no details yet...

Anyone know what this is? I am not familiar with it.

No idea, I thought I had everything Rory did.

On his website, there is a detailed description of these two discs. One studio, one live.

I'm lazy! Is this unreleased material, or a gh?

One disc is studio recordings from 1977-78 that were not released at the time. Some of the songs later appeared on Photo Finish, I believe. The second disc is a live recording from 1979, probably from the same shows that produced the Stage Struck album.

Thanks! I may be in, depending on price.

Does anyone know if there is any difference between the UK & USA editions? Amazon.UK is calling the UK set "Limited Deluxe Edition" with 24 tracks. Amazon USA still has no info although it's apparently coming out in the USA on 5/17 & in the UK on 6/6.

UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004T6OEHG/?tag=imwan-21

Disc: 1
1. Rue The Day
2. Persuasion
3. B Girl
4. Mississippi Sheiks
5. Wheels Within Wheels
6. Overnight Bag
7. Cruise On Out
8. Brute Force & Ignorance
9. Fuel To The Fire
10. Wheels Within Wheels (alternative)
11. Cut A Dash
12. Out On The Tiles
Disc: 2
1. Follow Me
2. Shinkicker
3. Off The Handle
4. Bought And Sold
5. I'm Leavin'
6. Tattoo'd Lady
7. Do You Read Me
8. Country Mile
9. Calling Card
10. Shadow Play
11. Bullfrog Blues
12. Sea Cruise

USA
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OR1X6A/?tag=imwan-20

This does look like a must buy, my only ? is whether there's anything exclusive on the UK edition not on the USA.

This does sound great but I'll wait until there's further confirmation on the tracklisting.

One CD that must be considered if you are a Rory Gallagher fan is -

Rory Gallagher
The Beat Club Sessions
Released: 13 September 2010
Label: Eagle

I play this a lot, fantastic live versions of his early 1970s classics.

Thanks for the head's up, I wasn't aware of that one!

Eagle Rock will release Rory Gallagher's lost 1978 studio album as a special 2-CD set called Notes from San Francisco, next Tuesday May 17. Here is the background: The story goes that Jimi Hendrix was once asked what it was like to be the greatest guitarist in the world, to which he replied, "I don't know, go ask Rory Gallagher!"
Rory Gallagher (1948-1995) is simply one of the all-time guitar greats. Slash, The Edge, Brian May, Johnny Marr, Janick Gers, Ritchie Blackmore, Glenn Tipton and Vivian Campbell have all said it. Since practically inventing the Power Trio format in Taste (both Cream and Taste debuted in 1966), Gallagher's music has stood the test of time and he's as popular now as he ever was, his influence gargantuan.

The story of Rory's lost San Francisco album actually starts in Japan. In November 1977, after a grueling six-month world tour, the band flew straight from their last show in Japan to San Francisco to begin working on a new album with famed American producer Elliot Mazer (who worked on Neil Young's Harvest, Big Brother & The Holding Company's Cheap Thrills and The Band's The Last Waltz). Mazer recalls the sessions grew "tense," as Gallagher thought the mixing process "too complicated." By the end of January 1978, he had shelved the whole record and broke up his band of the past five years.

Fast forward to 2011 when Rory's brother/manager Donal allowed his son Daniel to recover the album from the Gallagher archive and begin the process of mixing it with his engineer. Rory said in 1992 he hoped the album would surface one day but only if it were remixed. Bingo. Hearing this historic never-before-issued studio album from a key period of Gallagher's career (the album that would have been released between Calling Card and Photo Finish) is the Holy Grail for Rory's fans.

CD #2 is another fabulous discovery: a blistering live album taken from four December nights in 1979 at San Francisco's The Old Waldorf. In the audience Van Morrison, on stage Rory Gallagher (guitar/vocals), Gerry McAvoy (bass) and Ted McKenna (drums). Daniel Gallagher chose to add the live side to highlight why Rory chose to shelve the studio album and reduce his band back down to a three-piece. Rory, after seeing The Sex Pistols at Winterland during final mixes for his own album, was struck by the stark drama and blunt primitivism of pure punk. "It was as close to Eddie Cochran as you're going to get,'' he enthused. He had been saying that he wanted to get back to what he called "meat'n'potato rock'n'roll," a stripped-back primal raw immediacy hearkening back to his Taste days.

