Joe Bonamassa

Embracing his independence

As a professional musician for the last 21 years, Joe Bonamassa has passed more milestones than a veteran Indy 500 racer. Joe was only 12 years old when he opened for B.B. King and jammed with Danny Gatton's band, and when he was only 14 he shared the stage with James Burton, Dick Dale, Robben Ford, Robbie Krieger, Albert Lee and Yngwie Malmsteen at the 1991 Leo Fender Memorial Jam Benefit. At 17 Joe had several hits on mainstream rock radio with his band Bloodline, including "Stone Cold Hearted" and "Dixie Peach." In 2000 while he was just 22, Bonamassa released his first solo album, A New Day Yesterday, kicking off his career as a solo blues rocker, a career that's still going strong today.

Now at 33 years old, Bonamassa is preparing to write yet another exciting chapter of his biography with his new band, Black Country Communion, which features an all-star classic rock lineup consisting of singer/bassist Glenn Hughes (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple), drummer Jason Bonham (UFO, Foreigner, Led Zeppelin), and keyboardist Derek Sherinian (Alice Cooper, Dream Theater). The idea for the band came together when Joe was playing at Guitar Center's King of the Blues Grand Finals last November at the Hollywood House of Blues.

"Glenn joined me on stage at the end of the night," Joe remembers. "My producer, Kevin Shirley, was there and he suggested that I do something with Glenn, like start a band or something. I was having so much fun listening to Glenn sing and playing old Trapeze and Deep Purple songs with him like ‘Medusa' and ‘Mistreated.' In less than a year we went from that gig at the House of Blues to forming a band and releasing a record."

Although Bonamassa is known primarily as a blues guitarist, the hard rocking sound of Black Country Communion actually isn't as radical of a departure from Joe's roots as it would seem. Joe's introduction to the blues came through British blues-rock guitarists like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Paul Kossoff and Jimmy Page. "To me, the difference between the American style of blues and British blues is that the British-influenced stuff is heavier," he explains. "Instead of playing Fender guitars and little combos, British guitarists were playing Gibson Les Pauls and Marshall stacks. For me as a kid who grew up in the Eighties with Van Halen and MTV, British blues was more exciting, vital and appealing. I was playing Paul Kossoff riffs and Jeff Beck riffs and Clapton riffs way before I knew where it came from. But that's just how I grew up."

Unlike many guitarists who view the blues as a historical relic to preserve in a suspended state that stopped sometime during the early Sixties, Bonamassa views the genre as a living style of music that keeps evolving and progressing. In many ways, Black Country Communion is an extension of the fiery blues-rock style he's developed as a solo artist over the last 10 years. Many of Bonamassa's recent recordings like the songs "The Ballad of John Henry," "Blue and Evil," and "Last Kiss" from the albums The Ballad of John Henry and his latest solo effort, Black Rock, are riff-heavy rockers that fit right in with the bluesy style of hard rock that his bandmates Hughes and Bonham are well known for.

But Bonamassa's playing isn't all about burning up an electric guitar's fretboard. His recordings also reveal a deep appreciation for various acoustic styles, from raw country blues to emotion-laden Celtic fingerstyle. Joe shows diverse breadth as an acoustic guitar player on his own stellar compositions like "India," "Around the Bend," "From the Valley," and "Quarryman's Lament" as well as on his inspired covers of Tom Waits' "Jockey Full of Bourbon" and Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire."

A variety of acoustic guitars make up a significant chunk of Joe's impressive guitar collection, which consists of over 300 instruments, but his main choices on stage are Yamaha LJX26C and LJX36C cutaway acoustic-electrics.

"My very first guitar was a Yamaha classical guitar that my father gave me," he recalls. "I started playing the LJX26C and LJX36C in 2008. They sound really good when you just play them in a room, but when I play them live on stage I rely more on their electronics. I stuff the guitar's body with towels and plug the soundhole to avoid feedback because I play so loud on stage. I like the acoustic guitar to be as loud as the band when I'm doing a solo piece. When I hit a low note I want the whole room to rumble."

