the Glimmer twins. Rory had said to Mick, ‘Look, I have this Japanese tour to do’. Mick said it was Keith’s call, so he went to his room to find him comatose. He waited up all night trying to wake him, but he couldn’t. I met him off the Rotterdam flight with his bag packed ready to go to Japan. He told me that Keith took a break.
“We went off to Japan and then Australia and the story broke while we were there and there was a big story. It was a bizarre set of circumstances. It would have been interesting to see what might have happened. Then it became this scenario where they were trying out all these guitar players including Steve Marriott, Ry Cooder, Jeff Beck – a whole list of them. I think they felt, ‘Oh we’ve been turned down by Rory Gallagher, this can’t happen. No-one turns The Stones down!’ So they were saying, ‘Well, we’re the Stones, we’ve turned down Jeff Beck and Ry Cooder etc.’
“It probably was a fait accompli that Ronnie Wood would join. For what the Stones wanted… Rory might have turned the clock back a little – maybe that’s what some people would have liked. The four days experience of waiting around for someone to get their act together would have been frustrating for Rory.”
While he was a major live draw and a consistent album seller, one of the features of Rory Gallagher’s career was that he never made any concessions to commercial fashions or trends, always preferring to stick to the basic blues template. Was there ever any pressure for him to be more commercially minded?
“There was always that pressure to put Rory in a studio with a producer. But because he owned his own copyright and was licensing-in what they called ‘finished product’, the record company had no say in the matter. But slowly I was getting Rory around to the notion of a single. I was thinking if I go to a jukebox I play singles – not albums. But he found that hard to rationalise. He was afraid of his career being taken in a different direction and of being mis-interpreted.
“I’d say to Rory, 'Messin’ With The Kid’ is a single or ‘Bullfrog Blues’ – that’s a single. I remember the head of Polydor in America arrived down to a gig in Washington with an edited version of ‘Going To My Hometown’ and he said, ‘We’d guarantee you a number one with this’ – but Rory was incensed that they’d taken the tape and edited it. It left me in the position of being delighted that the head of the record company would come down and see the gig – but embarrassed that Rory wouldn’t talk to him. Then they’d recoil and wouldn’t come back. For Rory his big fear was getting a hit single just for the sake of it.”
Either way, it was not to be. Rory was a huge star, to a degree that may not be fully appreciated at times in Ireland. That he might have been so much bigger if he’d worked the business differently is, in the end, essentially academic.
Rory passed away at only 48 years of age, following complications after he underwent a liver transplant. His death came as a huge shock to the music world.
“The biggest difficulty was getting him to go into hospital in the first place,” Donal remembers. “Rory and a sticking plaster wouldn’t be in the same room together. He seemed to be immune from all those late nights – we’d be wrecked, but he’d want to stay up all night jamming in some club even after playing his own gig. I’d say to him ‘what about your hands – you’ve another gig to do tomorrow’ but he wouldn’t listen.
“He fell ill in January of that year and from the critical time where he had to be hospitalised to the time he died it was six months of pressurised intensity. There were some tabloid stories, which were completely ludicrous. My own view of it was that Rory was a private person and it was his own business medically. My main concern at the time was his recovery. And after that I thought the last thing he needs is to become more famous for his transplant than he is for his guitar-playing.
“It was a shock when he died. He’d gone into a coma so I had to make all the decisions from there on. We spent most of the first year after he died tidying up the legal end of things. It was only after that that we could concentrate on looking at the back catalogue and what needed to be done to bring it up to date.”
What’s most certainly not academic is the magnificent raw power of Big Guns – The Very Best Of Rory Gallagher. For those unfamiliar with the G-man’s genius, it is a chance to catch up with some of the greatest Irish rock’n’roll cuts of all time – and then some.
The legend lives on…