What we can learn from Rory Gallagher

Today is the anniversary of Rory Gallagher's death. He was born 64 years ago in County Donegal, Ireland (though his real home was Cork), and he died 17 years ago today.

He is probably my favorite electric guitar player of all time. He was a bad-ass who didn't want pop stardom, but he's not obscure and hip like most musicians I talk about. He was a very successful touring act and he sold a lot of albums back in the day when people bought albums. He was at least as skilled as Hendrix or Clapton, but he never sounded like he was showing off. He could make his single guitar sound more powerful than most multiple-guitar combos. His solos weren't even the most impressive part of what he did- it was the way he reacted to what was going on around him. He always seemed to be responding to or encouraging his band, and when he sang, he didn't sing on top of his guitar as much as he conversed with it.

I wanted to do something in honor of him. I settled on a  list. Why? For two reasons: 1) Blog readers and search engines prefer lists; and, more importantly, 2) Lists are EASY to write. 

Anyway, in honor of the man, I present this list of things you can learn from Rory Gallagher.

1) Buy good things and commit to them rather than buying a lot of shit.

Rory's parents took out a loan to buy his signature guitar when he was 15, and he played it ever since. It was a 1961 Fender Stratocaster with sunburst finish, but by the time Rory had become a star, most of the paint had been literally stripped away by his blood, sweat and tears, leaving a unique dark red + wooden look to it.

Guitar players - especially electric guitar players - are always faced with the temptation to buy new guitars. Guitars are relatively inexpensive compared to, say, pianos, and the differences between guitars are very noticeable- different woods feel different, different constructions allow for looser or tighter strings, and different pickups create different tones.

But Rory didn't buy new toys. He committed to his old toy. He swapped out the pickups and installed a new nut and new tuning pegs, but he held on to it. In fact, according to Rory, it got better with age.

Nearly 50 years after the guitar was built, Rory's brother Donal let Joe Bonamassa play it on stage for one night. And it still sounded awesome:



So next time you've got an old possession that still works, and you're thinking about being a good consumer and buying a brand new expensive replacement, maybe it's time to ask yourself this question:

What would Rory have done?

2) Don't neglect where you came from.



They say, "Don't forget where you came from." Nobody really does. But we do neglect where we came from. We definitely do.

For much of Rory's lifetime, Ireland was a third-world country and the north was ravaged by violence. When he became an international touring attraction, he could have never returned to that island- in fact, many of his fellow countrymen didn't. And why would they? Why play Belfast when you could play a hundred cities where you *didn't* run the risk of getting blown up?

But not only did Rory return home to tour Ireland- he toured Northern Ireland, too, at a time when nobody else would. And it was all captured in what was probably his best album, Irish Tour '74.

And it doesn't look like Ireland ever forgot him.

3) When you're great, you don't need a lot of amplification.

In Rory's time, guitar players like Marc Bolan and Mick Ronson (of David Bowie's band) typically played in front of massive Marshall stacks. But Rory didn't see the need. He was used to playing with small amps and he liked them, so he continued to play with small amps.

Ironically, when Brian May of Queen created his own kind of bombast, he actually began by trying to sound like Rory. May was amazed when he saw that Rory achieved such a mesmerizing sound with such a tiny amplifier.

In the '80s, Rory did begin to use larger amps, and with that, he also started to sound a big more generic (even though still sounded cool).


But the point is, if you're that great at something, you do still need some kind of amplification, but you probably won't need as much of it as everybody else does.

4) If your instincts tell you to keep away from drugs, you should probably listen to your instincts.

I started this list thinking that it would consist only of cool music trivia, but it's impossible to ignore the circumstances of Rory's unfortunate death.

Rory died of liver failure, and, because he's both a musician and Irish, most people assume it was the alcohol that killed him. But Rory was actually a light drinker who was very paranoid about putting things into his body.

That fear of messing up his body likely came from the same place as his fear of flying. But that fear of flying was a big problem for a guy who toured America and Asia. So he asked a doctor what was wrong with him. The doctor prescribed him a drug that would help him with his anxiety.

Rory took anti-anxiety meds for over 20 years, while having a beer or two after shows. In the '90s, he started feeling pains in his liver. A doctor prescribed him strong narcotics for the pain in his liver. In 1994, he was in the midst of a European tour when his liver started to fail. He was hospitalized for the rest of the year. After an unsuccessful liver transplant in 1995, he died. He was 47.