A street has been named after him in Paris; a corner in Dublin; a statue in his Ballyshannon birthplace, where The International Rory Gallagher Tribute Festival is held. There's a Rory Gallagher Place and Rory Gallagher Music Library in Cork. Annual tributes are held in Germany and Japan. The man has sold in excess of 20 million albums. Notes From San Francisco [MSRP $17.98] will be a worthy addition to his canon.

Track Listing:

CD1
1. Rue The Day
2. Persuasion
3. B Girl
4. Mississippi Sheiks
5. Wheels Within Wheels
6. Overnight Bag
7. Cruise On Out
8. Brute Force & Ignorance
9. Fuel To The Fire

BONUS TRACKS
10. Wheels Within Wheels (Alt version)
11. Cut A Dash
12. Out On The Tiles

CD2
1. Follow Me
2. Shinkicker
3. Off The Handle
4. Bought And Sold
5. I'm Leavin'
6. Tattoo'd Lady
7. Do You Read Me
8. Country Mile
9. Calling Card
10. Shadow Play
11. Bullfrog Blues
12. Sea Cruise

Thanks

Looks like another CD I will need to add.
Sure is a lot of stuff coming out in a very short time.

Floyd, Queen etc etc

I actually thought I posted a question here yesterday regarding the two other versions of this - there are 3 different versions of this on Amazon - but I must be losing my mind since I don't see any comments by me in this thread now.

Anywho, to kind of answer Geff's questions, I believe all 3 versions have the same musical content, but the "limited edition" version ($17.99 on amazon) is a book type thing with a bunch of Rory letters/postcards/journal type thing and the one for $32.99 appears to be vinyl (either vinyl in addition to the CDs, or just vinyl alone, I'm not sure).

You can see images of the limited edition on Amazon now (I don't think they were there when I looked before), also on play.com and play.com lets you zoom in on it. It looks pretty cool and for only $4 extra I'd like to hold out and get that one.

I ordered the deluxe version, for the extra book and other info that is apparently included. I buy CDs these days not just for the music, I enjoy reading about how it all came about etc etc.
Rory Gallagher was also a true gentleman and an amazing musician.

When Rory Gallagher left us in 1995, he also left behind a rich body of work. From hard-hitting blues to tender acoustic music to R&B to Celtic influences, Gallagher was an engaging performer and an astonishingly gifted guitarist. His discography includes well over a dozen albums, between power trio Taste (beginning in 1969) and his solo works (from 1971’s self-titled album to 1990’s Fresh Evidence), but hardcore fans have long known about a mysterious lost record, an album which was recorded in the late ’70s but never released. That album has now seen the light of day as Notes from San Francisco via Eagle Rock Entertainment.

Gallagher said in 1992 that he would be happy to release the material some day, provided it was remixed, but it took until this year for Rory’s brother (and tour manager) Donal Gallagher to let the recording out into the world.

“Rory had always harbored the ambition to make an album in the States,” Donal says. “Through the early part of the ’70s with Polydor that dream hadn’t come to fruition, so when he switched labels in ’75 to Chrysalis, he had two albums that were a strong success but weren’t what you’d call chart breakthroughs.”

Rory had worked with a producer for the first time on Calling Card – Roger Glover of Deep Purple, in fact – but wasn’t entirely happy with the mix of that record, so the idea of tracking the follow-up in America was flown up the pole. Chrysalis had been working with producer Elliot Mazer (Neil Young, Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra) on a few other acts, and it just so happened that Mazer and Rory had hit it off during the final Taste tour a few years earlier.

“In the course of that tour, Rory wasn’t talking to too many people,” Donal says. “The band had already split up, and were doing a farewell tour. So Rory spent his time with Elliot.”

Musically, Rory was very into American music, from Muscle Shoals to the blues, so he and Mazer had a lot to talk about.

