As one of the driving forces of the rock-country band Dry County, Jeff Gallagher, along with his bandmates, continue to produce albums and do live shows that solidify their unique sound that resonates with audiences across North America.
Gallagher, who was born in Calgary and eventually moved to Brantford in his teens, explained how music has always had a magnetic effect on him.
“I was always interested in singing and doing my thing. My parents still have an eight-millimeter film of me in my diapers and wearing my dad’s cowboy boots singing to Ronnie Millsap and Kenny Rogers songs…It was in the blood and how I got into playing. My oldest brother Ken was a gifted child…and somebody told my parents that for gifted kids, instruments were a great way to help them expand their horizons. So, he ended up getting a guitar and I instantly gravitated to it. Anytime he was out of the house, I would it his guitar and ended up teaching myself how to play. I did my first live gig at 14, [and] have been doing it ever since,” said Gallagher.
After moving to Brantford in 1990, the singer was into grunge and later became reacquainted with country music.
“I was part of that grunge generation…and growing up in Calgary, the last thing I wanted to be playing, or at least thought would be, was country music. It wasn’t until I was 21 that I started to be drawn back to country music because of acts like Garth Brooks and the re-emergence of Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin producing his albums. There was a rock element coming back into country music, which I liked. And being from Calgary, I guess life just came full circle and put me where I needed to be,” he explained.
After playing in the local music scene, Gallagher would form Dry County with another local musician by the name of Randy Solski in 1998….but, it came during one of the toughest periods in his life.
“I was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and it wasn’t looking good for me. I called Randy, an old colleague of mine and I gave him the bad news. I just told him that before I leave this world, I wanted to put out a country album. And as I was starting treatment, Randy decided to get the guys together to form what would become Dry County,” reflected Gallagher.
The next few years would be turbulent ones for Gallagher as he faced his battle with cancer.
“I did not have a good experience….I had a heart attack multiple trips to ICU [and] I really wasn’t given much of a chance…so it came to the point after my stem cell transplant…I had given up, and I told my dad, who came up to visit me, to take me home. They had moved me back into their place, and my mom would quarantine the house….a friend of mine would then introduce me to acupuncture and herbal remedies, and I started getting better going the homeopathic route. This upset a lot of people because they believed I was doing treatments that didn’t align with the established medical path,” Gallagher said. “Now keep in mind, treatment nowadays is a lot different than what it was in the late 1990s. I’ve just recently had another scare for a different form of cancer and I’ve watched my father go through his [battles]…since then, technology has come such a long way, and so much of the cancer is operable now. So, I’m not as anti-treatment as I once was, because of how far things have come in the last 30 years.”
As Gallagher would continue to battle his cancer, another one was brewing with the music industry, when Dry County released their debut album in 2002.
“When you listen to that very first album…it really sounded country compared to what we ended up becoming. But even back then, we were really edgy for country music and that caused us some issues….we would have country stations telling us we were a bit more rock than country and we had rock stations telling us we sounded a bit too country…so, many of those stations simply didn’t play us. We were really left in limbo,” he reflected. “We had a lot of people from the Canadian Country Music Association (CCMA) and in the industry at the time trying to lead us on the ‘right path.’. I think we had done everything the right way, but ended up getting picked up by a handful of stations here in Canada …we felt a little betrayed [and] were basically pushed to the back of the line especially when he didn’t have the luxury of time stemming from my health.”
However, Gallagher’s health would improve just as the band released their follow-up album called ‘Waitin on Hank’ in 2005.
“That was our breakthrough album [and] there was something about that one that connected with people…and soon enough, we were ready to explode in 2006 and 2007…while doing it our way at the grassroots level. I was still working as a DJ at a bunch of adult establishments…meeting a lot of dancers…I would hand out our CDs to them [and] because they were traveling all over the province, they were helping us get our music out there,” he said. “As our band had members from the area, including Six Nations, Brant County and Norfolk County…our fan base grew here because we were the same guys you would see out at work or doing the local scene. We always felt we had the best fans in the world…and this was a huge family that really pushed us over the top and opened up doors for us.”
While the band’s popularity grew throughout the counties, something happened that got them to the next level in 2008.
