'It's about keeping Rory's music alive': Lost opportunities to secure Rory’s legacy

IF Donal Gallagher had his wish, nobody would be worrying about where his brother’s guitar should go, or how much it might cost, because Rory would still be playing it.

“If wishes came true, it would obviously be that Rory had never died, that he was still alive, touring and playing with his instruments. If you could have a wish, that would be it,” he tells The Echo.

Rory Gallagher ed away 29 years ago, at the age of 47.

In recent weeks, there has been some controversy about the planned sale of the blues master’s 1961 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster which was his constant companion since, at the age of 15, he persuaded his mother to buy it on hire purchase.

The purchase of the guitar at Crowley’s Music Centre on Merchant’s Quay — for what was then the king’s ransom of £100 — was a defining moment in Rory’s life.

RTÉ’s Liveline lit up when news broke that Rory’s Strat was to go on sale for an estimated £700,000 (€819,000) to £1m (€1.17m) in London later this year, and the guitar will likely fall into private hands.

Sheena Crowley, whose father Michael sold Rory the guitar in 1963, has set up a GoFundMe campaign called ‘Help Bring Rory Gallagher’s Strat Back to his Home Town’, and it has already raised more than €31,000 of its €1m target.

In recent weeks Tánaiste Micheál Martin spoke fondly of the small civic reception he organised for Rory Gallagher, back in 1992, when Mr Martin was Lord Mayor of Cork.

“I would love if we could [intervene to buy the guitar] — obviously, I will talk to [Arts Minister] Catherine Martin and see what’s possible, but it would be lovely if we could get that guitar back on Leeside,” the Fianna Fáil leader said.

However, Ms Martin said in recent weeks that any such purchase would be the business of Ireland’s national cultural institutions, adding that any comment on considerations of acquisition “could adversely impact on the outcome”.

When The Echo asks Donal Gallagher for a comment on the Tánaiste’s remarks, he declines, adding that he has “the utmost respect” for Mr Martin.

That desire to not to cause offence or to insult the Gallaghers’ adoptive hometown — Rory was born in Rock Hospital in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, in 1948, and Donal was born in the Bogside in Derry a year later — is a recurring note throughout the interview.

“I don’t want to point fingers, and Cork city was always good to us as a family, so the last thing I would want to do is dirty my own doorstep. I have total respect for Cork,” he says.

Donal adds he doesn’t want to get into a blame game, but for all of that, he struggles to hide his frustration, having spent nearly three decades trying to establish, in the city Rory loved, a permanent home for his instruments and memorabilia.

“What people have to understand is after Rory’s ing, the guitars were there, and originally the plan was the city library was to be developed and rebuilt five storeys high, with basement levels, across the library and the city car park, which was also to be redeveloped.

“The plan then was that the new library would open and the music section, named after Rory, would then house elements of the memorabilia and instruments,” he says. “I can’t what year that was, we’re going back to the very late ’90s at the latest.

“The plans for that are still on the drawing board.”

Other possible sites have been suggested over the years, but he feels the library “would have been ideal, but, put it this way, I haven’t heard anything since”.

He says that in 2005, when Cork was European Capital of Culture, he “went to extreme lengths to put an exhibition on” in the Cork Public Museum.

“I asked: ‘What would you like from Rory?’ and I assumed they would say ‘a guitar’ and they said ‘no, something small’, and I said ‘can you give me an indication, are you talking about a harmonica, then?’, because that was the size of the space they were affording it.”

Maybe, he muses, some people weren’t as emotionally attached to his brother in the immediate aftermath of his death, before “all the work that’s gone into Rory’s legacy, because his profile now is so strong that it has become emotional”.

He says he has made “umpteen visits into City Hall over the years”, and he recalls various plans which came to nothing. When the Camden Palace Community Arts Centre closed in 2017, there were hopes something might happen with shared premises in Shandon, with feasibility studies carried out.

“I had meetings with people doing European funding for City Hall, but in the end … that’s the last I heard of it.”

There were talks with City Hall and the Montreux Jazz Festival about a jazz café in the old Cork Savings Bank “and no-one gets back to me and the next thing you hear is UCC has got [the] building”.

