“I suppose that it keeps hammering at me, why didn’t we slow down?” Dónal Gallagher reflects. “Why didn’t we take life easy? It’s all those questions. But that was part of ‘Rory the Dynamo’. And probably that’s what happened when he was starting to get ill – the Dynamo kept going, but he couldn’t stop.”
But of course Dónal’s brother, Rory, one of the hardest-charging guitarists of all time, just didn’t work that way. And that, beyond all else, is the story told in Dónal’s new book, Edged In Blue, an autobiography of his life as sibling and road manager to one of the most influential guitarists of all time.
This book, by extension, is also the de facto first authorised biography of Rory himself: the man who inspired The Edge and Johnny Marr to play, who toured the world so intensely that there was barely a fleck of paint left on many parts of his famous ’61 Strat when he died in 1995.
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And what a story it was. The book contains stadium riots, parties so wild that the National Guard had to be called out to stop them, limousines overturned by cattle backstage with ZZ Top, Johnny Rotten scandalising nuns on a flight to Cork and coffins sneaked into Beat-era clubs as stage props.
It contains epochal encounters with a roll-call of musical legends from Muddy Waters to Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jerry Lee Lewis, Captain Beefheart, Elvis, Bob Dylan (who got turned away by mistake at Rory’s dressing-room door), U2 and scores more.
But more importantly it is a portrait of a man who, in some ways, remained a closed book, even to his brother, throughout his life. It’s the first authorised account of Rory and Dónal’s childhood in Derry and Cork and of their mother Mona’s courage and devotion in nurturing Rory’s extraordinary talent, even when the family could scarcely afford to buy guitars.
We run, with Rory, alongside JFK’s motorcade on the president’s 1963 trip to Cork and experience life on the colourful and sometimes violent showband circuit in Ireland in the 1960s. We look over Rory’s shoulder as he writes songs that would become legendary among fans, and see Belfast through the eyes of musicians playing there at the grim height of the Troubles.
Above all else, though, it is the story of two brothers, the remarkable woman who raised them, and how a Fender guitar in a shop window changed not only their lives but the path of music history in Ireland and beyond. It’s a lot to sum up, as Dónal freely admits.
We just kept pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing
Speaking of Rory’s early days in his first band, Taste, Dónal says it was obvious that Rory’s dedication to music was an almost sacred mission to him, even in the early days of his career.
“My mother would be like, ‘When are you coming home? Haven’t you done enough now?’ But Rory would say, ‘No, we’re only just starting this.’ I’d be missing my pals back in Cork… your day was completely upside down to what was a pleasant life back home. But we just kept pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing.”
This calling to music provides the continuous, vivid thread of their lives together that was only broken with Rory’s death and, in a sense, not even then. And Dónal was there to witness it all, from boyhood stage appearances together in Cork to becoming Rory’s roadie and then road manager throughout thousands of gigs and untold highway miles.
Dónal’s first sense that taking care of business on the road with his brother might become a serious career was when Taste was invited to support Blind Faith on tour in the States in 1969 – and, even then, it seemed there were no guarantees, he recalls.
“I didn’t know whether Taste were going to take me to the States in ’69 because I really felt that I’d be surplus to requirements – I thought that there’d be a communal PA system and Taste were a three-piece so there wasn’t so much gear – so I always made it look heavier and bulkier than it was [laughs]. But then when we got over there, you found out that basically Blind Faith’s production was really unsatisfactory, to put it that way. So you had to get stuck in.
“But it was a great way to bond and form friendships with their crew and the other musicians. I mean, at that time, Eric Clapton didn’t have his own roadie, though Steve Winwood had a guy who looked after his keyboard, and Mick Turner was looking after Ginger. But if you think of how many people would be required to stage an arena tour today, all the crew, catering, trucking companies and transport companies that would be involved… Back then it was just one bus.”
The book is also a salutary reminder that nobody, including management and the bands themselves, really knew the best way to go about touring continents back then.
Chaos often reigned, crowd control was dangerously poor, and long nights blending into endless motorway miles, with sleep a distant, fractured memory, were daily realities. For Dónal, touring as Rory’s roadie and seeing the world for the first time, all this was a baptism of fire.
“There was no-one there to tell you – you learned the hard way. But there was a certain luxury to the fact that somebody paid for you to get on a plane, like it was unheard of, you know? I mean, we were doing it for free virtually because you were just so honoured to be on the tour like this,” he recalls of that early milestone tour with Clapton and co.
Taste’s subsequent split and the beginning of Rory’s 40-year solo career – after an incandescent set at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 – marked the point at which Rory truly matured from a promising newcomer to the major stages of the national music scene into the man of musical destiny he was always meant to be.
“It was such an enormous thing at the time, certainly in terms of the size of the audience,” Dónal recalls. “We’d been slogging away, doing gig after gig in a transit van up and down the motorway into Europe, in and out and back and forth… and then we got a slot on the Friday night at the Isle of Wight and the band’s equipment got stolen the night before – or part of it was – out of the van.
“It was so chaotic, and the band had already decided to split up and decided that the Isle of Wight was the last gig. And there were allegedly over 600,000 people there, you know. We were thinking, ‘Will people even be able to hear the performance? Will people be able to see it?’
“But on the other hand, Rory was such a fan of all the other musicians around the festival that he was almost there just to watch Tony Joe White play [rather than just to perform with Taste]. So that was the great thing about Rory – he kept his feet on the ground. He was always about the music.”
That sense of mission was sometimes the only frayed cord that kept them tethered to sanity at times. The book recounts bandmates having onstage hallucinations brought on by sheer exertion and unforeseen obstacles, up to and including having trucks full of gear towed away by the production crew of a James Bond movie, all of which made Rory’s life maddeningly unpredictable at times.
