San Francisco Blues

Out of the blue, into the back catalogue. Except, what we’re talking about here will come as a complete surprise to most rock ’n’ roll fans: a new, old Rory Gallagher record. That’s right. Notes From San Francisco is a fully-fledged, never-before-issued 1978 studio album, no less, by the late and indisputably great Rory Gallagher. That it is being released now, with a bonus CD featuring an unreleased San Francisco live show from 1979, makes it all the more intriguing a proposition. The album, which is available in several versions including a deluxe package, is also issued on a triple vinyl set, mastered from the original analogue multi-tracks.

So where did it come from? And why has it surfaced now? Therein lies a story. Certainly, many die-hard fans of Rory’s were aware of the existence of a Rory Gallagher album that had been recorded, mixed and subsequently scrapped. But few expected it ever to see the light of day – especially given that Gallagher himself had effectively disowned it soon after it was recorded. But after lying in the vaults for over thirty years, Notes From San Francisco finally hits the shops on Friday June 3. It is a very special rock ’n’ roll occasion indeed...
The story of the great lost Rory Gallagher album begins in November 1977, when Rory and his band flew to San Francisco from Japan, where they’d just completed the final date of a world tour. They were in the States to begin work on a new album, the follow-up to Calling Card, with acclaimed American producer, Elliot Mazer. Mazer had been the guiding force behind a string of classics, including Neil Young’s albums Harvest and Tonight’s The Night, Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills and he had worked with Bob Dylan, The Byrds, The Tubes and Linda Ronstadt, among others. When the Irish guitar legend arrived in the studio, Mazer had just completed work on one of the greatest live albums of all time, The Band’s The Last Waltz. The scene was set, you might have reasoned, for an all-time Rory classic.
THAT LOST IN TRANSLATION FEELING
The recording of what would become Notes From San Francisco was intended to mark a change of emphasis for Gallagher, who had enjoyed massive success in Europe throughout the ‘70s. Rory’s brother and manager Donal Gallagher recalls the thinking behind the ‘West Coast album’.
“Chrysalis, our label at the time, wanted an ‘American’ album, one that was much more radio-friendly — or more AOR if you like — than Rory’s previous work,” he explains. “That was the intention anyway. They felt this could be the big one and they needed us to be on their doorstep, as it were, recording it, so they could visit the studios and rate the progress of the sessions. The general feeling was, ‘Here’s a guy who can sell out three nights in Winterland down the road and yet the attention he’s getting in the media or on the radio in the US isn’t anywhere near what it should be’. I got the feeling that there was a lot at stake for
everyone involved.”
According to Donal, there was already a strong bond of friendship between Rory and Elliot Mazer, going back almost a decade.
“We’d known Elliot since about 1970 when he came to Europe with Jake Holmes, an artist he had produced and who was a guest act on the last Taste tour. Rory was always interested in finding out more about American music and he and Elliot hung out together a lot, chatting late into the night. When the decision was made to do an American album, naturally Elliot’s name came up and we decided to work with him. I was more or less there for the duration of the sessions, though I spent a good bit of time down in LA, at Chrysalis, trying to get the company, and the wider industry, behind Rory.”
For Elliot Mazer, it was a project he was more than happy to be involved in. He had a huge regard for Gallagher as an artist and had become a close friend of the Corkman.
“Rory was an unbelievable live performer; the guy was a magician onstage,” he enthuses. “He loved American music, everything from rock ‘n’ roll to R’n’B, and Memphis/Muscle Shoals soul. He was steeped in the blues but he loved white rock ‘n’ roll too and worshiped people like
Eddie Cochran.”
By the time Rory and his band arrived in San Francisco to begin the sessions (which ran from November ‘77 to March ’78, with a short break for Christmas), all of the songs were chosen, with rough demo versions already laid down.
“Rory knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish,” Mazer recalls. “He was very focused and my job, as I saw it, was about getting good bass licks and amazing guitar and vocal performances. I’d listen to the stuff and made suggestions, like, ‘maybe we need more second guitar here or some horns or piano there’. The idea was that each song would be treated as a song, which was a slightly different way for Rory to record than he’d been used to. I even set up a tape machine and playback system in his apartment, which was not something I did often. It was a special case with Rory – I wanted to get feedback from him as we
went along.”
