RORY GALLAGER, AN IRISH CYCLONE

Fall 1968 in Lausanne, Switzerland. I'm taking my first course in marketing and advertising at the École des Cadres.

There's a new club in town, this dull, straight, boring and bourgeois Swiss town. It's callad the Electric Circus. Some kind of a niche gathering for all the rich freaks, mainly foreign students like myself. And they're having live music as well.


And boy, what music! They made up and agreement with some English agency that every Saturday evening sends a different English newbie band to promote themselves abroad.


So, free gigs, psychedelia and great stuff too. Renaissance, the Free, Toefat, the Climax Blues Band, just to mention a few names.


And most of them guys, apart from being great musicians also were extremely nice, open and friendly people. The kind of person you'd like to be friends with, I mean.
But perhaps the fact of me being the singer and harmonica player in a local blues band was some sort of a reference, making some kind of a peer out of me.


However, most of the time the band and I, notably Kurt Müller, the piano player, we're hanging around with the bands and very often we'd jam too.

Kurt, a 16 years old kid at the time, now a well known sculptor, coud boogie just like an old spade in a barrelhouse, Memphis style.


So we keep on making friends with people bound to become famous, or like Keith Relf from Renaissance, who already is, being a founding members of the Yardbirds.


OK, all the intro to give you a taste of the kind of atmosphere we were in.
Then he showed up. The band, Taste, the leader, singer and lead guitar, straight form Cork, co. Cork, Ireland, Mr. Rory Gallagher himself.

A real surprise to me. Most likely one of the best gigs I've seen until then. Rory really could play them blues.

We all knew Cream (they were about to disband the that same year), Hendrix (he was still alive then) or others like Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck, but Rory was something different. To me he was a cyclone packed with skill, punch and emotions.

But let's go in order. And I try to offer you the videos in the same order I remember the songs, but you'll excuse me if some are not in the proper order. After all, almost 40 years are gone since that night.

The videos are from different eras and different shows off course, but the song are the ones they played that night.

It all began with an act by Dorris Henderson, and american half black-half indian folksinger accompanying herself on the autoharp. Mot much to say but GREAT!

Unfortunately, there's very little to find on the net about her on the Web. I managed to recover this photograph from her late years.


Then, with Ron Henderson, Dorris' husband doing the light show, Taste began. their gig.