Gary Moore walked into the studio in 1989 carrying a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard he had bought in London that same year and set it down in front of a Marshall JTM45 reissue. He was there to test the room. He was also, without quite knowing it yet, there to record the defining moment of his career. On the first day of what would become the Still Got the Blues sessions, he ran through the title track once, straight through. That was the take. He called it a dramatic day he would never forget, and you can hear why: six minutes and twelve seconds of a man who had spent two decades in the wrong genre finally arriving somewhere true.
The backstory runs deeper than gear, though the gear matters enormously to anyone who has ever obsessed over why that particular guitar sounds the way it does. The Les Paul on the title track was Moore's 1959 Standard, purchased the year before the sessions, paired with a Marshall Guv'nor distortion pedal into that JTM45 and a Marshall 1960B 4x12 cabinet loaded with Electrovoice 12-inch speakers instead of the standard Celestions. Nicky Hopkins, the session pianist whose résumé ran from the Rolling Stones to Jeff Beck, played piano on the title track. The result is a tone that sits somewhere between controlled grief and controlled fury, sustaining notes long past the point where lesser setups would have given up.
The famous "Greeny," the 1959 Les Paul Standard Moore had acquired from Peter Green after Green's departure from Fleetwood Mac in 1970, with its uniquely wired out-of-phase pickups, appears on "Stop Messin' Around." The title track used the other guitar entirely. Two instruments, two very different emotional registers, one album that needed both.
The personal story behind the song is the story of a man who had outgrown his own public image. By the late 1980s, Moore had been through Skid Row, Thin Lizzy, and a string of hard rock solo records that sold respectably but never quite landed him where he felt he belonged. Then geography did some of the work. Moore had been accepted into a particular riverside enclave of British rock royalty, and his friendship with George Harrison produced a song: "That Kind of Woman," which Harrison wrote, sang on, and played guitar on. Moore also played lead guitar on "She's My Baby," the opening track of the Traveling Wilburys' 1990 album Vol. 3, which tells you something about the circles he was moving in and the creative confidence that was building.
Co-produced by Moore and Ian Taylor, the album that emerged was built around a rotating cast of serious players. Keyboardist Don Airey, whose credits ran through Ozzy Osbourne and Deep Purple, played Hammond organ on "Oh Pretty Woman" and conducted the string section, with Gavyn Wright leading the players. Mick Weaver, who had recorded with Traffic and David Gilmour, handled piano on several tracks, while Nicky Hopkins covered piano duties on the title track, "Midnight Blues," and "That Kind of Woman." Bassists Andy Pyle and Bob Daisley split duties, with drummer Graham Walker and Thin Lizzy's Brian Downey sharing the kit. A horn section including Frank Mead, saxophonists Nick Payn and Nick Pentelow, and trumpeters Raoul D'Olivera and Stuart Brooks gave certain tracks a fullness that recalled the Chess Records recordings Moore had grown up studying. Albert King played guitar alongside Moore on "Oh Pretty Woman." Albert Collins appeared on "Too Tired." The record was tracked largely live with, as Moore put it, "mistakes left in," which is the opposite of how most guitar records get made and the reason why it breathes.
The song Moore wrote on tour in Germany and then recorded in a single take is, on the surface, a blues ballad about a love that has gone. The title plays a double meaning that Moore understood perfectly: still sad, still playing the blues. The song is also a statement of artistic intent, and the community of guitar players who have taken it seriously since 1990 have always heard that second meaning. "Moving On," the album's opening track, announced the departure from the hard rock decade. "King of the Blues," the second track on Side Two, declared the lineage Moore was claiming. The title track, sitting fourth on Side One, was the proof of claim: a slow, open-throated melody that lets the guitar say the complicated thing the lyric only gestures at. Released as a single on April 30, 1990, it reached number 31 on the UK Singles Chart. The album itself peaked at number 13 in the UK, a figure that tells only part of the story: it was Moore's best-selling record by a wide margin, eventually moving around three million copies worldwide and earning platinum certification in September 1994, four and a half years after release.
A coda to the story that Moore never fully resolved: in 2008, a German court ruled that the guitar solo in "Still Got the Blues" plagiarized a 1974 composition called "Nordrach" by the German band Jud's Gallery, written by Jürgen Winter. Moore denied ever hearing the song, which was unreleased at the time he made the album. The court ordered him to pay compensation regardless. It is the kind of legal footnote that tends to follow songs that get deep enough into the blues vocabulary, where the lines between influence, inheritance, and invention have always been contested. Moore had spent his whole adult life inside that vocabulary, from watching Peter Green perform in Belfast in 1967 to buying Green's guitar and dedicating the album to him, to making a full Peter Green tribute record, Blues for Greeny, in 1995. He knew exactly what tradition he was drawing from. That he did it in one take, on a guitar he had barely played yet, in a room he was using to test the acoustics, is the kind of detail that makes the official version of a recording session feel thin. The song was ready. Moore just had to show up.
