items tagged with Eric Gales

You wouldn’t know it from his discography, but 2010’s Relentless marked a comeback for the blues-rock guitarist/singer/songwriter Eric Gales. The Story of My Life was released in April 2008, and its follow-up came this past July – a pretty standard interval in the music business.

But there’s a hint of his troubles on Relentless’ lead track, “Bad Lawbreaker,” on which he sings: “I’m a bad lawbreaker / Three strikes ain’t enough for me.”

In between those two albums, Gales served 21 months of a three-year sentence for violating the probation he received in 2006 for drug and gun charges. “I was smoking weed on the road and I didn’t want to risk them telling me to come home in the middle of the tour” because of a dirty urine sample, he said in a recent phone interview. “I just said to myself, ‘I’ll deal with it when I get home.’” So he turned himself in after the tour and was sent to prison. (He couldn’t play a guitar for his first six months of incarceration but – because of the intervention of a warden who knew who he was – eventually led a prison band.)