“After having to develop our own path forward with little support from the CCMAs and getting no factor grants…things started to go our way [and] our lives changed forever when we got aligned with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). We got lucky when our manager at the time, had a chance meeting with Heath ‘The Texas Crazy Horse’ Herring, who was an MMA fighter and just happened to be stepping in for an injured fighter…to fight Brock Lesnar at UFC 87 in the co-main event,” Gallagher explained. “Heath was a fan of indie bands and the indie music scene, and he was going to use the ‘Waitin on Hank’ title track as his entrance music…and that that’s when our iTunes went through the roof. Other opportunities, like sponsorships started coming in after that…because we were exposed to millions of UFC viewers.”
The band was able to grow and get other opportunities in the process including television shows.
“We had a chance to piggyback on Heath and the UFC for a while, and then MTV came calling. We were part of a Jersey Shore-type show for rednecks called MTV BuckWild, and they had ended up picking up our first single from the third album, Cowboy Up. That led to getting some local sponsorships… Brian Witteveen from Strodes BBQ & Deli was the first one to step up and help us out with sponsorships and promote us…because Brian travels all over North America too [and] he was introducing our music to everybody he knew,” Gallagher said. “Yamaha keyboards got on board as sponsors along with Budweiser and Silver Lake Vodka. And suddenly, all of those festivals that weren’t paying attention to us before started to book us.”
Despite their growing popularity in the United States, Gallagher explained that the band had to face some tough realities.
“They loved us down south and so we naturally wanted to spend as much time as possible in the United States as we were making some real money doing live shows…we wanted to capitalize on this, as it was very difficult for an independent band like us to make money in Canada. But our fans up here thought we were turning our backs on them. That was tough,” he said. “We were also trying to balance things as country music had flipped on us. It had changed. The bro country came in…when radio stops playing your stuff and festivals stop calling you start trying to figure out what you’re going to do.”
After Gallagher had to get vocal cord reconstruction surgery, the band released ‘Hell or High Water’ in 2016, which quickly climbed the iTunes charts. However, everyone in the band was focusing on their personal lives.
“I pretty much missed my son growing up because of this business. If you saw my son and I together, you would swear we were more brothers than we were father and son. My parents really stepped up and pretty much raised my son for me,” Gallagher said. “Between my years dealing with cancer and then my years on the road, I missed everything and my bandmates, they were starting to have children too, and they didn’t want to make those unfortunate sacrifices as well. So, after ‘Hell or High Water’ the guys made it very clear that they didn’t really want to do that time on the road.”
After the band broke up in 2018, and enduring a divorce, Gallagher decided to move to the United States.
“I moved down to Florida….looking to live the Jimmy Buffet-Key West life. I started in the Tampa Bay area, which was quite the crazy town. I loved it. Then I spent some time down on the Gulf side and Cape Coral…there was something special about that community. I would record an album when I was there and ended up working for a radio station called RadioA1A, I did a weekly political podcast, which I thought was kind of funny because here was this Canadian guy talking about American politics,” he reflected.
However, after a visit from his parents, Gallagher’s father convinced him to get back to Canada because of a health scare. That would set the singer on the course to bringing back Dry County.
“This was around 2019, and at that point the guys from Dry County stopped talking and had gone our different ways. Unfortunately, we lost our US tour manager, Tommy Giles, to a motorcycle accident…At this time, I was managing a bar in Burlington, and Randy had showed, and we started to talk about Tommy and eventually talked about how egos and hurt feelings were no reason to leave 20 years on the table. We were all closer like family, and this industry has a way of ripping those people away from you,” Gallagher reflected. “I then decided to run for MP of Brantford Brant in the 2019 election for the Veterans Coalition party…and then after my defeat…my business partner pushed me into getting back into country music and started doing my first solo country record ‘Beyond the County Line’ under Smokey Mountain Shine. By the end of the recording, all the Dry County guys had made appearances on the album and we were basically back together.”
The album peaked at number three on iTunes sales, and got the band on track in getting to doing live shows again.
“When we first came back for our first shows, we sold out three nights within 36 hours. It was great to see the support from our fans…who we call the Redneck Mafia…this was our big family that were excited to have us back. It was really overwhelming to see that they didn’t forget about us. So that was very humbling,” he said.
And after decades in the music industry, Gallagher reflects on his career and the importance of what he has learned.
“As I say, if you live off your regrets, you’re just going to give yourself even more headaches. It’s all about learning from your mistakes moving forward. I have experienced first-hand how cutthroat, and phony the music industry is…the only real things about it is the miles you put in, the little bit of money you get to take home, and the misery it causes your family…but the chaos and heartache and everything that this comes along with this industry is, to me, what makes it beautiful and worth doing,” concluded Gallagher.
