Top 35 Rory Gallagher Quotes

The best slide guitar, unless you’re playing the Muddy Waters-style, is the old ’52 Goldtop Les Paul.

I started on acoustic guitar after I heard Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy.

My favorite lineup is just a trio, because then every night you can improvise and change the repertoire. Keyboards and brass can be great, but it puts you in a different ballgame because you’re not quite as free. You have to stick to the arrangement of the song.

I could bear being in the charts and being on everyone’s car radio 10 times a day. I’m just terrified of… a lot of people I respect have done it with a real little ‘ditty’ and that was the end of it – that was all they were ever known for.

Obviously, I would like to play to bigger audiences and have a bit more success, but not if I have to commercialize.

It’s dangerous not to tour, because people assume you’ve faded away, or have no interest.

After writing quite a few songs now, I have not a method but a way of being patient with a couple of verses or a certain set of chords. I can match them up quicker now than I used to. The one thing you do improve is songwriting.

In my opinion, the P-90 is the best pickup for slide – it has the right overtones.

I’m a great listener – I play records all the time at home. And I play guitar as a hobby. So inspiration has never been a big problem for me, but motivation can be a bit difficult sometimes.

I’ve never commercialized my music. I’ve seen that ruin too many people who think two-minute ditties are the answer.

As a kid, I loved any guitarists, whether it was Elvis Presley, Lonnie Donegan, Chuck Berry or even the cowboy guitarists like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The image of the guitar appealed to me.

I enjoy some nights in the studio. I’m not the greatest person in an enclosed space; I’m a live player by birth – like a gypsy folk player, I just sit in the corner and play.

I kept playing blues-based music all during the 1980s, and it was tough.

There was nobody in the city I came from – Cork, Ireland – that I could link up with to teach me the guitar.

Playing live is my natural element. It’s too hard to relax in the studio because there are too many options. It’s just not as exciting.

I’ve never been that career conscious.

I didn’t grow up working on 24-track – the first two Taste albums were eight-track and we always had tracks left over – we couldn’t believe it, either!

I’ve had too many opportunities to sell out.

I think rock should always stay a little bit outside the pale; I think it should remain a little bit dangerous – a little bit ornery, as the Americans say.

Ideally, I’d really like to put my own stamp on things, but it takes years, you know, and you’re constantly learning and studying and falling in and out with your instrument, learning different approaches and different attacks.

Basically, I like anything with guts – Lead Belly, Bill Big Broonzy, Johnny Winter, the Stones.

If anything, even though I can play in the sort of standard string-bending style, in the B.B. King mold and all of that, I’ve always had a great interest in the more primitive playing, the open chord playing, rhythm and figures.

I didn’t even have a record player as a kid, so everything was down to radio.

I like a nice rumble on bass, openness on guitar and drums that breathe.

I won’t squander my credibility, whatever that is, just for one silly song.

All I really want to do is play, that’s all that matters. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to cultivate an image. Everything has been on instinct. The flannel shirt and jeans, for example… those are the clothes I wear. If I wore anything else on stage, I wouldn’t feel comfortable.

You can play slide on any guitar, but to be serious about it you have a tough set of strings, otherwise you don’t get the full attack – you can’t dig in.

The strange thing is I can’t play jigs or reels or any of that traditional Irish stuff as well as I ought to, whereas I think I have got a good ear for blues, the tonality of it and so on.

In the first band I was ever in, we all had to wear a matching grey suit. I hated that.

Basically, I try to treat the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar. What you have to do is attack the instrument and know that your feelings aren’t controlled by the controls of your guitar.

I see music as a lifetime affair.

The difficulties people have with me are purely musical things, never personality things. But, you know that’s just the way it goes. I like to get things right!

Lonnie Donegan and the folk movement were responsible for a lot of the spread of the blues in England. The group Them with Van Morrison was a big influence on me, too, as were The Stones; The Yardbirds, John Mayall, and the other British blues pioneers.

Touring doesn’t have to be a harried, cliched way of life.

I liked Slash. He’s a nice guy and can really play.