Interview by Brad Balfour & Paddy McCarthy
Hard-core blues is rarely associated with Ireland. But if anyone did the job in making the blues a crucial genre for an Irish musician to adopt it was the late Rory Gallagher. Donegal-born, Cork-bred, this long haired rocker emerged in the early ‘70s, flourishing during the 80s and dying far too soon. Not one to take care of himself, he was in need of a liver transplant. While waiting for an organ to be available, he contracted an infection and suddenly passed away.
Over the years, his reputation and audiences continued to grow, as new generations discovered his crisp playing authentic feel; meanwhile his original fans continued to swear by his live shows. Thankfully a lot of them were recorded and got released through the medium of the day whether it be by magnetic tape or DVD.
Nowadays, nephew Daniel Gallagher has become his caretaker and promulgator of his story and song. As the guardian of his uncle’s catalog he takes over from Donal, Rory’s younger brother who has managed his bro’s career since he started.
With the upcoming arrival of “Blues,” a new release featuring 36 mostly unreleased recordings — some acoustic, and some electric — the Gallagher narrative continues. No songs are duplicated; some are culled from studio sessions for various albums — from “Deuce” in 1971 right up to “Jinx” in 1982 — while others are from stage shows and lost radio station sessions. There’s also a small number of recordings he made with artists of the calibre of Muddy Waters, Jack Bruce, Albert King and Lonnie Donegan.
The entire project was piloted by Daniel, nephew of Rory and son of Donal Gallagher — the latter having kept the Gallagher flame lit for several decades since Rory’s untimely passing in 1995. It was Daniel’s role to listen to all available tapes, follow up rumors about numerous others, decide which tracks best fitted the Blues theme, sort out the best takes, fit them all into a working running order and look after the editing and the packaging.
In the new issue of Ireland’s Hot Press, Daniel explains how he curated this collection of recordings and what it means for the legacy of the greatest guitarist from The Emerald Island. “The project was a long time in the works but the great thing was that there was so much to choose from. Of course, some of the tape boxes had scant information on them, but it was also often hard to choose the best version of a particular song.
“For example, initially there were five really fine recordings of ‘Can’t Be Satisfied’ and I had struggled to pick one. But then just as the project was near completion, I heard that a German guy had a version of it that I hadn’t known existed. It was recorded for Radio FFN in Lower Saxony in 1992, and features Rory’s National slide guitar. When something that great lands in your lap, even at the last minute, it picks itself.”
In order to get our own insights to this new release and other Gallagher news, The Irishexaminerusa.com team (well, Paddy and myself) interviewed Daniel by phone a few days ago.
Q: Have you visited Cork at any time in the last couple of years?
DG: My family still lives there. My brother is there, my parents are out on the coast in Ballyshannon. Yeah, I love it. I haven’t been back in awhile this year, but I was there last year.
Q: Is your family house still out there in Douglas?
DG: No, the one in Douglas isn’t there anymore.
Q: Have you been to Donegal to visit the family’s original roots?
DG: Yeah, there’s a festival out there every year so we’ve been going to the festival.
Q: Your father managed Rory, they’re touring, doing all this stuff, and you’re a little kid. When did you really become aware of what they were doing, the music business, and music itself? When did you feel it wasn’t just noise around the house but something you were connecting with?
DG: The very first time I remember was when my dad and Rory would be away a lot on tour and stuff, and I didn’t really pay too much attention to why. But then one night in 1987 — around October 17th, I think — when I was about five, he got me and my brother out of bed, and said, “We’re going on an adventure” and we got in a van and drove and went to the house with Odeon. I still had no idea what was going on. I guess we were at the side of the stage, and he pulled the curtain back and pushed us forward and suddenly we were beside [Rory] onstage. Rory was in full swing and it was amazing.
Then [dad] brought us out two Rory T-shirts, and we put them on. Rory saw us and had a huge smile and came over. Doug walked over with a guitar and pretended to machine-gun us, and then me and my brother were freaking out, dancing away onstage. So that was the first time I had any idea what they did for a living.
Q: Do you have a videotape of that? Was it recorded?
DG: No, unfortunately not. I remember speaking with someone who said they were in the audience. They could tell that something like that must be happening. They said Rory just completely forgot about the audience, and was over at the side of the stage doing all this stuff and they were trying to work out why. Then they figured it must be his nephews who were there or something.
Q: So your dad was away on the road; did that affect you in any particular way? Was it something you wanted to get more involved with? And when did you realize that this is a business you want to be in?