Rory didn't need drugs. What he did need we will never know- maybe it was psychotherapy, maybe it was more time off, maybe it was just a little bit more sunshine. But he didn't need drugs.

When Rory died, he left behind hours of great music and we can thank him for that.

Nearly the end of the trip, but certainly not the end of the blog.

There are so many more things I remember that I would like to share in this blog. But I won't catch up on them now. For now, I'm updating live from an internet cafe in Jerusalem.

I took a sample of a Jewish spirituality class for that last few days. I met Mottle, the guy who runs it, at a synagogue and he invited me to do it for these few days, giving me room and board and everything. He was hoping I'd decide to stay and extend my trip, but when I said I didn't want to, he didn't push it at all. He proved that he truly wasn't doing it only to get me to join. When he said I could just chill there for a few days and he only wanted to share his awesome program with me, he really meant it. Good guy.

The program was quite good. It didn't turn me around and make me feel more religious, but it did show me that, as I thought, I have a good potential to be a religious person. Or a spiritual person. Or whatever you want to say.

Some of the way the teachers talked about Judaism were as foreign to me as Christianity or Islam. They taught it as a more loving, almost Eastern religion in which YHWH is more like the infinitely faceted Hindu gods, or like the Tao that flows through everything.

And the dorm/study space is located in the most picturesque neighborhood in all of Israel: Nachlaot, Jerusalem. It resembles the Old City, with buildings made of stone with tiny yars behind walls, and blue metal shutters. But it lacks the claustrophobic and touristy feeling of the Old City. The buildings are farther apart and, well, there are no tourists. it's full of hippies and super religious folks. There are some cars, but they are few. it is full of parks and gardens, but they are all compact and personable. It all has a very compact feeling, but along with that is a sense that they wasted no space. Nothing there is big enough to make a person feel small- in fact, it's all so small that it makes you feel a bit big, but not so big that you can't fit in it (which is how the Old City makes me feel sometimes.)

And best of all, the city was built by Jews, for Jews, in land that never belonged to anyone else. Before the Jews settled it, it was nothing but forests full of coyotes. It, in fact, was the first building built by anyone outside the Old City walls, and it was bought fair and square from the Ottomans in the 1800s. I may have problems with the concept of Israel as the biblical, millenial homeland of the Jews, and in Nachlaot, the knowledge that Jews had lived here for more than a century moved me more than Massada or any other ancient monument. I felt more invested in the history of that place than the history of anywhere else I'd been in Israel. I could see my ancestors there just as much as I saw myself.

That's not to say the Western Wall doesn't still blow my mind. It still does, for sure.

Now I'm headed to Tel Aviv to track down a Jewish Brit named Joe Dale who I met at the beginning of the trip. He was a great guy, and seeing him again would be a cool way to end my journey.

Brief summary of some action-packed days

The last few days can not be given the entries they deserve at this time, so I'll tell the short version:

Petra is possibly the greatest of the world wonders I've seen so far. It's a site so awesome, it seems to have been created by an ingenius marketing agency. Not only does it have some cool buildings carved in stone, it has vast red canyons and mountains ripe for hiking. And it's within walking distance from an easygoing Jordanian town, yet it still manages to feel hidden from the world.

Since then I've been in Jerusalem. I came here planning to meet a friend, Shoshana, who I hadn't seen since 7th grade. That was far out on its own. But in addition to meeting her I fortuitously ran into a guy who I'd been running into fortuitously run into for years in Albany (at the Western Wall!), a house full of absurdly hardcore Zionists, as well as a hippie Orthodox rabbi who talked me into staying in Jerusalem for the first day or two of a class he's teaching, for free.

I'm continuing to read Tom Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, which I stole from Neot Semadar, and it keeps the place in perspective for me. Sometimes I feel like the only Jew in Jerusalem who would even pick up the book, but I'm probably over-generalizing.

And, to remind myself of the rest of the world that I also enjoy, I went to the websites of the Digital Film Academy as well as CELTA. And I remembered that, yes, I have a future, although it doesn't seem to have started yet, that doesn't involve adventures in ultramodernized ancient lands.