To achieve the volume output he desires with immaculate sound quality, Joe amplifies his Yamahas with an SSL preamp/EQ channel strip that goes into a Beyer wireless system and direct to the house mixing console. "Yamaha's electronics are very articulate," he raves. "Some acoustic guitar pickup systems have latency issues, and when you play certain notes they won't come out through the speakers clearly. When I speed pick and play those Al DiMeola-style Friday Night in San Francisco lines the Yamaha electronics follow right along. The guitars also have great bottom end, sound like wooden guitars and have a comfortable neck profile. They're perfect for the road. Beat them up and they come back for more."

With such a massive guitar collection, Joe has played a little bit of everything over the years but lately he's settled on Gibson Les Pauls as his main electric guitars. Joe collaborated with Gibson on the design of the Joe Bonamassa Aged Les Paul Goldtop, which made its debut in 2008 and remains one of Gibson's most popular Custom Shop models today. The guitar is based on a highly customized 1955 Gibson Les Paul that Joe's dad had in his guitar shop years ago when Joe was just starting to play.

"Gibson wanted to do a goldtop," he says. "I said I could wrack my brain and come up with a goldtop design. I remembered this old guitar that my father bought at his shop. It was broken and routed out to fit humbuckers where the P90s were, and the back was painted black to hide the cracks, but it was one of my favorite guitars of all time. It was just a basket case from a collector's perspective, but it was a great guitar that really played and sounded great. I thought that a copy of that would be pretty cool, so I wrote down every detail I could remember about that guitar, from the Grover tuners to the mismatched control knobs and nylon-saddle bridge.

"That model has a very unique tone," he continues. "Gibson now offers several versions of that model in a couple of different colors in addition to the goldtop version. They're also available with blue or sunburst finishes. I'm really proud of those models. They're like my children. A couple of celebrity guitarists are playing them, but most of them are in the hands of regular guys who sit in their music rooms and go out and gig and lean them up against their amps. I'm very happy that Gibson did that for me, and I could never repay them for the privilege. It truly is one of the honors of my life to be associated with such a great guitar. There are a few events that change your life, and that was one of them."

Over his 21-year career as a professional musician, Bonamassa has witnessed many events that have significantly changed the music industry as well. He's released records on a variety of major labels like Epic and EMI/Capitol, but in 2003 he started his own record company and bought back his entire back catalog to gain complete control of his career. "At first it was an act of self preservation and survival," he admits. "No A&R man at a major label today is going to sign a blues-rock guitarist. Unfortunately, what's defined as success in a major label world and what's defined as success in an indie world are two different things. Something that's successful for an indie label is often a failure to a company that has $50 million in overhead every month. But if you have six, seven, or eight people working for you, it's a working business model."

One secret to Bonamassa's success as an independent artist is his embrace of the Internet. He has a very liberal photo, video and audio recording policy when he plays live shows, allowing fans to capture his performances and encouraging them to share their recordings and photos with friends via YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and other web-based means of exposure.

"Most of my videos on YouTube have been viewed 400,000 to 500,000 times," he says. "Some are close to 700,000 views. I don't understand artists who don't let people film their concerts and hire a bunch of goons to roam the audience and harass fans. These days people want to check you out before they buy a ticket to one of your shows, and YouTube lets them do that. If they like what they see, they tell their friends or they email it to their friends and it goes viral. It's a great way to market your band, and it doesn't cost you that much, if anything at all."

In addition to providing a means to expose a band, Bonamassa feels that YouTube provides a great way to keep the blues alive with a new generation of fans and players. Even though major record labels have little interest in signing blues artists today, the genre continues to grow thanks to a large underground following that has been cultivated by exposure on the Internet. After witnessing the performances of the finalists at last year's King of the Blues competition, Joe feels that the future for blues music remains more exciting and promising than it's ever been.

"I think it's really critical to keep the blues alive," he says. "It was real encouraging to see all these young kids who were all really great players. It really didn't matter who won and who didn't win. The fact that they were there in the first place was a testament to their sheer determination and prowess on the guitar. It was great to see a new generation of players that are interested in this kind of music. People were playing slide, British blues and all points in between. It's important to keep guitarists interested in playing the blues. As long as artists keep making blues records that appeal to a younger generation the way that British blues appealed to me, it will remain a vital art form."