Un commentaire des tittres de BIG GUNS par Donal...
"DONAL GALLAGHER on Big Guns
From the 'Classic Rock' interview with Carol Clerk
(Read on folks as there is more info here than published in C.R.)
This is Rory through the years, with Taste and solo, and I chose the photographs to match the eras.
The whole album is mixed in 5.1 – SACD – to the benefit of everybody. This offers something to the fan who’s already got the tracks but feels obligated to get this album. It plays normal stereo too. There are recordings on here the fans wouldn’t have had before, and they’re cracking versions - ‘Messin’ With The Kid’ and ‘Bullfrog Blues’ with Rod De’Ath drumming and Lou Martin’s keyboards on there.
5.1 was a given factor I had to live with, and to get the purest 5.1 possible, we worked with the original multi-tracks in all cases barring ‘What’s Going On’. The multi tracks for that had been misplaced by Polydor, or else they didn’t want to give them to me.
I felt like I was getting a deck of cards that was made up of spades, aces, hearts and diamonds, where you had to pick a selection and make a complete hand out of it rather than having people see it as a Best Of Rory put together for the purposes of a compilation. We were putting songs together where they fitted together.
The situation I always had with Rory in terms of the studio. . . at gigs, I used to do the mixing out front until I changed roles in ’76 or whatever. And as somebody who mixed out front, I always felt left out of the studio recordings. I had my views. Rory’s approach in the studio would be to put on some lovely additional instrumentation, but when it came to the mix, he’d make it so subtle you’d never hear it. It got lost in the wash. He would look at the mixes as being, ‘Can I replicate this with a three-piece onstage?’ as opposed to saying, ‘I’m making an album.’
On Defender and Fresh Evidence, he took a lot more time in the studio. With tracks he had on those albums like ‘The King Of Zydeco’ – which had a piano and accordion player - he said, ‘Well, I’ll take extra musicians on tour if I need to replicate the album.’
I felt with the new mixes of the older tracks, I was opening them up and broadening them.
The first disc is the straight-in-the-kisser type of approach, no apology rock’n’roll. It works well and it rocks out and once you put your foot down, you don’t take it off. The tracks get you rocking and they don’t let you down.
The second set is a way of really just focusing in more on the gentler studio side, the very melodic side of Rory.
TRACK BY TRACK
DISC 1
BIG GUNS
‘Big Guns’ is a track I felt got overlooked. Jinx and Defender - sadly these are very neglected albums in terms of people’s view of them. I went back to ‘Big Guns’ once I got the Jinx multi-tracks in the studio. It’s Rory’s crime writing at its best, and it sets the scene for Disc 1 - ‘We’ll wheel out the big guns.’
WHAT’S GOING ON
If you polled the Taste fans, this would come out as the No 1 Taste track. In a way, I’m presenting Taste as an alternative line-up to all the others including Rod and Lou and Gerry, and Richard Newman and David Levy, the last two guys who were in the band. When you put them all into the soufflé here it’s very much Rory with mostly the drummers changing throughout.
TATTOO’D LADY
It’s as the song says. . . “They’re my family”. It’s a key line in there. Growing up as kids, we used to go to a fairground, and Rory was enthralled by any entertainer. We’d go up the following day and the whole thing would have disappeared. They would’ve moved on. There’s a huge parallel there between the rock’n’roll gig and the fairground moving on to the next destination. All the lights and excitement and work that goes into staging a show for a short period of time. It’s an unconscious thing that when Rory wrote that, that really was his lifestyle – the drifter, the troubadour.
BAD PENNY
It has such an enjoyable riff, and it does something for me. I love Rory’s use of very bar-room expressions - ‘Oh, he’s a bad penny!’ And there are echoes of superstition – “If you’ve got a bad penny in your pocket. . .” This very much comes from the bar culture – the community of people going into a bar. All those references would come out.
SHADOW PLAY
‘Shadow Play’ is a fine piece of writing. Actually, recently, when I was in New York last, I saw a window display for a crime book called Shadow Play. Whether it was one that Rory had read which had been reissued or relaunched, or it was something else. . .
Musically it has a lovely, I wouldn’t quite put it as a punk feel, which is a form Rory loved, punk music. He felt very akin to punk because of the three-piece bands he had, and the no-nonsense, and he always felt very unhappy about being classified in the old rock scenes because he didn’t feel he was part of the Prince’s Trust brigade. He stuck to the proper rock’n’roll. I’d love to hear somebody like Elvis Costello do a take on it.
This track really puts the finger vividly on a turn in Rory’s life - ‘What part do I play in the shadow play?’ He’s obviously questioning his own life. He’d hit that age of a certain maturity where people question whether they should go forward. It has hallmarks of paranoia I suppose, too, about it. Throughout his career, Rory wears his heart on his sleeve very much.
