BLUES AT CARNEGIE HALL
“Iwas warned about Carnegie Hall,” says Joe Bonamassa. “The sound in there…” His voice tails off. “My drummer Anton Fig hit his snare drum and it was like shooting off a pistol. I’m just so glad we didn’t do it with the electric band. It would have been miserable.” It’s a freezing New York afternoon in late January, the day before the big blizzard, and the 38-year-old bluesrock journeyman, dressed down in work jacket and trucker’s cap – advertising Gus’s Famous Fried Chicken of Austin, Texas – is sitting in the restaurant of a midtown hotel round the corner from the famous venue. He’s assessing the success of last night’s performance, the penultimate date on an all-acoustic tour along the East Coast, and the first in a brace of filmed evenings at the 125-year-old Manhattan venue. “They charged us half a million to film and that’s just their union bill,” explains Bonamassa, in his upstate New York drawl. “It’s so pedantic. If you want a Coca-Cola in a glass you have to staff a bartender to pour it. I needed a guitar I’d left on-stage and they told my tour manager, ‘He violated the dark stage, $14,000 fine.’ You’re dealing with old rules. It’s like playing the Vatican.” However, the Carnegie gigs are a necessary culmination of sorts. The realisation of a childhood dream, back from when the teenage Bonamassa, up in Manhattan for guitar lessons, would sit across the road in the Carnegie Deli, thinking, “What if…”, the concerts will be released as a double live DVD later in the year, the last in a run of releases that have already captured him in full blues-rock pomp at the Royal Albert Hall, Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre, and the Vienna Opera House. It’s also the punchline to a famous gag, and if anyone has put in the practice, it’s Bonamassa, who started learning guitar at the age of four, jamming along to his father’s Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Free and Led Zeppelin LPs. At 12, Bonamassa had his own band, and was playing live with John Lee Hooker and opening for B.B. King. In the following years, the guitarist steadily established a venerable blues-rock “brand” (he happily uses the term himself) that has won him a lucrative live following as well as naysayers who criticised him for his over-reliance on covers, his banks of delays and effects, and an occasional, well, safeness to his playing. Surprisingly, the first person to agree with this was Bonamassa. “We did a fair amount of touring from 2010 to 2014 where I don’t remember much of it,” he admits. “I probably rode the old covers wagon as much as any blues artist. People were saying the playing had become ‘safe’ and was lacking ‘feel’. That’s the worst place to be.” In response, Bonamassa changed his band, stripped out the reverb and echo, started playing through old ’50s tweed amps, and re-immersed himself in the art of songwriting. “You throw a cherry bomb into your world,” he says. “You just go with the guitar and the microphone and figure it out with these. (Holds up and wiggles hands about) “My pilot light went back on.” For the songwriting boot camp, he set up a Nashville office, where he works with professional lyricists and composers for two months of the year. The first fruits came on 2014’s Different Shades Of Blue. Bonamassa’s latest, Blues Of Desperation, is a better album again, reinvesting his “brand” with a warmth, character and humour that got lost somewhere back on the road. Tonight, the Carnegie Hall concert showcases these new songs, plus crowd favourites, in a live setting that places the guitarist’s soulful showmanship within a tradition of old American vaudeville. The auditorium smells of Greek pitch, and antique lamps and candles light the stage, while his band is made up of one-time Double Trouble keyboardist Reese Wynans, David Letterman’s former house-band sticksman Anton Fig,
Worldbeating guitarman Joe Bonamassa gets to the famous 7th Avenue venue, and makes a movie of it. “You’re dealing with old rules,” he explains.
Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy, Chinese erhu/cello player Tina Guo and Eric Bazilian of The Hooters on banjo and mandolin. Three backing singers – Gary Pinto, Mahalia Barnes and Juanita Tippins – are all kitted out in their ancestral costumes (that’s India, Thailand and Polynesia), while Bonamassa’s clad in black shirt and jacket, with requisite dark sunglasses to protect his light-sensitive pale blue eyes from the glare of the stage lights. Throughout, he relocates his blues-rock ballads and rockers to a harmonically rich and cosy world of bright melodies and acoustic drone, at times reminiscent of Ry Cooder’s ’70s LP experiments in blues, country and soul. Fittingly, one highlight tonight is a stripped-back cover of Blind Alfred Reed’s How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live, as covered on Cooder’s 1970 solo debut. Another is an exhilarating Duelling Banjos-style battle between Guo and Bonamassa on a high-speed guitar-vs-cello reinterpretation of Bonamassa’s Woke Up Dreaming that transforms into Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight Of The Bumblebee. It’s both faintly ridiculous and deadly serious, as all quality entertainment should be, and by the end of the evening, after an encore of Bette Midler’s The Rose, the 3,000- capacity Stern auditorium is on its feet. But as one project ends, so another begins. In July Bonamassa will be playing five UK shows saluting the three British blues rock guitarists who inspired him – Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page. He literally doesn’t stop. “I have to be careful about that,” he admits. “By the end of last year I’d gotten sick maybe seven times and by the end of it, I decided to shut it down for a month. That month felt like a year. It just becomes, what it is. My 50th anniversary will be on my 62nd birthday. It harkens back to what I learned from B.B. King. B.B. was a machine. He loved living on the road. He loved one-nighters, theatres. But he was the high-water mark, the high operator. He always wore a tuxedo.” MOJO asks if Bonamassa has any career advice of his own for musicians starting out. “If you’re making money don’t put it all in your pocket,” he says, “always try and reinvest it, try to get the show bigger and bigger so people keep coming back. And avoid the cliché. The cliché is what kills you.”