Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
A Calling Card from the past, the unexpected reminder of how your first introduction went and the abiding memories that stir, that reason, that plot with generous heart to return the smile of chance encounter or inspired reunion to your face; such is the power of music, of art overall, that we forget just how important such experiences are.
Selected from a series of gigs that accompanied the 1976 studio album release, Calling Card, Check Shirt Wizard – Live In ’77 is an album of understated pomp, unknowingly regal and simmering, silent panache that arguably has captured the great man at his most elegant and commercial best.
The virtuoso who stands in the temples of the unreservedly intense and hauntingly serene will always find themselves in exulted company, and yet the credit placed at the door of Rory Gallagher perhaps, like Peter Frampton and Steve Rothery, does not quite seize the point of their prolific and indeed sensual guitar work. Yet as the listener steps into the sound laid down at the door of the four venues to which the cuts and mystery appear, The Brighton Dome, Sheffield City Hall, The Hammersmith Odeon and Newcastle City Hall, they can, regardless if they are long-term aficionado or curious dipper into the Blues realm, piece together the puzzle and enigma that comes from the very essence of one of Ireland’s most enduring, and endearing, figures.
Time can either extend a person’s greatness, or it can diminish the love that was once held in abundance, regret of the shadows falling over the heroic scales reached, not out of spite, but realism, because the need for the leading light is an ever-consuming battle that is hardly ever truly won.
However, and with sincere illumination, songs such as Moonchild, Secret Agent, A Million Miles Away, Out On The Western Plain, Walk On Hot Coals, Too Much Alcohol, Souped-Up Ford and the finale of Country Mile, all give that extra, upbeat, and tantalising thrill that comes with meeting a stranger for the first time, but then understanding you have known them all your life.
The force of exuberant Blues is not to be dismissed, and Check Shirt Wizard-Live In ’77 is a piecing together and beautifully joined reminder of just what lay under that check shirt, what colossal music inspired brain, with all its trappings and excess captured for all time in amber, truly brought tot the live stage in which he was the gifted son of Blues, in which the Wizard held the assembled court spellbound.
A stunning illustration of Rory Gallagher in his natural environment, a distinctive and unbound pleasure that none surely would have known was coming.
Rory Gallagher’s Check Shirt Wizard – Live in ’77 is released on Friday 6th March on Chess/UMC.
Ian D. Hall