The King of modern blues delves into his own record collection and comes with up with something astonishing
So you’re the best blues guitar player of your generation. Your own studio albums are getting better and better (and so is your songwriting too), but you still want to challenge yourself.
At least, it always seems to be the way that Joe Bonamassa works. Because, barely three months after his last shows in this country, he’s back and with a brand new concept. The reason? Well, does genius need a reason beyond the simple concept of because he can?
This time he’s playing these songs because he really wants to, as he explains before “Let Me Love You Baby”, this is own personal homage to those greats who not only came before him, but more importantly inspired him to do what he does. Tonight is nothing more than a gleeful, reverential and respectful trawl through the work of the British Blues Explosion, so in addition to Jeff Beck, there’s The Yardbirds, Zeppelin, John Mayall, Clapton and Cream and more, but in typical Bonamassa fashion, not only does he put his own stamp on things, but he does things – he does songs – you just wouldn’t expect.
This is the archivist in him, this is the blues fan, and oddly in these covers he perhaps reveals more of himself than ever before. When he talks about watching Cream videos that he rented from Blockbuster (“for anyone under 30 it was before Netflix”, he jokes) before playing “SWALBR” he seems to be in his element, adding mischievously “i didn’t know what they were singing about then and I still don’t now!”
It almost seems redundant to praise the quality of playing here, but when Reese Wynans – a Hall Of Fame inductee for his work with Stevie Ray Vaughan – turns the Colston Hall into a Honky Tonk on “Breakfast With Stu” or when Bonamassa, bassist Michael Rhodes and drummer Anton Fig perform “Spanish Boots” as a Power Trio in the classic mould, then it’s no exaggeration to call it a thing of beauty.
Indeed, the whole two hours is spellbinding. It’s quite an undertaking to play an entire set of material that you haven’t performed live before. At least it would be to mere mortals. Joe Bonamassa isn’t that, and there are times when his own performance reaches new levels. The dark, almost jazz atmosphere of “Little Girl” or his take on “White Summer/Black Mountain Side” are little short of incredible and contrast brilliantly with the light, airy takes on Clapton’s “Motherless Children” or “Mainline Florida”.
There’s an epic old thing to close the set, Led Zep’s “How Many More Times” segues into Free’s “The Hunter” and back again by way of a drum solo, but whatever else he is, JB is a rock star and a rock star knows that you’ve got to encore and if you’re going to encore then you wheel out the big guns. In this case that means “Sloe Gin” – and if that too is a cover then you best believe that everyone here in the sold out crowd knows who perfected it.
It takes real bravery to attempt what was done tonight, it takes real skill to pull it off. The biggest compliment you can pay the show is this: Even if you didn’t know any of the songs – and it’s a fair bet that very few had heard all of them before tonight – you’d still know that you were witnessing something incredible. In that respect it is business as usual for Joe Bonamassa. There’s simply no one better than him at what he does, whatever he does.
Photo: Gavin Lowrey