DG: I wouldn’t say it affected us. I remember the longest time they were away, they went and did an Australia-Japan-US tour. It was for quite a while in the early 1990s. My dad came back with the craziest presents from Japan. It probably was tougher on my mum than us kids. I wouldn’t say I particularly noticed it affecting me in any sense.
Rory toured so much, he was well known as such a live performer. He bought me my first guitar when I was about seven. He got me a classical guitar to start learning on. And then every so often I’d be around his flat or something and he’d show me some guitar or let me hold one of his.
Then I started getting into Guns ‘n Roses, and he played with Slash on the American tour in ’91. He always encouraged me to play. And then after Rory passed away, I really got into guitar more when I was a bit older, about 17, and started playing and getting into bands.
Q: At least you didn’t go and turn out to be somebody who’d play disco or something like that. How much do you feel you need to learn the blues history and blues legends, or do you feel you absorbed it from Rory by just being around it?
DG: I don’t play blues guitar, but I definitely picked up knowledge of it from spending so much time with Rory’s music and seeing the roots of where his music comes from and who he covered and things like that. But I wouldn’t say that part has creeped into what I play or write. I’m more into [the] indie rock kind of stuff.
To play blues music, you have to be really earnest about the music, you can’t just dip your toe in. You have to believe you can really take it on, and Rory did that. It didn’t have the same appeal to me. I think it was the atmosphere, a bit. Rory was young when he got into blues, he was a sort of older soul, and I think blues was very much his calling.
Q: You’re more into modern music, right?
DG: Yeah, yeah, and I use [effects]. Rory didn’t really use effects; I use more delay and stuff. But I’ll go, “here is something he does” and I’d go, “I’ll steal that and work on that.”
Q: Who do you think of as an influence now, a band like Radiohead?
DG: For me? Guitar-ways, yeah, Radiohead, or Remain in Shelter; Shanties has an amazing guitar player. Mike Strauss from Rat-a-tat. There are some really great guitar players out there. I guess there are not as many blues rock guys. There’s [Joe] Bonamassa, but my taste developed before the blues-rock things came back.
Q: You’re pinioning between your own career and getting involved with [curating] and making sure that Rory’s music gets out there. How do you manage the two?
DG: The first Rory thing I did was an event in 2005. I put together a Montreux DVD collection of Rory’s performances at the Montreux Jazz Festival. And then I just carried on from there, starting to dig into the archives, to produce albums such as “Notes from San Francisco”, the blues record, Chechen Wizard, are the more recent ones, taking them into the studio and mixing them.
At the time I was in a band called Gazelles, up to about 2010. Whenever we weren’t gigging, I’d be going through as best as I could in the archives and try to make things. And it actually worked out because the bass player in Gazelles became a producer and he has helped me engineer and produce all these records of Rory’s. He’s a kind of studio whiz. So in that way it worked out quite well.
And then the A&R side of things, that’s like I do for Rory: in digging into archives, trying to bring up lost records or reimagining all the albums. I’m trying to do that for Universal as well, currently trying to get a J.J. Cale thing together, and things like that.
Q: How is it for a band in this day and age to get gigs and all? Both pre-Covid and now in the era of Covid, are you finding new ways to adapt?
DG: It’s more a solo project that I do in Blank Spaces. But then I did a first album on my own and when I moved here to New York about six and a half years ago. I got together with a drummer and a bass player and we were gigging around, trying to make it happen and we recorded a record.
Then Covid hit, so we were stuck with a finished album. The label then didn’t want to put it out, and everything was locked down. I just put it out myself and used platforms like I put it out through Spotify and everything. You just have to adapt. You have to suddenly try to make a front cover of the album, make a music video, in lockdown. So you just have to be a bit inventive.
Obviously, the gigs aren’t going to happen anytime soon, so that’s out of the window. Some people are very creative, they do live shows from their home. Each person just has to find their own way of getting music out. If you have a home studio, you’re very lucky, and you can keep sending material out.
Q: With lockdown, you have a chance to go through all those old Rory tapes. It’s said that there are hundreds of hours, hundreds of songs,
DG: When we moved all the tapes to Universal’s archive in London back in 2017, there were over a thousand tapes we moved — so much stuff, a lot of live material. Sadly, that’s not where I am, so I can’t actually go through it all. I’m not simply in lockdown, a lot of people weren’t working in the archives. But slowly but surely, it’s starting to open up a bit, and I can say “Hey, can we look at this tape” or whichever. It’s starting to get back in, but it’s a slow process at the moment.
