“I plugged them in and said, ‘Man, I've been missing the boat.’ So they're back, and now I have eight of them”: Why Joe Bonamassa has started playing Dumbles again – years after he sold his original collection

Joe Bonamassa has revealed why he’s started to buy Dumble guitar amps again, after he sold his three personal examples eight years ago.

Recently, Bonamassa made guitar magazine headlines when he announced his latest vintage gear purchase: Lowell George’s famed Dumble Overdrive Special Reverb, which he snapped up after a 15-year quest.

That particular amp was the late Little Feat guitarist’s main amplifier, and prior to Bonamassa’s purchase, it had been last played the night before George died in June 1979.

The historical and musical significance of this particular boutique tube amp goes without saying – its very sound is etched into the annals of rock guitar lore – but it marked something of a left-field purchase for Bonamassa.

After all, as the blues rock guitar titan once revealed in an interview with Total Guitar (via MusicRadar), Bonamassa had previously sold his entire collection of Dumble guitar amps back in 2016, preferring instead to play vintage Fender Tweeds.

“I sold all my Dumbles,” Bonamassa said at the time. “I had three at one point and I sold them all. One I traded for a ‘59 Les Paul, which I get way more joy from.

“Two years ago, I mothballed that whole cliché of the rig I’m most associated with – the two Marshalls and the two Van Weeldens and the Dumbles and the effects board and everything.”

Talking gear with Joe Bonamassa | The Zak Kuhn Show - YouTube

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Now, the Dumbles are back in full force. In a new interview with The Zak Kuhn Show, Bonamassa was quizzed about why such amps didn’t work for him back then, and what influenced his decision to go back to Dumbles after all this time.

“I got into the Tweeds for a long time, and I got tired of trying to go around and around, and using too complicated of a rig to achieve the same result as plugging straight in,” he reflects.

“2020 rolls around, and I repurchased a couple at that point. I built this three-piece rig for when we were going to do those shows that could only have 25 percent of people.

“I brought back the old amp shanty from years ago, and I plugged them all in – same wiring, same pedalboard, same everything – and I said, ‘Man, I've been missing the boat.’ So they're back, and now I have eight of them.”

As for why he didn’t take to them back in 2016, Bonamassa argued they simply represented “a lot of money sitting around”.

And, when pressed on when such considerations have ever made a difference in his gear collection, Bonamassa elaborates, “I probably sold them in 2016 because I was funding Flying Vs or sunburst Les Pauls. It’s an expensive hobby.

“I got a couple of stupid offers on these things, and I’m like, ‘I’m dumb not to take it.’ But now they’re twice as much as they were when I sold the original batch. Collectors do weird things.”

Now, Bonamassa has three Dumbles on stage with him when he plays live, but as he tells Kuhn, the Lowell George one is “the crown jewel of them all”.

“That one came to me after a 15-year search. I knew where it was, but the guy wasn’t ready to sell it. I lost out on that in 2011, and it came to me this year. No regrets. It’s a pretty special piece of rock ’n’ roll history.”