KICKBACK CITY
This is from the Defender album which also has a great track, ‘Loanshark Blues’, on it. All those very hard-edged city songs. . . I presume the city to be London. Rory adored London. It’s not an anti-London song by any means. It’s more to do with the whole music industry as it was operating at the time in London. It’s a sort of a dig at that scenario. Not that things change. . .
BOURBON
Jinx didn’t get the credit it deserved, largely, I felt, because the cover didn’t work with that set of songs. Also, it suffered from the title Jinx. Rory was so very much in the blues idiom of superstition - ‘mojo’ and things like that. I do know we suffered terribly on American radio. People wouldn’t touch the album because they felt there was a jinx on it. We were told by the record company. Some of the DJs and producers wouldn’t touch it.
In his own life, Rory liked bourbon, but it’s not quite his own life story. It’s parallel to a guy being on the road for quite some time. He told me that he’d written it partly with the likes of Waylon Jennings in mind at the time. We’d been to see him on tour in Denver and places like that. Secretly, it was a song he would have loved to have been covered by Waylon or someone with that country-rock life.
‘He had the DTs for breakfast and the shakes till noon, he grabbed his guitar and left his hotel room. . . got to put some miles behind him. . .’ Rory’s almost going back to the circus moving on, the drifting life and the agony of how out of synch you are with the rest of the world. It’s having its breakfast, that’s the middle of your night. When the world is having its lunch, you’re having your breakfast. That feeling of being out of synch and having an itinerary the length of your arm.
Then you get to the location and the music sends you. It can take you anywhere. Once the music kicks in, life is tolerable again. I think it’s a very poetic song based on a troubadour’s life.
SINNERBOY
From Taste Live At the Isle Of Wight. One of the sad things is that Rory never ever performed a Taste song again onstage after they split, ‘Sinnerboy’ being the exception. It was a track that Rory did on his first solo album, but he’d obviously just written it at the time of the Isle of Wight.
It’s very much set in London, I feel, at a time when particularly young Irish lads would arrive. The economic elements back then were such that we had mass migration out of Ireland in the late Sixties. Up around Earl’s Court and those areas you’d see a lot of people who really hadn’t two pennies to rub together. Their isolation was the alcohol, hence the lines of the song, ‘Take away the paper cup. . . one more inside him won’t do him no good.’
USED TO BE
This was recorded live at Hammersmith in the late Seventies and released in 1999 on BBC Sessions. It’s a cracking version. It really is. It just kicks in. Again, it’s the riff. It benefits with keyboards as well.
The whole remastering gave us an opportunity to clean up and update stuff from the Seventies to the Nineties and bring on technology that had moved on.
Rory always had a certain amount of criticism by people saying, ‘He’s great onstage but his albums never measure up.’ I said, ‘I’d love them to listen to the updated versions.’
Rory took a bit of a pounding emotionally himself when Taste split. This is a little bit of, ‘Better get used to being my used to be.’ It was a moving-on - he was now in full flight.
GOIN’ TO MY HOMETOWN
A latter-day version, from Wheels Within Wheels, the last album. It’s a favourite and when you’re compiling a best-of, you couldn’t not put that song on there. I’d favoured this version over the Live In Europe version purely because there’s an homage built into this as well - Lonnie Donegan features on the track with Rory.
I think fans would anticipate it at concerts. They couldn’t wait for him to swing out with the mandolin. It was one of those songs he could have played continuously on a loop all night. Of course, Rory can claim many home towns, or many home towns claim Rory. I think it’s almost like an end-of-tour song.
BULLFROG BLUES
This is previously unreleased, recorded in Brighton on the Stones mobile, as was ‘Messin’ With The Kid’. They’re very much two songs he didn’t write but he made them his own. Rory had that uncanny knack of being able to put his own stamp on songs. He was most impressed by the Canned Heat version. I remember him buying the record of that in Bangor, Co Down, in ’67. He’d liked the song for a long time and in fact Canned Heat tried to get Rory to replace Al Wilson when he died. The message never got through to Rory. I suspect it was suppressed by [Taste manager] Eddie Kennedy at the time. We found out years later.
Taste and Canned Heat had done a run of dates together and Rory and Al Wilson and the rest of Canned Heat - they got on so well together, and they admired each other.
MESSIN’ WITH THE KID
There are different versions - Junior Wells’s was the known version - and the writers are disputed. Like any song like that, Rory would take and re-adapt it. That was his forte. The intro is an original Rory riff.
DISC TWO
THE LOOP
It’s Rory’s instrumental tribute to Chicago and the overhead tube system. It goes in a loop over Chicago. It features Mark Feltham’s harmonica playing. Because of the 5.1 context and without trying to do a Pink Floyd on it. . . Rory on the original version had put on the sound effects of an underground train, so in this case, we actually got the full 5.1 sound of the loop itself from people in Chicago. It came via an electronic wave. Tony [Arnold] the engineer grafted it on so it completes what Rory would have intended to do himself.