However, not long into the sessions, Donal Gallagher says he became aware that a bug had entered the system. Something was niggling at Rory.
“Relatively early on, I got an indication from Rory that he wasn’t satisfied with the studio and that he was a bit upset that there were technical breakdowns with the equipment. He might be in the middle of a take and discover that something needed to be fixed. What had happened, I think, is that Elliot had ripped out the studio and brought it to the Winterland to record The Last Waltz and then brought it back and re-built it. I remember these concerns were voiced to Elliot at the time.”
Nor was that the only source of Rory’s
growing anxiety.
“Also,” Donal continues, “you had Rory, the bandleader who now had somebody else in charge in the studio. And that didn’t sit well with him. Plus, he’d just come off a world tour and he was in that Lost In Translation kind of jet-lag zone, with all the disorientation that comes with it. Rory was inclined to work all night, non-stop. He was listening to mixes from the night before, first thing in the morning, before breakfast. You couldn’t discipline Rory to take it easy. I tried to do it but I couldn’t.”
MAKING UP A LIE TO COVER THE CRACKS
As far as Elliot Mazer is concerned, the recording sessions went well and he believed he had a potentially great album on his hands. It wasn’t until it came to the mixing process that, for him, cracks began to appear.
“We finished the record but because of the pressures of time, we had to go straight from recording to mixing. I was mixing it as I would any song-oriented record, but I could see that Rory was thinking, ‘this doesn’t sound like me’. He was torn between how he saw himself and what the record was saying
about him.
“Then the Sex Pistols played at Winterland,” Mazer adds, “and he and I and a bunch of other people went along. It freaked him out.”
The arrival of punk was a divisive moment in rock ’n’ roll history, which challanged people to define themselves in a particularly stark light. Rather than leaning in the direction of gaining more exposure on American radio, Rory’s reflex to seeing the Pistols in action was to recoil to basics.
“They couldn’t play,” Elliot Mazer says of the Pistols, “but Rory saw the incredible energy they had and it brought him back to how he started. He had been very successful at being a rock guitar player and didn’t feel this record represented what he wanted to be. At one point during the mixing he’d looked at me and said, ‘I don’t like the way the hi-hat sounds’ which I thought was odd. Then he walked out of the studio – and I never saw him again.”
Meanwhile, with the planned release date getting closer, Donal and Rory headed to LA, where 53 record executives – one from every state in the US – had been flown in for a playback of the new album. Donal: “I went to Rory’s room for a quick chat beforehand and I asked him to hand me the vinyl demo of it, so I could take it up to the record company. He just said, ‘no you can’t play them anything – no one is going to hear it’. I said, ‘Can I just play a few tracks and we can sort out any problems with it later?’ I was pleading with him at this stage, telling him, ‘We can’t let all of these people down’. But he just held the record up and threw it into the bin.”
Who knows in how many different ways history might have hinged on that dramatic moment? The album was literally binned by Rory. And Donal was confronted with a dilemma.
“It was an impossible situation,” he recalls. “There was no right or wrong thing to do, but I went up and faced the music and made up some lie about the demonstration record being faulty and that we needed a few more weeks to finish it off. I was buying time, to be honest, but it seemed hopeless. It was devastating.”
The bad moon kept on rising. It was as if the entire project was jinxed.
“Later, I went back to the hotel,” Donal recalls, “and heard that Rory had been rushed to the Mount Sinai Hospital. They told me there’d been an accident in the street, but I had no way of knowing how serious it was. He arrived back with his thumb in plaster – he’d caught it a car door.”
In the short term, news stories about Rory’s injury might distract people from wondering where the record was. But with the album’s release now in jeopardy and the immediate future of Rory’s career uncertain, the two brothers departed LA and headed for home.
