Joe Bonamassa
“I’m not going to try and sound like Robert Johnson, or B.B. King, or Muddy Waters. I never will - that’s not who I am. Nobody wants to hear my version of ‘Sweet Home Chicago’. Nobody wants to hear my ‘Mustang Sally’.”
Commiserations, festivalgoers, if you’re banking on Joe Bonamassa belting out blues classics at this year’s Guilfest. For, as he’s telling Ents24 down the phone, this humble, likeable and astonishingly talented New Yorker is no slave to the blues pantheon. “I have no adherence to tradition, I haven’t been on this blues pilgrimage or something,” he continues, warming to his theme. “As a musician, you’ve got to keep on evolving, adapting, pushing boundaries.”
Joe’s speaking to us from the volcanic archipelago of Santorini, where he’s recording his next album - or, as he puts it succinctly, “trying to get the blues in Paradise”. In fact, the islands are best known as the site of the largest volcanic eruption in history some 4,000 years ago - a happy match, we can’t help thinking, for Bonamassa’s explosive take on the blues.
Blues has a rich, complex tradition and hagiography, from 19th century African-American spirituals and work songs, via the likes of Robert Johnson and Son House, onto B.B. King and Muddy Waters and up to the present day. Joe, for his part, caught the blues bug young, mastering classics by the age of seven and opening a concert for his hero King just five years later. He’s built up a vast following across both Europe and the US with his kinetic, rock-infused blues. And when it comes to the future of the form, Joe - while a great respecter of those traditions - is convinced that the music must continue to evolve. “You’ll hear blues artists complaining that ‘the media won’t talk to us’, or ‘MTV don’t play our videos’, blah blah. OK: so what are we going to do, just board up the windows and put up the ‘Closed’ sign? I refuse to accept that. You’ve gotta make records that are a little bit new and exciting. You can’t make the same blues records time after time.”
Joe’s most recent release was last year’s ‘The Ballad of John Henry’, his tenth long-player. It is, by some distance, his most personal collection to date, with a traumatic recent breakup fuelling many of its lyrics. Happily, all that pain has been distilled into some of the most emotive and powerful music of his career. “I am very happy with it,” says Joe. “It was a very personal album: I went through a really horrible breakup during the making of it, the biggest heartbreak of my entire life. You put yourself out there, fall head over heels in love with someone, and they get you to move your entire household across America… and you set up together, and it lasts two weeks before they send you packing. It wasn’t so much the heartbreak - people change their minds, after all. It’s being forced to face your fears of rejection. It gave me a massive feeling of failure.”
He admits to being on the verge of breakdown this time last year. “I was shattered. And meanwhile, while all this is happening, my life is going a hundred miles an hour, making a record and touring constantly. And there came a point where I just thought, f*ck this, I’m just gonna pull myself up by my shoelaces, and write and tour and not let this person drag me down. So that’s what I did. And I came up with - I think - some of the best songs I ever wrote.” Committing such raw emotions to paper was a new departure. “I’ve always been wary of putting my personal experiences into my lyrics. I’m a very private person, I don’t put my stuff out there, really. So I took a real chance. But that turned out to be the very best thing about the album. I get so many letters about this album, from people describing similar emotional experiences that they have lived through.”
Where some of the songs on ‘John Henry’ (‘Happier Times’, ‘The Great Flood’) document last summer’s emotional meltdown, others - the title track, for example - take the pulse of American society at large. The eponymous John Henry is an American folk hero, believed to have been born in Missouri in around 1840. A titanically strong, fearless worker on the early railroads, Henry - so the legend goes - raced against, and defeated, a steam-powered hammer - only to die victorious, hammer in hand. “The myth of John Henry really inspired a lot of blue-collar people,” Joe explains. “As the industrial age arrived and factories everywhere were replacing workers with machines, this man showed he could work harder than a machine.” Joe uses the Henry legend as a launch-pad for some wider reflections on changing values Stateside - in particular, America’s blurring of the boundary between fame and notoriety. “It’s gotten pretty easy to be famous in America today. You just do something stupid or outrageous, film it and put it on YouTube. No one seems to know the difference between famous and infamous anymore. And OK, you can get yourself remembered for something, but the question is: is it good or bad, what you’ve done? Or just indifferent?”