BORN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF TIME
One of Rory’s earliest writings. I suppose he must’ve been in or around 18 when he wrote that. Even though he was a professional musician, I think he was putting the boot back in at his schooldays – being controlled and breaking out of the system. ‘Blister On The Moon’ is very similar in that regard. We were suppressed or we were crushed -‘We’ll crush you like a fly… get back in your box and shut up.’ Rory was quite a leader as a youth, which he didn’t necessarily want to be. He was quite a trendsetter, from his hairstyle to his clothes.
As well as the school education, he had the musicians in the showbands telling him, ‘Stop trying to show off,’ if he wanted to write a song, or if he happened to be a showman. It’s an anti-conformity song.
It was always a Taste favourite. It was recorded on eight-track. It had a lot more instruments than I had realised or that seemed to be on the record. It was almost like a flower blossoming once it was given the treatment in the studio. There were so many undercurrents of guitars Rory had laid down himself that seemed to have been lost in the original mix. I love the melody on that song, and the arrangement.
There’s footage of Taste performing it. It was filmed in a dump in Munich. It’s absolutely incredible. It’s one of the days at the end of the German tour. The record company got them together and did a TV show and they were in the middle of a dump.
A MILLION MILES AWAY
Ballycotton, Co Cork, is a fishing village that’s at the end of a headland, so it’s a cul-de-sac. When you find a town, that’s the end of the road. The rest you have to walk. You can walk these cliffs away from the madding crowd. It’s one of those places you want to keep secret. I’ve gone there for the last 19 years straight. Rory and I once drove down for the day. I think there was a couple of friends with us, but Rory went off on his own and disappeared out of sight. He was always quiet, but he’d been very quiet all day. Then he came back and I said, ‘Are you all right, you’ve been unusually quiet today?”
I thought he was depressed or sad. And a beam came on his face. He said, ‘I just got this inspiration for a song and I’m really, really happy with this idea of a song.’ And I suspect it was ‘A Million Miles Away’.
CALLING CARD
To me, it’s the epitome of Rory’s blues writing. He’s showing you can take a song and give it out as a message, telling somebody else that it’s a thin line - the rain ain’t fussy about where it lands. It rains on one just like it rains on all.
It also highlights the random selection of life. Some people are blessed, some people are cursed. There’s no sort of qualification of it. It’s a random thing and in the case of depression or alcoholism or whatever, if it falls on you. . .
I think ‘Look up, brother, be alert, whatever you do don’t show that hurt’ is the key line in there. At least keep your pride. That’s what he was like, totally, absolutely. Rory as a person, privately. . . there were times when you knew he was in turmoil inside and he’d go off and do a recording session or an interview. He would never cower down. He would’ve been better to say, ‘I’m not too well today,’ or ‘I’m not going to do it,’ take the time to work a thing out.
It was like that school of thought – ‘Never let them know you’re licked or never show a chink in the armour.’ Maybe it’s something that eldest children have to bear. You take it on the chin more.
For me, if I had to say what was Rory’s definitive songwriting, one song that would describe how good a writer he was and how capable of keeping the blues heritage and writing a new blues song, it would be ‘Calling Card’. It encapsulates the fringes of jazz, blues. . . and I just love the style of writing. It’s like a lesson for life, almost harking back to ‘Into every life a little rain must fall.’
OUT ON THE WESTERN PLAIN
Rory had always played around with different tunings and this is one. It’s known by guitarists as the GEEGAD tuning. You tune the top string to G, the second one to E and so on. Then Rory put a variation on it. People like Martin Carthy would be very familiar with that. It gives you that extra Celtic tonality. The song was written by Leadbelly, and here you have something which was probably derived from some folklore, out on the western plain - an imaginary western. Rory was able to take this blues song and add a Celtic dimension to it. Probably the definitive Celtic blues merging.
LONESOME HIGHWAY
It’s from Wheels Within Wheels, and it’s a very distinctive track. Rory laid lots of guitars down and it features a very Byrdsy sound. He was a great fan of The Byrds. He had huge respect for Roger McGuinn. When he was with the showband, The Impact, they came to London looking for work and they were up in Kilburn supporting The Byrds, who’d just had a hit with Mr Tambourine Man.
This song has its own little history. It was the hardest one to locate. When we found the tape, we couldn’t find the full vocal version, and we were attempting to patch it together. We had 12 different multi-track versions of the song. We thought, ‘We’ll compose it from what we’ve got.’ We gave up at midnight. We said, ‘We’ll treat it as an instrumental.’
