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Eric Gales is one hell of a guitar player, but he says he kept his talents hidden from his school friends – who had no idea when he signed a six-figure record deal.
Gales was still a teenager when he played with Carlos Santana in front of a staggering number of people at Woodstock ‘94, and has since more than lived up to his child-prodigy reputation throughout a prolific career. He has become one of the greats of modern blues.
But his predilection for making an electric guitar purr was his best-kept secret for a long while.
“I’m a drummer first,” he tells Rick Beato in a new interview. “The percussive aspect of my playing nods to the knowledge of me as a drummer, and in my early junior high years, I was the leader of the percussion section at school.
“I didn’t want nobody in school to know that I knew how to play guitar until I went on the Arsenio Hall Show, and the jig was up.”
Over the years, Gales became a regular on the chat show, first appearing in 1991. On that same show, Carlos Santana, his godfather, later hailed him as the next big guitar player, comparing him to Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
But there’s only so much hiding one can do when, as Hall says, you “take the place apart” on national television.
“I didn’t want a lot of new friends, you know?” Gales reasons for his secret guitar skills to Beato. “I didn’t want these people trying to be my friend because of what you think you can get out of me. I’d just signed a quarter-million-dollar record deal at 15 years old.”
So he kept quiet about it until the show aired. Then his life really started to change.
Gales had signed with Elektra Records earlier that year. The Eric Gales Band put out their self-titled debut album in 1991, followed by Picture of a Thousand Faces two years later. Gales hasn’t looked back since.
In other Gales news, the blues titan recently teamed up with Kiesel for an all-new signature guitar and enlisted some of the best players in the business to pay tribute to his late brother, Little Jimmy King, with an all-star album.
