Gary Moore walked into Sarm West Studios in London in November 1989 carrying two 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standards, a Marshall JTM45 head pushing an Electro-Voice-loaded 4x12 cabinet, and a Marshall Guv'nor pedal on the floor for extra bite. He was 37 years old, a veteran of Thin Lizzy, Colosseum II, and a string of solo hard rock records that had made him a guitar hero in Europe and a near-unknown in America. The album he made in those six weeks, released on March 26, 1990 as Still Got the Blues, became the most important record of his career — not because he changed, but because he finally stopped pretending he had.
The case for Still Got the Blues as a pivot record is accurate and also slightly misleading. Moore had been a blues player since his teens in Belfast, when he first heard Peter Green play at the Club Rado in 1967 and came away permanently altered. Green sold Moore one of his most-used guitars, a maple 1959 Les Paul Standard that would become Moore's primary instrument for decades. The hard rock years — the Thin Lizzy stints, the metal-adjacent solo albums like After the War — were real work and serious playing, but the blues was always the foundation underneath. By 1989, according to AllMusic, Moore was fed up with the commercial pressure to write hit singles and tired of his metallic direction. Still Got the Blues was where he stopped negotiating with the market and went home.
Co-produced with engineer Ian Taylor, the sessions drew a remarkable cast of British rock veterans: keyboardists Don Airey (then known for his work with Ozzy Osbourne and Deep Purple), Nicky Hopkins (Jeff Beck, the Rolling Stones), and Mick Weaver (Traffic, David Gilmour); bassists Bob Daisley and Andy Pyle; drummers Brian Downey, his old Thin Lizzy bandmate, and Graham Walker. A horn section adorned several tracks, and a string section led by Gavyn Wright shaped the arrangements on others. Moore prized spontaneity throughout. The album was largely recorded live with minimal overdubbing, mistakes left in, the whole band playing in a room together the way blues is supposed to work. That approach is audible in every bar of the record.
The guest list told its own story. Albert King, whose 1967 recording of "Oh Pretty Woman" Moore covered here, played guitar on that very track alongside him. Albert Collins joined on "Too Tired," a Johnny "Guitar" Watson tune from 1954. These were not cameos assembled by a label for marketing leverage. Moore had been introduced to Collins by his manager during rehearsals and borrowed the album and never gave it back. Having King and Collins on the record was a statement of lineage, a public declaration of where this music came from and who Moore considered his teachers. The album's liner notes drove the point further: the record was dedicated to Peter Green.
The George Harrison track sits in a category of its own. Moore and Harrison were neighbors in Henley at the time, and "That Kind of Woman," a song Harrison had originally written for Eric Clapton, was recorded partly as a duo at Harrison's home studio, with Nicky Hopkins adding piano and Graham Walker later overdubbing drums at Metropolis. Harrison sang backing vocals and played guitar. The strings for the album went down at Abbey Road. What reads on paper like a sprawling, expensive production was in practice a record made by friends who trusted each other, which is why it sounds the way it does. The title track, a slow-burning Moore original, was captured in essentially one take, with only minor fixes afterward.
On the gear side, the specifics matter. Moore used the Peter Green Les Paul, "Greeny," on "Midnight Blues" and on the Fleetwood Mac cover "Stop Messin' Around," which served as an early signal of the full Peter Green tribute album, Blues For Greeny, he would release in 1995. His primary instrument through most of the sessions was a second 1959 Standard he had acquired at the end of 1988, a guitar he called "Stripe," which bore serial number 9 2227 and was believed to be Ronnie Montrose's long-lost instrument. Both guitars had original PAF pickups. The Marshall JTM45 into the 4x12 with EV speakers gave him the classic British blues-rock voice, and the Guv'nor pedal on the floor added the saturation that pushed his sustain into that long, aching register that defined the title track's solo. He had made a deliberate choice to leave the rack-mount effects and superstrats of the 1980s behind entirely.
Still Got the Blues reached No. 83 on the Billboard 200 and No. 13 in the UK, and eventually sold around three million copies worldwide, certified gold by the RIAA in November 1995. For a record that was essentially a 37-year-old Irishman settling a decades-old debt with the music that made him, those numbers are almost beside the point. The album launched a blues run that carried Moore through After Hours in 1992, Blues Alive in 1993, the supergroup BBM with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker in 1994, and Blues For Greeny in 1995. Peter Green's Les Paul, which Moore was eventually forced to sell, passed through collectors' hands until Kirk Hammett of Metallica bought it in 2014. Don Airey later recalled sitting at the Royal Albert Hall and hearing Joe Bonamassa play "Midnight Blues" on that guitar, and bursting into tears. That chain of custody, from Green to Moore to Hammett, with Bonamassa in the middle playing the song off the album that started it all, is as good a picture as any of what Still Got the Blues actually accomplished.