I went off to bed and Tony the engineer phoned me an hour later. He’d found the original master. ‘The extraordinary thing about it,’ he said, ‘is that the last verse is complete, but Rory’s put two different vocal endings, so you’ll have to tell me which one you wish to pick.’ One ending was optimistic and one ending was pessimistic. Which do you pick? I then said, ‘Seeing that he’s left us a choice, we take two lines from the positive one and two from the negative one and make it ambiguous.’ It’s a great piece of legacy that he left.
It’s very descriptive – life’s a trial but who knows which way the road might turn?
It was recorded at the time of Against The Grain. It needed more attention. There’s lots of percussion and little timpani bells. There’s a chime through these tracks, leading into. . .
JUST THE SMILE
Which had a lot of that Celtic percussion. It fell into place very much because of the instrumentation. Rory had a lot of acoustics on it, and there’s a lot of percussion which would’ve been Wilgar Campbell. I felt there was a feel through all this. It’s the folkier side of Rory coming through, like a folk band without the bodhran. It’s much more opened up. That album [Rory Gallagher] was done on an eight-track actually. It was beautifully recorded.
I’M NOT AWAKE YET
This in a way keeps the idea going. There were sides to Rory. . . the guy onstage, the guy offstage, the rock guy, the bluesman; it always was subtly hidden that he was a folkie at heart. I’m attempting to replicate in a way a little bit of the Wheels Within Wheels experience by putting together a choice of some of the tracks. You can hear all the acoustic guitars he’d laid down that probably you hadn’t heard before. His mixes were inclined to be so subtle you’d only hear one guitar.
DAUGHTER OF THE EVERGLADES
It was always a bit of a mystery song to me, and I asked Rory one time. He said it came from a book that he’d bought on tour, and the emotions in the book led him to write about this daughter of the everglades. That’s all I got out of him. It’s obviously a tragic story. It’s somebody lamenting another person who’s died.
On one of the US tours, there was a friend of ours who worked at the record company at Chrysalis. She was due to go on a flight. She came to Rory’s gig instead. The flight she was meant to go to Florida in crashed into the Everglades. I figured that may have had a part in the song. She was always with Gerry [McAvoy]. It was a terrible crash.
The same sort of lucky escape happened to Norman Damery just after he decided to join Rory in the first line-up of Taste. He was due to go on an Aer Lingus plane, but he didn’t take the flight. It crashed leaving Cork. It was consequently shown it was hit by a missile - mistaken for a target practice.
I’LL ADMIT YOU’RE GONE
It’s a heartbreaking song. That’s all I can say about it. When I was asked about Rory after he died, all I could say was, ‘Have a listen to “I’ll Admit You’re Gone”.’ I think it marked a junction in Rory’s life where he really became saddened and disheartened. Something, I’d say a private thing, had caused a huge upset in his life and I think it’s a turning point. It’s obviously the break-up of a relationship. It’s very descriptive. I think because his guitar playing was so amazing, his songwriting abilities were completely overshadowed. This is a song that, for instance, I’d love Sinead O’Connor to do a version of, or Elton John.
About two or three years ago I was on holiday and I didn’t take any Rory stuff with me, but I was given a compilation, Troubadours, done by Keith at BMG. He’d compiled what I’d describe as an album of American folk artists. He included this track of Rory’s in the compilation. When it came on, it beautifully stood shoulder to shoulder with everything else. I was so proud to hear Rory in a very much more American context.
THE KING OF ZYDECO
It’s a tribute to other musicians and to Cajun music. Through his career, on all his albums, Rory would pay a tribute to various people or places. This is a tribute to Clifton Chenier. It’s very much about Rory at that point - it’s him saying he wanted to pack in and take a holiday, which he never did. It just shows you the busman’s holiday element about Rory. If he would take a holiday, he’d go down to the Gulf Of Mexico and go along the highway and go to see Clifton Chenier. It’s the melancholy in Rory’s heart which is very obvious here. ‘What I should really do is head on down and chill out.’
THEY DON’T MAKE THEM LIKE YOU ANY MORE
They don’t – and there’s the little bit of irony in why I put that title last. That’s the sad thing about Rory. Without having a beef at the media generally, I felt that Rory was overshadowed and in a lot of quarters was almost airbrushed out of rock history. Which only made me more tenacious to fight his corner. It suddenly took his death to wake people up.
‘Oh, yeah, there’ll always be another guitar player.’ There was a time when Rory was the only one. He paved the way for everybody else, but he got so taken for granted. They don’t make them like him any more.
In this track, he stretches out his jazz ability. The jazz side of Rory he didn’t over-exploit. I would see him sit in on jam sessions with Larry Coryell. . . some of the great jazz musicians, and he could equally hold his own with the rock guys, the folk guys, the jazz guys. He was a great all-rounder. In the background, it’s Rory playing the brass section. It’s also about Rory’s multi-talents. "
