It feels inconceivable to think about a world where Joe Bonamassa isn’t on tour. The bluesman reckons he’s played around 3,500 shows since bursting onto the scene in the early ’90s and it’s felt like he’s been glued to the road since.
Thankfully, he tells Guitar Player, “more of them were good than bad,” but he has reflected on the worst show of his career, which he calls “The Golden Goose”. It came after his solo career had got off to a positive start, and brought him crashing down to Earth.
“I’ve done a lot of shows,” Bonamassa reflects. “If you take the last 25 years with an average of 100 shows a year, that’s 2,500 shows right there. Between 1990 and 2000, I probably did 1,000 shows, so we could be looking at over 3,500 gigs in all.”
There are two picks for his best shows, both in terms of most cherished, and his best performance – “The Royal Albert Hall in 2009 with Eric Clapton,” is one, says. “That one was good – it was my bar mitzvah.
“But the absolute best performance I ever gave, in my humble opinion, was the first time we played Red Rocks in 2014,” he continues. “The weather was perfect – it was 80 degrees, and no wind. It was a golden era and a perfect storm. And luckily, we filmed it.”
Just 14 years before that sell-out show, Bonamassa’s career wasn’t so glittering. But he turned his most soul-crushing professional experience into a driver for success.
“All musicians have bad shows,” he accepts. “Your gear fails, your strings break. The audience doesn’t know the inside baseball of it all, because as long as there’s sound coming out at them, everything seems fine. But I’m going to introduce readers to the concept of the Golden Goose. It’s happened to quite a few people, and in 2000, it happened to me.”
In the wake of his first solo album, A New Day Yesterday, Bonamassa was booked to support folk-blues proggers Jethro Tull across the States, replacing Roger McGuinn. Things were looking good.
“Of course, the album’s title song is a cover of a Tull song, and Ian Anderson and Martin Barre were so nice – they even wanted me to play the song live,” Bonamassa says. “I thought it was kind of tacky, but they were like, ‘No, we really want you to do it.’ Ian introduced us onstage every night, and everything went great. It was the most fun you could have.”
He then headed out on a headline run, with the discrepancies between venues and turnouts dramatic.
“We showed up at this place in Memphis called Beale Street Live – it’s not there anymore; now it’s a Coyote Ugly – and it was one of those door-deal situations,” he explains. “The ticket price was $12 but we were getting 100 percent of the door, so it was a good deal.
“Our showtime was 8:30, [with] no opening act. I was backstage and I said, ‘It’s kind of quiet out there.’ Time to go on came around, and I swear, there were five people in the club: me, the bass player, the drummer, the bartender, and the guy driving the van. We grossed zero dollars. We got the Golden Goose.”
It feels a little ironic – if not odd – that a city so steeped in blues music had been the setting for the guitarist’s humbling.
“There’s nothing more deflating and Spinal Tap than going to one of the epicenters of the blues and drawing zero people,” he says. “Not a single person paid, no-one came in. The bartender said, ‘If you start playing, people might come in.’ But it was a rainy Tuesday night. I said, ‘There’s nobody out on the street. We’re done.’”
He even reveals he “didn’t play Memphis for years,” afterward. But instead of licking his wounds, he made the best of a bad situation.
“We ended up working on a couple of things arrangement-wise, so it was like a rehearsal. I think we worked up the [Yes song] Starship Trooper ending to one of our songs because we were just fucking around. This went on for 45 minutes. Not even the bartender was watching us. It was ridiculous.”
The guitarist, now celebrated as one of the finest blues musicians of his generation – even if the Grammys keep snubbing him – has come a long way since. It shows both the cruel and the kind sides of the music industry – and underlines the importance for music lovers to support up-and-coming talents, even on rainy Tuesday evenings.
It too proves, to all the struggling musicians out there, that the rain can clear in favor of brighter days in 80-degree heat.
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