The Blues Cruise
What happens when you put 2,000 blues fans on a boat with their heroes for a week? We joined Joe Bonamassa, Peter Frampton, Bernie Marsden and a raft of other guitar legends on the Keeping The Blues Alive At Sea cruise to find out.
We join Joe Bonamassa, Peter Frampton, Bernie Marsden and a raft of other guitar legends – and 2,000 blues fans – on the Keeping The Blues Alive At Sea cruise.
It’s morning at the docks in Barcelona and lines of well-heeled Americans in faded tour T-shirts are snaking round rope cordons, waiting to have their sizeable luggage taken aboard the Norwegian Pearl cruise liner, which looms jauntily above us in its party-coloured livery. The giant ship is to be our home for the next five nights for what promises to be an unusually painless voyage into the blues. This is blues de luxe and your baby can’t even leave you once the vessel is underway, unless they feel like swimming for it, so that’s one heartache avoided already.
Our captain for the voyage, in a musical sense, is blues-rock’s man of the hour, Joe Bonamassa, who is both the star act and curator of this floating tribute to the minor pentatonic scale.
“You either come off these cruises with a love affair with the guitar, or you never want to hear it again,” Bonamassa observes drily, when we catch up with him aboard. “There’s no middle ground.”
He’s not kidding about that. A glance at the schedule reveals a pretty much non-stop bill of guitar-laden gigs. Peter Frampton, Bernie Marsden, Eric Gales, Vintage Trouble, Larkin Poe and a crew of other Able Bluesmen will perform for the vessel’s 2,000-plus passengers en route to Monte Carlo and Malta. This is the first time the cruise is sailing in the Med, but it follows similar voyages in the Caribbean that proved a success, despite their distinctly salty price of admission. And though some of the passengers look like they might have been at Woodstock the first time around, somehow we doubt that locating clean loos will be an issue. If you want to bring your own ‘fine wines and champagne’ aboard, the brochure advises, there’s a corkage fee of 15 euros per bottle. Elsewhere, it boasts of oriental fusion cuisine and other culinary delights to be found in the ship’s many restaurants. It’s all a long way from the Mississippi Delta, to be sure. Can you really have the blues while you’re sipping from a chilled glass of Taittinger, watching the sun set over Monte Carlo? As we shuffle up the gangway to board the ship, we guess we’re about to find out.
“You either leave with a love of the guitar, or you never want to hear it again.”
Joe Bonamassa
The ship gets under way so smoothly that the punters already grazing on free buffets hardly notice, and soon the coast of Spain sinks beneath the horizon as we head out to the open sea. Up on the pool deck, Peter Frampton kicks proceedings off with a live Q&A session, taking questions from a partially disrobed crowd, as the Mediterranean sun beats down on a sea of balding pates and rotund bellies that are already acquiring a lobster-red hue. The compere passes the mic around and someone asks Frampton about his teenage friendship with David Bowie, who Frampton’s father once taught at school. Could Peter share any personal insights into Bowie’s formative years?
“David, this is the truth, so don’t sue me,” says Frampton, with a theatrical glance heavenwards. “My dad said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with that Jones boy: I swear on Friday, when I did the roll-call, he had eyebrows. But on Monday, he didn’t have eyebrows any more’…”
The crowd laugh and the Q&A moves on to other matters, Frampton very much at ease in the role of maritime raconteur. Time to get out of the heat for a bit. Stepping inside, we catch a set by Eric Bibb, a wonderful acoustic songwriter who’s also a scholar of blues history. We’re hoping he can give us some sort of handle on what this all means. Chatting with Bibb after the show, we comment on how, although he’s a fine guitarist, his voice is the real heart and soul of his blues music.
“The vocal thing is key to understanding what blues is all about,” Bibb reflects. “It started out in the fields, it started out before people even had guitars. People were singing in the fields, people were singing in churches, people were singing at home, and that’s the core of the blues to me. So, the fact that it’s so guitar-centric right now, and it’s a lot of overwrought, basically pretend emotion… It’s become a cartoon, almost.
“I don’t say that to put anybody down,” Bibb, adds, equitably. “Because I think music finds it own way and people use what they resonate to in their own music, and they take from the tradition, they make it their own. But what I want to point out is that it was once really sincere expression, based on what people were feeling… Those early blues heroes lived a life that we can’t really imagine, and it created emotions and a need to express certain things that we can only guess at.”
This is undeniably true, but as the voyage continues it’s gratifying to find evidence that blues music still has the power to say something potent and real. Toronzo Cannon is a charismatic American bluesman who drives buses for the City
“Blues is one of the most storied and complex genres imaginable.”
Megan Lovell
of Chicago, when he’s not playing to packed auditoriums in the Med. He sees a big slice of life on the streets of the Windy City and writes it all into his music. His song Insurance, for example, is about not being able to afford medical cover – which is no joke in America if you get sick and don’t have enough dollars to pay the doctor’s bill.
“It’s the same old blues but in a new suit,” Toronzo comments. “I mean, I took the template of Jimmy Reed’s Take Out Some Insurance, with that feel, but put the modern-day spin on it where you can lose your home if you haven’t got proper insurance. Some of it’s funny, like when I talk about the colonoscopy part, or whatever. But then the part where I talk about a guy [who] lost his wife and then he lost his home, everybody gets quiet,” he adds.
