The 1970s guitarist The Edge said influenced everyone: “He left us too soon”
There are countless guitarists out there to this day who are trying to figure out what the hell The Edge was doing on those classic U2 albums.
He never claimed to be one of the greatest guitarists to ever walk the Earth by any stretch, but when listening to him perform, a lot of the greatest moments of any U2 song come from him using the delay effects perfectly whenever one of their songs starts. It was all about finding the next innovative sound every time he worked with someone new, but he was still in debt to the massive rock and roll guitarists that came before him.
Then again, The Edge wasn’t looking to make U2 into a band of virtuosos by any stretch. Most of them looked down upon the prog rock bands that tried to play a million notes per second, and some of the best music that they had ever heard was born out of the punk tradition. It was all about dismantling what rock and roll was all about and paving the way for something new, and The Edge was already well ahead of the curve when he started listening to bands like The Clash for the first time.
This was what music sounded like if it were used as a form of revolution, but that didn’t discount the blues geniuses that had come before, either. Eric Clapton already sounded like he was on another planet when he was performing with Cream, and even for a band that seemed to be larger than life, Jimmy Page always kept Led Zeppelin anchored to the ground with every single classic riff he pumped out.
But for someone who grew up in Dublin, Rory Gallagher was absolutely essential for The Edge when he first picked up a guitar. Other guitarists may have had a lot more notoriety or reinvented the way that many of us looked at the instrument, but the reason why Gallagher became famous had more to do with the intensity and the passion that he put into every single note that he played.
Some of the licks that he was pulling out felt like the punk version of what a blues guitarist was supposed to play, and when looking at old footage, you can practically feel him feeding off the audience. The record labels may not have wanted to promote him the same way that they did for bands like Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones, but The Edge figured that every guitar player knew the truth about Gallagher’s playing.
While he never claimed to be anywhere near as good as his idol, The Edge felt that every guitarist was taking notes when they first heard him perform, saying, “Rory Gallagher was the man for any music fan from Ireland in the mid-1970s. Especially for someone like myself who was trying at the time to master the electric guitar. He was a hard act to follow. He had an ease and command that was enviable. He left us too soon but his legacy is evident in the number of young guitarists who are drawn to his music.”
Is there any way that The Edge was going to pull off a Gallagher lick whenever he played? Hell no. The whole U2 enterprise would crumble to the ground if he tried to do that, but it’s not like he wasn’t capable of making something outside the norm. He was drawn to Gallagher’s energy more than anything, and that meant trying to make songs that had a bit more punch to them than your average rock and roll song.
You can get a lot of that inspiration from punk rock, obviously, but Gallagher was a different artistic plane than what everyone else was doing. He wanted to show everyone how much fun can be had on the instrument when you put your whole heart into it, and judging by what The Edge did with his effects, he seemed to be having just as much fun layering all of those sounds on top of each other.