This sense of craft and patience is evident in Joe’s own steady ascent. “Nothing comes from nowhere. Laying some foundations - ‘paying your dues’, as the phrase goes - is the hard part, but it is critical to having a lasting career in anything. You see bands who couldn’t play to a man and his dog six months ago, and now they’re doing stadiums with a full light show. And I’m like, ‘But this is all a blur’. The machine stops - and what’s left? Just a big pile of money. I would rather have things the other way round, build my reputation gradually.” He cites the case of his hero King, who stayed at the top of his game - the undisputed, er, King of the Blues - for half a century. “And how did he do it? He just kept making records that were good.”
And does our Joe want to climb just as high, and stay there just as long? “I don’t want to be Sir Edmund Hillary, I don’t want to be the guy who climbs to the top of Everest. I just want to establish second and third base camp and stay there. If you can play 2,000 or 3,000 seats a night you can make a very nice living and accomplish everything you wanted to. But when you start getting into Robbie Williams, O2 Arena territory… that’s a dangerous game if you want to be in it long-term. U2, Springsteen, Clapton: there are probably fewer than ten acts who have managed to sustain that level.”
You seem, Joe, a strikingly grounded musician, with no delusions of grandeur or overweening sense of your own importance. “Well, any performer who says they have no ego is lying,” he concedes. “There has to be some sense of bravado, some genie making you want to get up there night after night. Of course I want people to walk away saying that we were the best band at the festival - I’m competitive that way, sure. But I’m also realistic. Yeah, we’d love to play Wembley one day. But eventually, it’s all going to come back down to earth. We have a good set-up, good musicians and good crew, so I’m happy. Oh, and by the way, I don’t have to charge people $250 for a ticket! The economics of it work to the point where you can afford to do it right.”
Joe, whose touring schedule carves up roughly 50/50 between Europe and the US, has always gone down well this side of the Atlantic. And, he says, the British and Irish blues of the 1960s made more of an imprint on his own musical DNA than did the indigenous music of his homeland. “When I was a kid, I’d listen to the American blues. But then when I heard bands like Free, Led Zeppelin, John Mayall, Jeff Beck and Rory Gallagher, I heard this real… swagger. It was louder, it was a little more sophisticated and it didn’t seem to have any rules. Now I’ll buy a CD of classic American blues, and out of 100 tracks you can pick out Robert Johnson’s voice, Leadbelly’s, certainly Howlin’ Wolf’s: but after a while you’re thinking, ‘this all sounds the same’. Chicago blues changed that a little, Muddy Waters definitely had his own style: but it was still a little… samey. British and Irish blues tore up the rulebook.”
Could it be that being so much further from the source allowed our acts a little more latitude? “Yeah, I think that’s true. And the weird thing is that, back in the Sixties, acts like Led Zep came over to America and sold the blues back to Americans - who didn’t know that all this music was indigenous to our country. And now, forty years later, I’m the American guy coming back to England and selling you guys back something of yours. I think that’s pretty cool.” It’s a two-way street: more recent British blues haven’t, he feels, matched the energy and innovation of those Sixties pioneers. “When I first came to England I thought every kid on every street corner would have a Les Paul [guitar] and be playing like Jimmy Page. When I got here, everyone was trying to play like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Texas. Weird.”
Joe mastered the blues guitar before he was out of short trousers. But what of the vocals, the other crucial half of his act? “I’m definitely more at home with the guitar. Singing I’ve gotten better at, certainly, and it’s something I like to do, but it’s also the hardest thing I have to do. You have to manage your voice carefully - whether you can hit that high D or C all depends on how you’re feeling, on how you slept the night before. Everyday it’s a struggle. But the struggle is a challenge, I dig it. And I’ve got better at the singing over the course of the albums - if you listen to my early stuff, I sounded like I was being run over by a truck.”
Interview by Steve Wright
Joe headlines the Ents24 Stage at GuilFest on Sat 11 July. See www.guilfest.co.uk for more info.
See all Joe Bonamassa tour dates.