Q: That must be an enormous task.
DG: Yeah, I’m currently going through the multi-tracks of Rory’s very first solo album from ’71 because next year will be the 50th anniversary. So I’m going through it now and checking out what alternate takes and stuff like that are on the tapes. If there’s any kind of studio talk, stuff like that, that the fans might want to hear. So I’m just digging through that right at present.
Q: Will you have something ready for Christmas?
DG: No, it will be next year at some point. We had three releases this year. I think Rory’s fans probably want me to save their bank accounts until next year.
Q: What about showing live performances and putting together a film? There must be tons of videotapes of live performances.
DG: Yeah, we’ve done quite a few DVDs: all his Montreux performances, all his Rockpalast performances, there’s the Irish Tour film, the “Ghost Blues” documentary I made in 2010. And the Isle of Wight film, “[Taste: What’s Going On – Live] at the Isle of Wight 1970” I did in 2015. I made that in New York with the film director Murray Lerner, who sadly passed away. But that was quite a highlight, getting to work with this Oscar-winning film director and getting to spend a couple of months editing and putting together that film was really quite fantastic.
Q: Has there ever been talk of doing a fictionalized biopic?
DG: For quite a few years there have been different talks and different ideas. I’m working on one at the moment, maybe not covering all of Rory’s life, but more just concentrating on a particular section. It’s a weird thing because Rory was a very private person, and so I don’t know that he would have been thrilled about something that dug into him and his character. He just was very, very private.
I’m thinking more of a film based on a random event in Rory’s career that’s important and telling that story, rather than like Rory’s parents and growing up and that sort of thing he might have been quite private about.
Q: Would you be writing it or directing, or what do you see as your role?
DG: I’m producing it. I’ve written a quick treatment just to kind of get things talking in my head to get [a tack] on it. I’m with some people now on expanding that. But I’d want it to be done by the best and so speaking with some screenwriters and people like that to take it on.
Eagle Rock did about five or six DVDs of Rory’s live material and documentaries. So they did the “Taste: Isle of Wight”, they’ve got “Ghost Blues”, Rockpalast and Montreux for example. It’s out on BlueRay and DVD. It might be streaming on something as well.
Q: You’re based here in New York, calling us from downtown, the East Village I presume?
DG: Right now I’m in New Jersey with my wife. She’s registered to vote here so we came for a few days before she votes.
Q: What plans do you have after this Covid thing lifts? What would you say your next step will be?
DG: For my own self or Rory’s stuff?
Q: Both.
DG: On Rory’s stuff, I’ll keep working on that first album’s 50th anniversary for next year. I’m really going to try and push to see if I can get the script written for “Rory’s Song”, because I think there’s enough interest in Rory’s popularity. Rory is on the high again and I think [fans would] be interested in some stories from his career.
On the personal thing, if [quarantine] is lifted again, I’ve got enough material written for a third Blank Spaces album so I’d like to get into a studio again and record again, and put that out.
Q: But you’re staying creative, that’s good. Are you amazed at how resilient his sound and music is? He keeps getting newer audiences all the time.
DG: He does. I think the secret is that Rory didn’t follow different trends. He wasn’t suddenly doing a disco record and then suddenly doing a New Romantics record, and then suddenly something else. He stayed true to what he played. And because he was so [like] that and his look –he didn’t change his look or go to socialite parties and try and fit in with anything. When someone sees a photo of Rory, he’s in Converse jeans and a checked shirt.
He looks like any 20-something-year-old in Brooklyn. He kept himself quite relevant looking and sounding all the way through. Because there wasn’t a sort of fake chasing the sound of somebody else’s thing. And I think that rings true to people when they discover him and they see a clip of him on YouTube or something. He looks like a really cool guy from now.
Q: Where are Rory’s guitars now, and how many did he have?
DG: Rory’s main Strat is currently at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of an exhibition. And all the rest, mainly in London. He had about 100 or so.
Q: Have you played them all, or some of them?
DG: Yeah, I played for different Guitar Magazine photo shoots and stuff like that. I’ve played and restrung quite a few of them.
Q: So you wear many hats: producer to musician to guitar re-stringer.
DG: Guitar tech, yeah. I wish they weren’t valued like they are, because it would be great to have them played more. Rory’s Strat we’ve managed to lend to people like Joe Bonamassa have played them a couple of times.
We lent it to Bonamassa twice: once at Royal Albert Hall and one at Hammersmith. On his first album he covered a Rory song. He has always been a very good Rory supporter, a very good man.