“I really felt it was a terrible low and the depression became contagious,” Donal says. “I remember packing my bags with my tail between my legs, not knowing where to go with this. Apart from everything else, it was a massive financial hit, costing us close-on $200,000 plus the accommodation and flight costs. When we got back to Cork we had a meeting, which was unusual. I was always looking for time with Rory to get an agenda going, but never could get him to sit down. On this occasion, we walked around the garden and he told me he was getting rid of the band. It was another sucker punch – now we had no band to
record with.”
HOW AN OLD FLAME WAS REDISCOVERED
For his part, Elliot Mazer says he was “shocked” when he heard the album wouldn’t be released.
“I felt all along that Rory was pleased with what we were doing. I’d made a record that I thought was phenomenal and I wanted it to be huge. I love selling records. I don’t know of a record producer who doesn’t. It was a real turning point for everyone, including me. I sold my studio shortly afterwards.”
For Donal, it was a question of picking up the pieces, as best he could.
“Not long after we returned from the States, I’d had to go over to Cologne to work with the Rockpalast people and I felt there was a home-from-home kind of atmosphere over there, which was good. I talked to Rory who’d found Ted McKenna, and to Gerry McAvoy – and they came over to Cologne as a trio to record what became the Photo-Finish album, the title of which was a kind of criticism of the way the other album was rushed. Some of the songs from the San Francisco sessions were re-recorded and the album did well.”
Rory Gallagher would soon recover from this temporary artistic and commercial crisis. He went on to release half-a-dozen more albums and to scale new heights in terms of his pan-European popularity, before his untimely death in 1995 at the age of just 47. Meanwhile, the San Francisco album was shelved indefinitely and would remain so for the next
thirty years.
“It was sitting there in the archives and as far as I was concerned it would stay there,” Donal Gallagher confesses. “But not long ago I allowed Daniel, Rory’s nephew and my son, to have a listen to it. He’s a guitar player and he has a good ear and I felt maybe he could open it up with a new mix and perhaps correct a number of technical problems.
“When he’d finished, I listened to the playback and it was much better from an instrumentation point of view than I remembered. For instance Joe O’Donnell, who we’d brought over to San Francisco, played some tremendous, almost heavy metal violin. And there was a Mexican sax player who played a soprano and tenor sax simultaneously – it almost sounded like a showband brass section (laughs).”
However, Donal still wasn’t convinced that the album should be released in its own right.
“I thought, some of these tracks have been re-recorded anyway, and so I don’t necessarily see this as a standalone album. But we found these old multi-tracks of live shows recorded at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco shortly after the session and I thought ‘why not pair the two recordings?’ I hadn’t really listened to those shows in all that time – but they were fantastic. In fact, some of the criticism I’ve had from the European press, when promoting this release, is: ‘Why have you kept this live album hidden for so long?’ Some even say it’s on a par with Irish Tour 74. So, for better or worse, you now have the studio album and what Rory did a few months later with the raw energy of a new line-up.”
For Elliot Mazer, finally hearing Notes From San Francisco confirms his initial instincts that it was always a great album.
“When I first heard it after all these years, I was in tears,” he admits. “I think over the years Rory told Donal that he wanted it to come out eventually and I’m glad that it has. The energy and the vibe of the sessions are all there. I love ‘Fuel To The Fire’ – it’s a sad song and it sounds dark and deep but it really is Rory playing at his very best. Songs like ‘Cut A Dash’ and ‘On The Tiles’, are the two rough mixes I gave to Rory back then.”
The quality of the finished product suggests that maybe Rory was too close to it all, to see the wood from the trees. If the album had been finished and released, well, a whole new avenue might have been opened
up. But who knows? There is no point in second-guessing history.
“With hindsight, perhaps if Rory and Elliot had had the chance to spend time together to tease out exactly what each of them wanted, it might have worked out,” Donal avers. “I think Rory, in his heart of hearts, knew it would have been better doing it like a songwriter’s album, but with American session musicians, instead of his road band. In many ways, both the studio and the live tracks tell the full story of that period. And in a bizarre way, this album could be the one that gets more attention than any other
Rory album.”

Notes From San Francisco is released on June 3 on Sony