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Joe Bonamassa is fed up with bands that pretend to play live

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Joe Bonamassa is fed up with bands that pretend to play live

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Joe Bonamassa recently returned to No. 1 on the Billboard blues chart with “Live at the Hollywood Bowl,” his 28th release to do so.

That’s more times than any other artist in the history of the list.

His latest tour is playing at the Arizona Financial Theater, a 5,000-seat venue.

By any reasonable metric, at 47, Bonamassa is the most successful blues guitarist of his generation.

As for how that came to be, the man has no idea.

“I’ve been thinking about it my whole career,” he says.

“I was lucky. We’ve had a couple of records that have done really well, a couple of live DVDs that have done really well. Something connects, you know? I don’t know what, but it does. And it’s all over the world. It’s not just here, you know. I am definitely older abroad. I don’t know what it is. Not my good look, I’ll tell you that much.

Joe Bonamassa cut the blues while Led Zeppelin reimagined it

Bonamassa grew up in a musical household and started playing the guitar at the age of 4, encouraged by a guitarist father who turned him on to the heroes of the British blues boom of the 1960s: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and other Brits that they cut their teeth in the classic blues releases they imported from Chicago.

“I always say that my trip to Chicago went through London,” says Bonamassa.

“I was in love with Clapton, Beck and Page, Paul Kossoff, Rory Gallagher, all the great British stuff. The first version of ‘I Ain’t Superstious’ I heard wasn’t Howlin’ Wolf. It was Jeff Beck. So my trip always went through London first.”

Those legends of the British blues scene played an important role in shaping the guitarist he became.

“I know musicians try to make it into a myth and say, ‘No, I liked the real stuff, blah blah blah,'” Bonamassa says.

“But if you were a white suburban kid and you were interested in blues guitar in the ’80s, you went to Stevie Ray Vaughn. You went through ‘The Beano Album’ with John Mayall and the Blues Breakers. You went through ‘Truth’, ‘Beckola’, ‘Zeppelin I’, Fleetwood Mac, ‘Irish Tour ’74’. All this was very relevant. This is how you introduced yourself to the elders. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s exciting and raw!’ It had rounding. And that’s how I got here.”

You can definitely hear him struggling to achieve that level of excitement in his own approach to blues guitar.

“Well, it can’t be boring,” says Bonamassa. “I’ve been accused of being boring, but I try not to be.”

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Joe Bonamassa picked up the guitar at 4 and never put it down

From the moment he started playing, Bonamassa knew he had found his life’s work, even if he had expressed it differently at age 4.

“I never had a plan B,” says Bonamassa. “When I was little, I was like, ‘That’s it. That’s all I want to do. It’s always been something for me that I really wanted, playing music and being around guitars.”

It was a while before he felt he had hit his stride as an aspiring blues guitarist.

“I think you start to make progress after your first 10,000 hours in any field, any career,” he says.

“You start moving forward when you figure out, obviously, what you should do, but more importantly, what you shouldn’t do, and you avoid mistakes and pitfalls and things that people get stuck on all the time.

“That’s something that’s really important to me and it’s a very constant journey. You’re constantly changing things about yourself, constantly trying to make it better, make your live show better.”

He’s still working toward that goal, moving the goalpost just right to keep him motivated to improve as he gets better.

“By sheer wear and tear, you become a better singer over time,” he says.

“And I surround myself with the best musicians I can find. They are all better than me. I mean, that’s how you get better. You surround yourself with people who are better than you. Then you have no choice but to rise to the occasion.”

Bonamassa about playing with an orchestra: ‘Like chewing gum and peanuts’

For “Live at the Hollywood Bowl”, Bonamassa was surrounded by an orchestra of 40 musicians for his performance on the stage of that iconic venue.

“It was great,” Bonamassa recalls.

“I mean, they don’t like guitars, but that’s fine. Orchestras don’t like loud guitars. That’s just a fact. We had to make some pretty big adjustments sonically on stage from what we normally do, like crazy adjustments my guitar was in another county but we got it working.

He credits his longtime producer, Kevin Shirley, for working it out in the mix.

“When you marry an orchestra with strong blues rock, these two, it’s like bubblegum and peanuts,” says Bonamassa. “You don’t want to have a handful of peanuts and gum at the same time. But I’m excited. I thought Kevin Shirley did a great job.”

Bonamassa cuts ‘Blues Deluxe Vol. 2’ to see if it had improved in 20 years

Bonamassa’s latest studio release, “Blues Deluxe Vol. 2,” which spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard blues charts, was intended as a follow-up, of sorts, to a release from 2003 called “Blues Deluxe”.

“I just wanted to see if I was better or worse in 20 years,” he explains.

“I mean, that was the goal. Am I a better singer now? We answered that question, yeah. Am I a better artist? Well, I couldn’t get those songs out 20 years ago. So it was a really good record, a fun record to do”.

An important key to this improvement, says Bonamassa, is to make the occasional mistake.

“You learn a bigger lesson when things go wrong than when things go right,” he says.

“If a show goes well, you say, ‘Yeah, it went exactly as I planned.’ If something happens or you’re not great, you learn from that experience. And it’s important to be open to that again and again. You don’t know everything. Even though I’ve done thousands of shows, every show is a learning experience. It has a learning curve.”

Joe Bonamassa says we’ve “lowered the bar” for live music, but he won’t

One of the things he’s loved about touring is knowing that at any given gig, he can always come back and try to do a better show the next night.

“If you have an off night, which everyone does, then you have a chance to redeem yourself tomorrow,” he says.

“One concert won’t define your career. Good or bad. Every show, we start from scratch. We were great last night. That doesn’t mean we’re going to be great tonight, you know? And I think I can speak for the my side when I say that’s what keeps them excited every night, too, going into the unknown without a net.”

And to be clear, there is no net at Bonamassa’s concerts in an industry where smoke and mirrors are more the rule than the exception.

“You know, I can be like a lot of other acts and run a bunch of songs, and we can go up there and mime, and it’ll be exactly the same every night, and rip off the fans, or whatever you want to call it,” Bonamassa says. .

“But we do everything live. It’s a live show. I mean, things are going bad. I sing out of tune from time to time. But I think the fans like it. It’s much more honest.”

Watching people play pre-recorded tracks doesn’t cut it for Bonamassa.

“My litmus test is if I hear background vocals that are more in tune than the Beatles at Shea Stadium, I’m out,” says Bonamassa.

“We’ve lowered the bar over the last 30 years. Remember when people used to get caught using that expletive) and that would be career-ending? Now that’s fine. Just remember the name of the city. Put your voice up for it in the ads , then you’re literally just copying the tracks, and that’s perfectly fine. I think what keeps us relevant is that we don’t do it that way.”

Bonamassa has been working on a follow-up to “Blues Deluxe, Vol. 2,” not that he necessarily thinks you need one.

“You know, I’ve made many, many records in my career,” he says. “So I’m slowing down what I put on. You know, the world doesn’t need another Joe Bonamassa album. There’s something like 40-somethings with the live ones. We don’t need another one.”

Joe Bonamassa at the Arizona Financial Theater in Phoenix

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, November 2.

Where: Arizona Financial Theatre, 400 W. Washington St., Phoenix.

Entry: $69 and up.

Details: 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com.

Ed has covered pop music for The Republic since 2007, reviewing festivals and concerts, interviewing legends, covering the local scene and more. He did the same in Pittsburgh for more than a decade. Follow him on X and Instagram @edmasley and on Facebook as Ed Masley. Email him at [email protected].

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