Eric Gales’ time is now. A rule-breaking, genre-fusing force of nature, hailed by giants like Joe Bonamassa, Dave Navarro and Mark Tremonti as one of the best guitarists on the planet, you’ll find the Memphis blues-rocker’s thumbprint on everything from his Grammy-nominated solo catalogue to the soundtrack of director Ryan Coogler’s smash-hit horror movie, Sinners.
Yet there comes a time when every musician must look their past squarely in the eye. And while Gales’ latest release, Tribute To LJK, is a thrillingly modern record for the here-and-now, it’s also a nod to his bloodline and the roots of his family tree. “This record has been a long time coming,” he says of the speaker-rattling release co-produced by Bonamassa and Josh Smith. “I wanted it to be the ultimate tribute to my late brother, Little Jimmy King, to keep his memory alive and make sure people remember who he was and still is. All of these songs except one are his originals. I wanted to deliver his tunes to the world, through my eyes. And I wanted it to be badass – and that’s exactly how it turned out.”
The blues is an ecosystem, and it’s a measure of the respect commanded by both Eric – and his fabled older brother, real name Manuel, who sadly passed away in 2002 – that these ten explosive covers are delivered by an all-star cast with deep ties to the project. “Buddy Guy and Little Jimmy played together, so he guests on the track ‘Somebody’,” explains Gales. “Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram has gone on record to say my brother was a big influence, so he’s on ‘Rockin’ Horse Ride’. They also both make pretty significant cameos in Sinners. So it all interweaves.”
To understand why Tribute To LJK might be the proudest moment of Gales’ meteoric career, you have to follow the thread back to the late-’70s and a hectic family home in Memphis, Tennessee. “I’m the youngest of five siblings, so I grew up with all my brothers and everybody played guitar,” he recalls. “Manuel was ten years older and it was a great to have him to look up to. I was so proud when he started his own band, got into his career and he was off to the races. And then, after all his years of grinding away at his craft, to hear that he was touring with Albert King’s band in the late-’80s was awesome.”
Eric turned out a fierce guitarist himself, taking chief inspiration from Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson, while developing a unique style sparked by flipping his right-hand Hagström electric so the thickest string was nearest the ground. “I just picked it up that way,” he shrugs.
And while Manuel made his mark in the world – graduating from King’s lineup to front his own ’90s outfit, Little Jimmy King & the Memphis Soul Survivors – Eric and his sibling Eugene signed to Elektra Records for 1991’s debut album, The Eric Gales Band. “I had a deal at 15 and the record came out when I was 16,” he recalls. “Even at that age, I already felt this was what I was gonna do in life.”
A supernova amongst the shoegazers of the grunge era, there was simply nobody like Gales on the scene, and he was saluted in Guitar World’s readers poll as that year’s Best New Talent. “We weren’t the typical I-IV-V blues group,” he reflects. “We were trying to set ourselves apart, to make people start talking. A 16-year-old black kid coming out playing blues-rock and wailing: that just wasn’t happening at the time. And I didn’t see it happen again until Kingfish came around. I think The Eric Gales Band definitely left our mark on the world.”
Joining Carlos Santana onstage at Woodstock ’94 felt like a baton passed between two generational guitar players, before a trio release with Manuel and Eugene as The Gales Bros – 1996’s Left Hand Brand – brought further acclaim. His solo career got cooking with 2001’s That’s What I Am, and by 2004, when the Experience Hendrix Tour went national, there was no-one more qualified to reimagine Jimi’s classic material. “Man, everybody involved in that was there because we were massive fans of Jimi,” he recalls of his stinging takes on ‘Purple Haze’ and more.
Yet the millennium brought challenges, too. In 2002, Manuel died of a heart attack aged just 37 (“It hit me hard, man. It’s still not easy that he’s no longer here”). As for Eric, he recalls a string of “wrong turns” that led to his 2009 incarceration at Shelby County Correction Center for possession of drugs and a handgun. “It was my own decisions that led to that,” he admits. “You end up doing things like that, that’s where you’re gonna wind up. It didn’t kill me, but it was a very depressing time. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it did. I can’t go back and erase the past.”
Instead, he looked to the future. Everyone loves a comeback story, and Gales’ trajectory since those dark days has been dizzying. Revisit the past decade and you’ll find him working at superhuman pace, whether pushing his technique to the redline in 2013’s supergroup Pinnick Gales Pridgen or embarking on his acclaimed run of Mascot releases that include 2017’s Middle Of The Road (featuring Gary Clark Jr and Lauryn Hill) and 2019’s Billboard #1 The Bookends.
The lead single of 2022’s Grammy-nominated and chart-topping Crown album – ‘I Want My Crown’ – set out his mission statement. “After prison, early on, I felt like I had something to prove,” Gales considers. “But I no longer feel like that anymore. Now, I’m proud of what I do, and I keep moving forward.”
Working on Sinners, he says, was exhilarating (“I’m amazed that before I pass away, I get to hear some of my work on a movie screen”). But even after conquering Hollywood, there was still an itch to scratch. And as Gales blew into Nashville’s Curb Studios to record Tribute To LJK – with a crack band including MonoNeon (bass), Gerald Jenkins (organ/keys), Lemar Carter (drums), Lenesha Randolph (backing vocals) and Josh Smith (guitar), with horn arrangements from Calvin Turner – he already had a wishlist of classics to drag back into the spotlight. “We picked out some wonderful songs,” he says. “My brother was a straight-up blues artist. Me, I tap into a few other areas of the market. This record, it’s still classified in the contemporary blues category. And if you’re a fan, you’ll know this is Eric Gales.”
Following a poignant spoken-word introduction by Danuel Gales (Manuel’s twin brother), the tracklisting roars to life with ‘You Shouldn’t Have Left Me’, from 1994’s acclaimed Something Inside Of Me. “That’s a real blues-club burner with a ‘Blues Is Alright’ kinda vibe, a real high-energy opener,” he says – and the velocity builds with the wah-soaked ‘Rockin’ Horse Ride’, on which he cuts heads with boy wonder Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram. “When I hear that,” he considers of the swaggering track originally aired on 1996’s Left Hand Brand, “I just have depictions of a strip club, for some reason.”
From the same album comes ‘Guitar Man’: a smokin’ ode to a life lived by the axe (“I love how it sits in the pocket, in a very rocky, punky sorta way”). That’s when Joe Bonamassa breaks out of the control room for a stinger solo on ‘Don’t Wanna Go Home’, taken from 1997’s Soldier For The Blues. “That may be the most rocking song on the album,” says Gales. “We broke out the rare Les Pauls, then Joe took the solo in the middle, I took the ride-out and we went for it.”