Eric Gales, meanwhile, says blues is a channel for personal catharsis, following his struggles with addiction. Gales has been clean for three years now and the buzz aboard ship was that Eric was not only on career-peak form on guitar but opening up to the audience about the hard knocks he’s taken in a nakedly confessional way. Curious, we dropped in on his set in the ship’s main theatre and left impressed. Gales has drawn comparisons with Hendrix in the past but you get the sense that his defining moment has come: a time when he is wholly and unapologetically himself. When someone in the audience shouts out “Play Machine Gun!” Eric simply shakes his head and says “I ain’t trying to be the next Jimi Hendrix. I’m just trying to be the first Eric Gales,” which earns an ovation.
Catching up with him afterwards, Gales explains how blues has been an outlet for his brightest hopes and darkest fears, which he says makes his music relatable.
“I’m almost forty-five years old, so it’s safe to say that pretty much anything that a person in my audience has been through, I possibly have been through it too,” Gales reflects. “I often say that I’m playing from a severe point of pain…from things that I have caused on my own [and brought upon] myself. So, I think that the things that I have been through are very recognisable to a listener. So, even if they have no knowledge of what a guitar is… they can relate to it. And that means a lot to me.”
Meanwhile, Rebecca and Megan Lovell of sisteract Larkin Poe, whose gutsy, uplifting performances prove to be one of the highlights of the trip, take a slightly different tack, arguing that every genre has to evolve and speak to new audiences if it’s to remain relevant.
“We’re a blues band in the twenty-first century and female-fronted,” Megan says. “We have a lot of angles that make us different. I think that it’s our responsibility as artists to bring something new, to try our best to break the mould a little bit… That’s what I think will keep a genre alive – if you continue to allow it to be pioneered. But that doesn’t mean forget the past, because historically blues is one of the most storied and complex genres you could ever imagine.”
Meanwhile in the ship’s casino, R&B dynamos Vintage Trouble also ponder the meaning of blues in such a setting, so far from its roots. How are they finding the cruise?
“I ain’t trying to be the next Hendrix. I’m trying to be the first Eric Gales.”
Eric Gales
“It’s really cool,” says the band’s energetic frontman, Ty Taylor. “I mean, sometimes you forget that you’re on something that’s floating in the water, until you look outside and see the glory… of this body of water.” He waves his hand at the glittering sea outside the window.
“The people on the boat are so friendly and attentive,” says drummer Richard Danielson. “They aren’t just here to be on a cruise, because they’d be on some other cruise. For a musician, it’s cool to be on a boat where people are really there to just pay attention to music.”
Guitarist Nalle Colt adds, however, that “it is a different crowd to our regular audience, mostly because it’s pretty expensive. Most of the people you meet here are American or German, so you have to take a flight just to get to Barcelona, even before you board, so it’s quite the expense. So I feel like these are very dedicated music lovers.”
While the cultural relevance of the blues in a cruise-liner setting may remain up for debate, it’s clear that one of the things those dedicated music lovers are here for is to watch great guitarists playing their arses off. The promo posters for the cruise depict Bonamassa as a cartoon gladiator, wielding his guitar in an arena. The image seems fitting as there are plenty of memorable guitar duels – notably between Joe and Eric Gales, who go at it hammer and tongs as they trade licks over Joe’s brooding Ballad Of John Henry.
An even more interesting battle of fretboard prowess unfolds when Joe joins Peter Frampton on stage. Joe’s rapid cascades of notes are like the moves of an aggressive, younger boxer throwing jabs at a veteran champ who stays out of range, biding his time. When his turn comes, however, Frampton is pure class: his licks unhurried but the phrasing superb, the work of a melodic master with nothing left to prove. Frampton recently announced that he’s to retire from playing soon, due to a degenerative muscle disease. If so, he’s leaving the ring undefeated.
‘Thanks to the calibre of the artists, there are very special moments of music here.’
Thankfully music isn’t a fist-fight, and Joe is a more nuanced player than that brief shred-off might have suggested. Away from the main stage, he gives arguably his best performance of the cruise when he sits in with singer Jade McRae. Jade’s ordinarily one of Joe’s backing vocalists, but she’s a stellar artist in her own right, with a voice beamed straight out of heaven. Listening to her set, we also hear a different Joe: reaching carefully for the right note, the deeper emotion, and finding it.
That moment is perhaps a metaphor for the whole cruise. There are many different layers to it. You could enjoy it as big-name entertainment and not look any deeper than the serviettes that the canapes are served on. But, thanks to the calibre of the artists, there are very special moments of music here too. Some of the best happen away from the main stage, as Whitesnake legend Bernie Marsden amusingly recounts the morning after the cruise’s musicians staged an impromtu jam in the cordoned-off artist lounge, which one lucky cruise passenger found himself participating in.
“Reese Wynans [formerly of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble] was at the piano and it all kicked off,” Bernie explains. “He played for about an hour: just a piano and two acoustic guitars… Anyway, in the middle of all this a guy wandered in, I think he was a punter from the ship. German or maybe Swiss. And he picks up an acoustic bass and he played with everybody. Someone said ‘Who is this guy?’ But he was just from Room 534 or whatever. It was basically the best night of his life. And afterwards he said: ‘Please, can you show me which one is the Joe Bonamassa?’”
Keeping The Blues Alive At Sea Mediterranean II sets sail from Barcelona on August 14-19, 2020. Further info:www.bluesaliveatseaeurope.com