“Rory had great leadership in that sense. He kept very cool,” Dónal says. “I mean, behind the scenes, he’d let you know what he was unhappy about. But you had to think on your feet. You had to improvise. I mean, again, it’s one of the stories in the book, but we’d arrived to do a show at the arena where Elvis Presley had done the Roustabout movie, and it was huge – it could hold 100,000 people.
“We arrived there and we’d been sent the day sheet to say Rory was on at 11, so we got there that evening and the promoter said, ‘Where are you going? You were supposed to be on at 11 o’clock this morning,’ and we laughed. I mean, Rory doesn’t play in the morning.
“So the promoter said, ‘Well, that’s it, guys. Sorry. Alice Cooper is closing the show, so there’s no room.’ And we’re kind of standing there thinking, ‘Christ, we’ve come all this way…’ But the guy took pity and he said, ‘Look, you can play to the audience on the way out. That’s all I can do for you now. I’ll give you a few bucks for your expenses.’
“So there was a bit of humming and hawing, but Rory straightway was like, ‘Fine, let’s do it.’ And I said, ‘Well as it happens they have a second stage, so we’ll be ready to go if everybody’s up for it.’ And, yeah, they tore the place apart.”
And that’s another common theme of the book. Encores that lasted hours. Legendary acts being scared to follow the force of nature Rory became when he hit the stage – a man who even had the power to save the world’s most disastrously chaotic festival on Bull Island by sheer stage presence and stamina. Because sometimes when Rory was tearing the place apart he was also, in a sense, holding it all together.
He was trading all the time and it was part of what all the guitarists like Jimmy Page did… they were vinyl collectors as guitar buyers…
This was never more true than when Rory later toured Ireland as a solo artist – including the North at the terrifying height of the Troubles – on his celebrated Irish Tour in ’74. Dónal argues that Rory’s family background made him uniquely placed to be a unifying force in music at a time when any common ground at all was bitterly hard to find.
“From our childhood, we had the experience of living in the North and understanding the social parameters and the differences and the subtleties and all that growing up. And it wasn’t alien to us to go back up North. And then we had the experience of being there from ’67 with Taste, actually living in Belfast. You could see the tensions rising then, but it was nothing like what turned into in the 70s, when it really went downhill, big-time. And then really very quickly, it had descended into war, really.
“So people on all sides appreciated the fact that you know Rory [had roots in the North as well as in Cork], and many of his musicians were from Belfast, too. I mean, if you look at various line-ups there was Wilgar Campbell, Lou Martin… They were all people from Belfast. So, in a way, Rory stands to, why wouldn’t I come back and play for these people? The real challenge was really for the promoter to get the venue and insurance to play there – or not get the insurance, as it might turn out.’”
What’s striking and, in the final analysis, tragic about the book is how little space Rory left in his life for any rest or private life. Recording and the road were his ruling passions and the book is partly so eventful because Rory, at least until the 1980s, very rarely took time to stop. Going hunting for guitars was as close as he got to a relaxing hobby, Dónal says.
“That was his downtime: going to Denmark Street and then getting to know the guys down in Denmark Street. Because he was trading all the time and it was part of what all the guitarists like Jimmy Page did… they were vinyl collectors as guitar buyers… that’s their downtime. It’s not like, ‘Oh, damn I have to go out and buy a new guitar because I’ve got to play the Albert Hall, what a terrible chore that’s going to be…’
“I mean, Rory couldn’t wait to get out the door and come back with something. But I suppose because of our kind of humble beginnings there was this guilt [about spending money on guitars] and so he would negotiate the best price he could.”
The book, of course, charts the tragic cost of Rory’s single-mindedness and his inability to accept the natural limits of the human body when put through the absolutely relentless demands of the road for too many years.
Although both Dónal and Rory observed periods of abstinence from drink, it was an ever-present palliative for fear of flying, and beer flowed like water in numberless backstage get-togethers.
But when back pains from shouldering heavy guitars, red-eye fatigue from far too many flights – and other side-effects of Rory’s relentless touring schedule – brought strong prescription painkillers and sedatives into the picture, the path to self-destruction had unwittingly begun and, sadly, that, too, is charted by the book, witnessed with love and a sense of helplessness through his brother’s eyes.
At the end of the day, if you haven’t got your health, it’s zilch
“And at the end of the day, it’s all about your health,” Dónal reflects of what writing the book brought to the surface for him. “If you don’t have your health, you have nothing. Doesn’t matter how many guitars you’ve collected, how much money you might have made, or how many records you put out.
“At the end of the day, if you haven’t got your health, it’s zilch. So I suppose the focus is very much back to that for me. And it is very cathartic in the sense that you think about what else you could have advised or influenced or tried [to help the situation]… that’s the hardest part. You say to yourself, ‘My God, why did I say that or do that or not say that?’ or whatever… and you can’t regret.
“But on the other hand, having left 30 years to [pass before beginning to write] the book, you’re able to reflect and then say, ‘Well, you see the counterbalance is his legacy’ – because it seemed after Rory died, it could have all just dissipated.”
And yet it never did. Partly that’s because Rory’s family – Dónal foremost among them – have worked incredibly hard to keep Rory’s music alive, through festivals, reissues of classic recordings and unearthed sessions, and even public art like the statue of Rory that was unveiled in Belfast last year.
But it is, ironically, the vital spark in Rory’s music – that volatile yet boundless creative energy that consumed him – that keeps people coming back to him. His charisma, his warmth and humanity as a writer, and that absolutely headlong, wild beauty to his guitar playing is what continues to captivate. 30 years on from his death, he’s playing encores.