He says he has “a list as long as my arm of the various locations I looked at, the flights I’ve taken to talk to people, and sometimes when you’re dealing with bureaucracy, they just don’t respond, or your email is stuck in their junk mail or some excuse, because they don’t necessarily maybe want to deal with the problem”.

He adds that this is not unique to Cork, saying he has had some negative experiences with museums in other jurisdictions: “There’s no guarantees what happens to instruments when you hand them over.”

The decision to sell Rory’s Strat was not taken lightly, Donal says, “but the reality is we’re after 25 years of insurance, storing, attempted thefts, you name it, [and] it’s not as if people didn’t know it was there.”

As to the idea of putting Rory’s Strat in a museum, perhaps one dedicated to Rory or to music, he cautions that there are few guarantees that doing that might work either.

“Right now, Belfast is looking for it, [as are] people in London, but also with the reality with rock museums and music museums, the big one at the Dome in London, that’s closed down, all the elements moved to Liverpool, the Beatles museum in Hamburg, which was a state of the art museum, that’s closed down.

“Fender built their own visitor centre in California, they invited me over to the opening, because they had ambitions perhaps that the Strat might one day feature, in fairness, being Fender and connected with the history of guitars, I thought, yeah, this might potentially be,” he says, pausing before he finishes the sentence, “but that’s closed down.”

He says he will feel an emotional tug when it goes, but he notes wryly: “I mean it’s not something I can hang over the fireplace”.

He tells the story of being on a show with Shadows founder Bruce Welch, who has the famous 1959 sunburst red Fender Stratocaster that Hank Marvin used to play, and urging Welch to get the guitar valued. Weeks later, he got a call from Welch.

“He said ‘I don’t know whether to consider you my worst enemy or my best friend’, and I said ‘why’s that?’.

“He said he had had no idea of the value of the guitar, and he said: ‘In one way, it’s kind of ruined it for me, I used to go to shows, put it behind the curtain after sound checks, and go and get a coffee or a beer somewhere, and come back and just grab the guitar.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t do that anymore’.”

Apart from the costs relating to storage, Donal says, instruments are made to be played.

“The fact that it has been sitting in a bank vault along with the other instruments, any good instrument person will tell you that even if it’s temperature controlled and all that, the best thing for an instrument is to be played and used and nurtured.

“As a guitar collector, and somebody who played the instruments, Rory didn’t collect them to just sit in guitar trunks forever.”

Anyway, he says, for all their importance, instruments are only that.

“The main aspect is Rory’s music, the music he wrote, and performed, and recorded, that’s what I’m about.

“There are plenty of places that ask me about guitars or have them put in bars or whatever, but I’m not in the business of running a bar, I’m not in the business of running a museum, I’m not in the business of doing that kind of thing.”

He lists off all the places he has exhibited Rory’s guitar, and he confesses to sleepless nights when it has been travelling: “I’ve exhibited Rory’s guitar in the Cork City Library, in Collins Barracks in Dublin, the Blue Stacks Festival up in Donegal, it was on show in Harrod’s, London’s Olympia, in Paris.

“Its last location was in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in America, it went out there for an exhibition, to have a run of so many months, it didn’t come back for three years, even though it was in a safe place, covid had intervened and people had changed positions.”

Licences have to be issued each time the guitar travels, he says, adding “the bureaucracy since Brexit hit is phenomenal between the European countries”.

Next year will be Rory’s 30th anniversary, Donal says, and “the conveyor belt of life is shoving me along too”, adding that he didn’t want to leave responsibility for the guitar to someone else.

“I’ve had to take very difficult decisions, but it’s about keeping Rory’s music alive.”

Even if the 1961 Sunburst Fender Stratocaster eventually does not return Leeside, Donal ends on a positive note, wishing only the best for the city that was such a loving home to the Gallagher family.

“Hopefully, we’ll find other things that can be done, particularly in Cork,” he says.

“Let see how things work out, and hopefully, if all our wishes and dreams came true, Cork city’s music library would have been built a long time ago.”

Asked for a comment, Cork City Librarian David O’Brien said: “Cork City Libraries are proud to have our music library named after Rory Gallagher and we welcome the opportunity to engage again with the Gallagher family at any stage to foster the memory of Rory and the tremendous contribution he made to music and the heritage of the city and beyond.

“Always open to collaborate and develop that process in any way we can.

“The door is always open,” Mr O’Brien said.