Finally, in 1977, it was proposed that Rory would record an album with Mazer in San Francisco. So at the end of a year-long world tour, and without so much as a couple of days off in between, Gallagher and his solo band arrived at Mazer’s studio in San Francisco to begin work on the album which he hoped would capture some of the American musical spirit that he so admired.

“Parallel to this, Rory was experimenting a lot more with his guitars,” Donal says. “Replacement pickups were really coming to the fore in that period, and adjacent to Elliot’s studio was a guitar store called Star’s Guitars – I think they even shared a front door. So Rory was using a variety of guitars – more than he would use on previous albums. He was using a Gibson SG, for instance, so I think there’s probably a fatter pickup sound that gives it an edge.”

The album was due to be completed by Christmas ’77, but once the mixing started, the project had run into glitches and trouble.

“Rory wasn’t really happy with where the album was going,” Donal says. “After Christmas, Rory and I returned to San Francisco to do another set of mixes. But remix after remix, there was something radically wrong, in Rory’s view. He just wasn’t happy. So by mid-January, he decided he wasn’t going to go through with it.”

Donal says it’s hard to pin down exactly why Rory wasn’t happy with the work – after all, the performances and engineering certainly sound great today.

“Frankly, to my ears it sounded terrific,” Donal says. “Hindsight is a great thing, but I think the fundamental issue is that after that he split the band up. I don’t think it was because of their ability to musically play on the album, but I think that in Rory’s heart of hearts, the idea of doing an American album would be to work with American musicians.”

But non-stop touring had made Gallagher’s band a well-oiled machine that was firing on all cylinders and was socially well-integrated, so it was considered prudent (and probably cost-effective) to get the band into the studio straight away. And anyway, Donal believes Rory wouldn’t have had the courage to tell the band he wasn’t going to use them on the album.

“For every album that I remember him involved in, Rory would have post-natal depression,” Donal says. “So there was always an element of the mix not coming up to scratch for him, or things irritating him, but Rory was a workaholic. And the deadlines and pressure in those days always seemed to be so great. You had to have it recorded by this date, mixed by that date, pressed by this date and then you had to be out on tour by this date. And when you have your youth it just doesn’t seem like it, but when you stand back after all those years, it was absolutely nuts, going on the way it was!”

The album has now undergone the remix that Rory wanted, and has been bundled with a live album taken from four December nights in 1979 at San Francisco’s The Old Waldorf.

“Rory educated us to look after tapes,” Donal says. “We had the tapes baked a couple of times to make sure there was no moisture over the years, because I’d heard some horror stories, like one case where Elvis Costello had put all his tapes into a professional storage facility and they had deteriorated, so we knew that certain types of tapes were inclined to break up and shatter. So where we felt it necessary, we duplicated to a different source.”

Donal allowed his son Daniel to begin the process of mixing it with his engineer.

“People are going to say: if Rory’s not involved in this, then what am I doing?” he says. “But when I heard it after remixing, it sounded a lot better than I’d remembered it. Initially the mixes they were doing were very much ‘the guitar mix,’ because with Rory in the studio the guitar was in front of everything else – that’s just what you got! But I felt that with this album it was much more of a band album, because the keyboards and extra instruments were layered on, so I felt that maybe the way to go was to not worry too much about it being a guitar album – you don’t need to sell Rory as a guitarist to anybody – so let’s open the thing up, let the keyboards breathe, get what you can out of it, and let it all broaden out. Because, in effect, people are going to want to hear the produced album, at the end of the day.”

I guess I didn't update this thread with my comments on it.

I ordered the deluxe edition, it is a nice package.

My only complaint with it is that instead of trays for the CDs they are just crammed into these very tight sleeve things and very very hard to get them out - I have a devil of a time getting the live CD in/out. Would be easier if at least they cutout part of the edges to be able to get a grip on something. I am probably going to have to doctor mine or keep the discs in a separate case.

Music-wise this is great to have if you are a Rory addict (like me). I much prefer the band/arrangements of the same songs on Photo-Finish over these versions, but very nice to get to hear this stuff now. And the live show is killer. Amazing that something like this comes out unexpectedly so many years later, definitely a treat.