The guitarist The Edge said would be remembered forever
The Edge didn’t join a band like U2 in the hopes of having a couple of decent hits on the charts.
He had followed in the footsteps of bands like The Clash, and their goal was always to make music that lasted for longer than any of them would be alive. Because at the end of the day, those songs could become hymns for what rock and roll used to stand for, but in the case of rock and roll guitar heroes, he would point you towards many other rock and roll heavyweights before looking at his own sound.
And when you look at the kind of musical innovations that The Edge has made, that’s saying a lot. No one since the likes of Jimmy Page has used the studio as an instrument whenever making a U2 record, and yet some of his greatest moments on the guitar don’t even include a proper solo. His use of delay has allowed him to tell stories with more substance than most singer-songwriters could, but that was always in service to his heroes telling those same kinds of stories.
Jimi Hendrix was practically calling on a higher power every single time he played one of his solos, and when listening to Eddie Van Halen, most people could be just as entertained sitting and watching him jam for a few minutes as they would be listening to the average Van Halen song. If there was one thing that united all of those giants under one roof, though, it was the blues, and The Edge was a student of the genre long before he even discovered his pedals.
After all, the biggest guitarists of all time were descended from blues artists. Robert Johnson could practically be called the real father of rock and roll before Chuck Berry started playing, and everyone from Keith Richards to Eric Clapton has been disciples of the blues, but as rock and roll began to spread out a little bit more, no one had the same kind of fury in their playing that Rory Gallagher had.
His legacy might be a bit more muted than the Hendrixes and Pages of the world, but what Gallagher did was no less influential than what either of them was doing. There were pieces of his sound that were a lot more pentatonic-based than others, but when you listen to him soloing in the right context, he had the same kind of energy that most people didn’t understand at the time. It was midway between blues rock finesse and the spirit of punk rock, and The Edge felt that was what people would remember about Gallagher.
He may not have had the highest profile, but what he did on the fretboard was unmatched in The Edge’s mind, saying, “In terms of his contribution to rock ’n’ roll in this country, he will always be remembered. He was the first. He was the guy who did it when it was unheard of in Ireland. A lot of the bands and artists that came after him really should thank him for preparing the way.”
And despite no one being able to truly copy what The Edge does live, there are pieces of U2’s catalogue that do owe a significant debt to what Gallagher used to do back in the day. The band weren’t going to invite their fans onstage or unleash hell whenever they performed, but if you listen to a song like ‘Love is Blindness’, the absolute torture that The Edge put his guitar through is all down to the way that Gallagher used to play when he was a little.
Because at the end of the day, the guitar is an emotional translator, and regardless of how many effects pedals people use, what gives every song its fingerprint is how one person’s hands approach the instrument. And in every Gallagher song, you can hear everything from excitement to pain to heartache, and that’s the kind of music that no one will ever be able to replicate properly.
