'95 Per Cent of Tone Is in the Player'

How Eric Gales is taking one of electric guitar’s oldest art forms and reimagining it for a new generation

- By Jonathan Horsley. Photographs by Katrena Wize and Getty

The blues has been appropriated by every style of popular music but maybe it’s time for pop culture to repay the favour. Maybe it’s time for the blues to consume those styles and put them in a different context. If so, Eric Gales is the man to do it. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he is a player of catholic tastes and an uncanny ear for incorporating alien styles back into the realm of electric blues. With each passing release, it’s like he is redesigning the future of the art form, augmenting it with licks and phrases gleaned from funk, jazz, rock, Eric Johnson, Andrés Segovia – from whomever catches his attention.

Gales’ new studio LP, Crown - produced by blues-rock’s premier production duo Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith - is an eclectic piece of work that torpedos the received wisdom that blues exists only inside a I-IV-V progression. It’s iconoclastic. There’s a hip-hop sensibility to how Gales deploys his styles, like he has a channel switcher. This is the record you play to those who say the blues is an archeological musical endeavour, that the best music has already been made. But what goes into a style like this?

RAW INGREDIENTS

If mastering Eric Gales’ flamboyant playing style is a task akin to scaling Everest in a pair of Dunlop Green Flash, it is some consolation knowing that amassing a rig to give you a Raw Dawg tone is eminently more achievable. Gales’ sound on record is all spanky Strat-style cleans, meticulous, detailed, with a raunchy, juicy overdrive when he engages blues-rock mode and takes aim for the centre of the sun. Crown was recorded with his signature Magneto RD-3 S-style electric going into a tried and trusted setup.