When Rory Gallagher (Almost) Joined The Rolling Stones
Source: Wiki Commons. Photo by Jan Slob. Rory plays for Utrecht in The Netherlands.
As the legend goes, when Jimi Hendrix came offstage after The Isle of Wight Festival he was asked “How does it feel to be the greatest guitar player in the world?” He responded with “I don't know. Ask Rory Gallagher.” However true this quote may be, Rory Gallagher was revered throughout the 1970’s and was Ireland’s first rockstar, inspiring the likes of Brian May from Queen, Slash from Guns ‘N’ Roses and fellow Irishman The Edge. Before Thin Lizzy, before U2, before The Cranberries, there was Rory Gallagher. And he was once asked to join The Rolling Stones.
Rory initially played in Irish showbands as a teenager, touring all across Ireland and the UK, and this gave him enough money to purchase his first-ever Fender Stratocaster. He then went on to form Taste, a blues-rock group that supported Eric Clapton’s Cream and played at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, so it’s not unlikely that Hendrix would be familiar with Gallagher’s music.
Taste soon split up and Rory went solo. Five years later, he was invited to Rotterdam where he would audition for a little-known group known as The Rolling Stones. As you may know, The Stones blew up in the 60’s but towards the end of the decade, their guitarist Brian Jones left the band due to drug problems and subsequently passed away. His replacement, Mick Taylor, had a successful stint up until 1974 when he too suffered from drug problems.
Mick Jagger picked up Gallagher from the airport, where they got a taxi to De Doelen Concert Hall, where he was set to have some jamming sessions with The Stones. Funnily enough, Jagger, the biggest rockstar on the planet at that time, tried to haggle the driver on the price of a taxi. Gallagher met the rest of The Stones with the exception of Keith Richards, who quite unsurprisingly, was reported to be ‘off his face somewhere’. This proved hugely unlucky for Gallagher, as to join The Rolling Stones you would surely need the approval of Richards, not least because he was the only other guitarist in the group.
Time was ticking, and Rory soon had to get back to London to catch a flight to Japan, where his tour of Asia was scheduled to begin. He didn’t want to let his audience down, so he just went straight up to where Richards was staying and found the rock legend passed out. Rory stayed up all night, checking every half hour to see if Richards had woken up, but he remained in his disorientated state for the whole night. Rory knew that it wasn’t to be, so took his guitar, got up, and left. Three months later, Ronnie Wood became their new guitarist from then on until the present day.
It’s still argued whether Gallagher’s heart was really in joining The Rolling Stones, and his solo career gave him more artistic freedom and independence. He never chased commercial success, so much so that he never even bothered releasing singles. Tony Clayton-Lea of The Irish Times described him as ‘a musician who loved the music for what it was and not for what he could get out of it; a man embarrassed by music biz backslapping; a man who, in the early stages of his rise to success, carried a change of clothes in a paper bag’.
Gallagher continued making music until the 1990’s and died of complications due to a liver transplant in 1995. Despite not working with Mick and Keith, Gallagher had an incredible solo career and his legacy lives on. He may not have become a Rolling Stone, but as their famous song goes ‘You can’t always get what you want’.
